The study of literature isn’t generally thought of as a course to make you rich, so when a wagering system sprang from the pages of “A Wide Runner” by James Kelman in Not Not While the Giro (London: Polygon 1983), I was skeptical. Readers familiar with Kelman’s workhorse characters might question whether sensible investment advice could ever come from men who live in pubs and die in vats of acid. A work of art, moreover, does not exist in order to provide tips for how to beat the races; and, particularly in Kelman’s work, the delusions the archetypical loser exploits so as to pursue his shabby dreams must, in all artistic and intellectual honesty, result in failure.

A woman and a man were standing in front of a sculpture. The sculpture was in the middle of a park in the town where the woman and the man worked. The sculpture was a block of bronze and long as a moving truck. Its surfaces were smooth, mostly, but in places the shapes of hands, faces, and feet pressed through the sculpture from inside. It was the afternoon, sunny but mild, wind out of the east. The woman and the man were on their lunch break. They had a half hour.