‘Paradise, Nevada’ tries to capture our anxious American essence with a collision course through the gaming industry
If you squint at anything hard enough — a person, a phenomenon, a city — it becomes a microcosm of something else, indicative of systemic failures rather than its own shortcomings. This was the premise of the American systems novel, which reached its turn-of-thecentury apogee in the form of panoramic doorstops by Don DeLillo, Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace. In the decades since, literary fiction has scaled back on such audacious maximalism, narrowing its breadth to fit the contours of individual lives rather than sweeping prognostications of collective life. It can be easy to interpret Jenny Offill and Ottessa Moshfegh’s spare autofictional rhythms as rejections of the baggy, hypermasculine excesses of “The Corrections” and “Infinite Jest.”
In its attempts to capture our anxious American essence, Dario Diofebi’s debut, “Paradise, Nevada,” is a throwback to the sprawling 1990s systems novel on both a conceptual level and a sentence-for-sentence basis. A former professional poker player, Diofebi submits Las Vegas — a crossroads of capitalist grift, real estate speculation and right-wing Christianity — as an emblem of our national ailment, a perpetual boomtown sustained by a transient service class. With a narrative whipsawing among four neurotic protagonists, “Paradise, Nevada” charts a collision course through the gaming industry, grappling with Vegas’s objectifying entertainment complex and accelerating tech sphere.
At its core, “Paradise, Nevada” is a moral inquiry into the profit motive, with poker a metaphor for the diminishing returns of a consolidated U.S. economy. Like private equity and venture-backed start-ups, the Vegas card tables have become domains of cutthroat risk assessment, with professional sharks preying upon hapless tourists for their sustenance. “Poker too had become, through the greed and incapacity for cooperation of its agents, a no-technical-solution problem, a state of impasse that no amount of thinking could overcome,” considers Ray, a Stanford dropout and aspiring tournament pro. “If the problem of the unfair distribution of as- sets in the future of poker didn’t have a technical solution, then conscience was what needed to be reformed.” The threat of machine-driven oblivion also worries Mary Ann, a casino waitress; Lindsay, a struggling Mormon journalist; and even Tom, an Italian immigrant overstaying his visa.