"I was restless like a tomcat as well, but not a tomcat in heat. The thing hung loosely from my groin like a used condom. Xiao Mi was regarding it with interest." (p.128)

This would have been a fun novel if only it had actually delivered what the premise promised.

There were three particular and unrelated issues I had with 'Game Point', but to be fair, only two of them are Bai Xiao's fault.

First of all, this seems to have been translated and then published very quickly because there are a lot of typos, at least in this edition. Mostly, they're translation-specific typos that smack of L1 interference. Things like writing things in the singular when they should be plural. That sort of thing. The kind of typo that would have been caught had this been looked over a few more times by an editor whose sole task was to catch something like that.

But you know what, I wouldn't have particularly cared or even noticed were it not for the other two problems I had with this.

The beginning of the story really dragged without managing to be expository enough to feel even somewhat justified. Just a lot of banal scenes of our protagonist doing very mundane things that don't end up mattering, like reading a book in bed (does it become important later that he reads? No, not at all). This is also the section where we're introduced to the one-too-many character, his roommate, who does not need to be in this story and serves no purpose other than to populate it.

The dragginess is further exacerbated by the fact that much (though not all, and we'll get back to that) of the action is very vague. As in, we know that the two central lads of the novel: the protagonist and his 'friend', Lobster, are scam artists, but it's made very unclear how successful they're supposed to be. At the beginning, one of the first concrete moments of action is the police showing up looking for Lobster and acting like they're trying to close in on a major crime player.

But then at the end, despite it sort of being implied by other things that happen that these guys are somewhat of a big deal, the narrator muses about whether or not Lobster will truly ever strike it rich as a con artist.

The central point of intrigue: this big con they're trying to pull off, is also really convoluted. Maybe it was just me, but though I could pretty easily follow how the narrator attempts to con his own partner, I never really got what the original con was supposed to be. And then the climax happens and is over in the blink of an eye and I had to read a few sentences several times to even vageully understand what exactly happened, and I'm still not 100% sure.

All critique of the plot, however, pales in comparison to my biggest ick about this novel, which was the 'romantic' subplot.

I don't care that the narrator, and really all the men in this novel, harbored deeply sexist beliefs about women. I don't care about the politically incorrect comments they made about the women around them -- these are bad guys; misogyny is part of the characterization, so whatever, fine.

No, the truly offensive thing about 'Game Point' was the way this person wrote sex scenes -- and at least, at least twenty percent of the text is sex scenes. A lot of it was kind of gross or unsexy even though the framing would suggest it was meant to be at least somewhat titillating. And some of it was weird in a way that made me wrinkle my nose even if I wasn't quite following the imagery.

For example, at one point after the narrator boffs his friend's girlfriend (their illicit 'love story' is actually what the book is about by the by), he describes the aftermath thusly:

"[...] I was well aware that she didn't come with me. It wasn't entirely my fault. She had been hot, using her hands and mouth, and then sitting on me like a fretted British shorthair." (p.119)

I'm not entirely sure what is supposed to be hot about a cat, fretted or otherwise, and I don't want to know. But the sex and cat imagery get mixed together another time later in the story and I didn't like it then either.

I genuinely can't tell if this was an artistic choice to make every single sex scene as repulsive as possible as a means of revealing the narrator's lack of self-awareness or just the author's own sexual taste absolutely not aligning with mine.

I choose to believe it was the former for my own sanity, but that doesn't make it any more enjoyable to read.

Liked the premise though, and I did find a crumb of enjoyment out of reading aloud some of the worse lines from the sex scenes to my partner. Bonus star for that.