‘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-the-century 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 sentencefor-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 assets in the future of poker didn’t have a technical solution, then conscience was what needed to be reformed.” The threat of machinedriven oblivion also worries Mary Ann, a casino waitress; Lindsay, a struggling Mormon journalist; and even Tom, an Italian immigrant overstaying his visa.
While Diofebi’s exposition and extensive footnotes owe a debt to Wallace’s work, his closest analogue is Tom Wolfe, whose breathless reporting and visual detail prompted critics to wonder why he bothered writing fiction at all. In Diofebi’s case, the conceit is clear enough — if anything, his characters feel too much like mouthpieces for his arguments, and not enough like people. The protagonists are earnest rubes, the antagonists villainous caricatures, and as in Wolfe’s best-selling tomes, the unlikely subplots thread into a fiery, calamitous climax. Like Wolfe’s New York in 1987’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities” and his Atlanta in 1998’s “A Man in Full,” Diofebi’s Vegas is typical of civilizational rot, a city unsustainable in its gluttony.
It’s reductive to criticize such an ambitious debut for its length, but there’s a great little poker novel buried within “Paradise, Nevada” — one which, admittedly, would have been a harder sell to the literary presses. The book’s drama unfolds at the card table — the rivers, the flops, the risks and consequences — in a way that jolts adrenaline regardless of your familiarity with the game.