Las Vegas is famous for its excess — money! lights! shows! gambling! entertainment! tourists! It seems somehow appropriate that Paradise, Nevada, set in the area containing the Las Vegas Strip, is also excessive — in this case, with an overload of words, plotlines, and characters.
Central to the story is the Positano, an imaginary casino resort that recreates the Italian Amalfi coast in miniature, hiding of course an infinitude of slot machines and casino tables.
Waves would gently lap real Italian sand. Directly overlooking its twelve acres of Tyrrhenian Sea, a 700-foot hill had been erected out of surprisingly cheap Texas deep-rock, a by-product of fracking. At floor level, the seaside town of Positano, with its fish market, its cathedral, its town hall, disguised the face of the large casino-and-shopping area.
It is an amusing concept, and entertainingly described.
There are multiple threads to follow in this book. There is Tommaso Bernadini, a young Italian man from a small neighbourhood in Rome who gets a lucky break in a local poker game and wins a ticket to the World Poker Championship in Vegas. He doesn’t get far in the championship, but his new friend Trevor suggests that he simply ignore his visa and stay on as an illegal immigrant. His story is well fleshed out (and familiar to the author, also an Italian poker player in America).
By the time the cop pulled him over on Tropicana, Tom had been an illegal immigrant for fourteen months.
A second thread follows Mary Ann, a young woman who works as a waitress in the Positano casino. Mary Ann, it is suggested, is recovering from anorexia, which she blames on a plethora of first-world issues. Her angst might be vaguely defined, but it is certainly described in exhausting detail.
She had coated her life in lies and likes, doubled down on her ambitions and self-image, bought in on all the narcotizing bullshit the times had to offer.
Then there is Ray Jackson, a top-ranked American poker player who is suffering from a crisis of self-doubt after losing to a computer. Ray’s paroxyms of self-analysis are fairly endless. At the beginning of the novel, he is driving from Northern California to Vegas.
Recursive thoughts and emotions overpowered Ray’s processors all the way past McWay Falls and Ragged Point and the tourists posing for Instagram pics. Regaining control had been the whole point of agreeing to this scenic detour all the way to the desert; he knew he’d find himself alone with no phone reception, […], and what else could one do in such situations but parse decision trees? Yet now he just sat there, looking at the sea lions, […] admitting computational defeat. Waving the old white decisional flag.
Additional storylines follow Mary Ann’s Aunt Karen, an aging waitress on the strip subjected to age discrimination; Lindsay, a Mormon investigative journalist for the Las Vegas Sun; Lindsay’s brother Orson, a reclusive aspiring writer; their extended family; Zach Romero, a tech baron; Trevor, a self-important conman; Walter, an elderly gay Brit who is apparently willing to act as unpaid therapist to Mary Ann; and more. Phew. It is difficult to maintain an interest in all of these characters, and the endless rambling digressions do not help.
Few authors of fiction (apart from Terry Pratchett !) can carry off footnotes. They can seem ponderously academic, interrupt the flow of the narrative, and leave the reader with the annoying choice of whether to break for the footnote, or ignore it and hope that the the book will make sense without it. In this novel, the typical footnote runs like this:
Expected Value, meaning the long-run average value of theoretical repetitions of the examined decision would yield a positive outcome, as defined by E[X] = x1p1 + x1p1...xk,pk, where variable X can take value x1 with probability p1, value x2 with probability p2 and so on up to value xk with probability pk.
(shouldn’t that 2nd term be x2p2? It is really annoying to have show-offy explanations with errors.
It’s hard to figure out the expected readership of this novel. Surely a reader fascinated by the mathematical aspects of poker would be bored to tears by the frat house party that Trevor drags Tom to, or the attempts of the Strip workers to unionize? Is there an intersection between interest in Mary Ann’s modern malaise and interest in the hand-by-hand poker game? And each of these plots has been done better: for a well-written novel describing a complex game, see Louis Sachar’s The Cardturner, which is riveting even for those who have never played bridge. For behind-the-scenes classics, there are Arthur Hailey’s Hotel, Airport and Wheels.
I think the author aimed to encapsulate all of the contradictions, personalities and ethos of Vegas in this novel. An ambitious goal, but he doesn’t trust the reader to draw their own conclusions. Instead, almost every situation is used as an opportunity to explain it all to us.
The post-online wave of poker nerds distilled its wisdom from the nonfiction of Nassim Taleb and Malcolm Gladwell.
It was a bubble, a momentary suspension of all social rules under the blanket of fear, survival instinct, and the promise of invisibility.
All the way near the end, we suddenly get the thoughts of a dead man.
And now I join the rabble of the phantasm world, this drove of spirits too vulgar to haunt the attic of a London terrace […]
Buried somewhere in all this is the kernel of a good novel.
SO agree about T Pratchett’s footnotes! And yes, Sachar’s bridge novel was brilliant, even for the total bridge ignoramus. Such a feat of good writing. Enjoyed the review, even if it does not sound like a novel I will be adding to my reading list!