Life is Not a Game: Reworking the Metaphor in Richard Ford’s Fiction KEVIN BROOKS I N METAPHORS WE LIVE BY , GEORGE LAKOFF AND MARK JOHNSON EXPLAIN that the metaphor life is a gambling game is so thoroughly accepted as a concept that its many variations—‘‘I’ll take my chances,’’ ‘‘the odds are against me now,’’ ‘‘I’ve got an ace up my sleeve’’—can be understood as ‘‘literal expressions structured by metaphorical concepts’’ (51). Michael Oriard, in his cultural history of the ‘‘life is a game’’ metaphor, Sporting with the Gods: The Rhetoric of Play and Game in American Culture, traces the metaphor back to St. Paul’s letters, and forward through its changing meaning in American culture, from Pu- ritan notions of human fate as the ‘‘sport of the gods’’ to nineteenth- century notions of the triumphant human will succeed at the game of life (152–53). According to Oriard’s study, the meaning of life is a game continued to change and take on different nuances during the twentieth century, from the playfulness of the Beats who rejected the game of life as the ‘‘‘phony’ or ‘square’ world of the fifties’’ (453), to a New Age celebration of the transcendent possibilities inherent in ‘‘life as play’’ (467). Oriard concludes that while the ‘‘longings and anxieties represented by America’s sporting rhetoric are perennial ones, [ . . . ] they are not constant’’ (478). The metaphor continues to get worked over in contemporary pop- ular culture. ‘‘Life is a game’’ and its various iterations can be found in books like Poker as Life: 101 Lessons from the World’s Greatest Game by Lee Schreiber and Idiot: Beating ‘‘The Curse’’ and Having Fun in the Game of Life by Johnny Damon. Cherie Carter-Scott’s best selling books, If Life is a Game, These are the Rules and If Love is a Game, These are the The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 42, No. 5, 2009 r 2009, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 841