Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
The harsh beauty of Nevada, the glitzy pleasures of Vegas and the thrill ride of gambling.
Dec 1, 1999 | Metaphors come cheap in Nevada. Las Vegas is now America's city, the fastest growing metropolis in the nation. Dedicated to distraction and dollars, the desert strip implodes history every few years and reinvents it as something bigger, grander, more expensive. It's a ludicrous place, a jumble of misplaced architecture surrounded by roller coasters and ringing with the sound of jackpots. The absence of context is the context.
It's an easy place to find meaning -- or to ascribe it. As is Nevada, its home state, a harsh region filled with equal amounts of emptiness and brutal beauty, characters of terrible behavior or stiff determination. In "In Nevada," David Thomson, who has written several books, including three editions of "A Biographical Dictionary of Film," suggests that the great open spaces of Nevada are blank screens. His book, a series of essays that cut between historical episodes, current events and landscape portraits, is an attempt to connect sketches and portraits that in composite add up to Nevada.
Two other new books, "Double Down," by the brothers Frederick and Steven Barthelme, and "24/7," by Andris Martinez, are similar ontological inquiries. Where Thomson looks to empty deserts, military testing sites and tiny, Godforsaken towns for insight into the new West, Martinez examines the bright lights, cheap culture and two-bit gamblers of Las Vegas as residents of a new America. The Barthelmes' book, which tells a personal tale far more serious than either of the others, uses gambling -- the stock, trade and increasing export of Nevada -- as a way to investigate loss and death.
"24/7" and "Double Down" have killer jacket hooks. Martinez talked his publisher into a $50,000 advance on the condition that he would gamble it all in Las Vegas during a month of research. He scores a running tally of his daily winnings (mostly at the beginning) and losses (mostly near the end) as a postscript to each chapter. The Barthelme brothers, both authors and writing professors (and younger brothers of short story writer Donald Barthelme, who died in 1989), together lost nearly a quarter of a million dollars in Mississippi riverboat casinos. The brothers were also indicted and charged with felony conspiracy to defraud a casino, a charge that was finally dismissed without trial in August.
"In Nevada" doesn't have a sexy premise, but it was written by a smart author bent on solving the mystery of his fascination with Nevada. Thomson read and watched nearly everything he could about the state. He also traveled through it several times over several years by car -- the only way to see Nevada.
If "Double Down" and "24/7" are more exciting reads, it's mostly because the stakes are higher. Both books have the thrilling appeal of debt porn, those cautionary magazine articles in which the writer confesses to having thousands of dollars in credit card bills. Readers who dally a bit above their means experience an easy, reflexive sympathy while at the same time vicariously living the cheap excitement of charging fancy dinners, cashmere sweaters and Prada shoes. It's armchair spending.
Similarly, good writers like the Barthelmes and Martinez convey the dizzying rush of winning to readers sitting safely at home. The cards and the dealer conspire to make the player rich. Blackjacks fly. The dealer busts. Chips stack into piles. Bets increase. The reader is right there at the table.
And then, of course, in a couple of bets, the gambling starts to go horribly wrong. Without hand-wringing, both books ruminate on the nature of compulsion and the psychology of gambling. "Double Down" begins with a quick brief on both writers, including a sketch of the modernist house that their father designed in Houston. The Barthelme brothers were raised as individualists but ended up as academics living a quiet, altogether typical university life in Hattiesburg, Miss. In 1992, riverboat gambling was legalized in the nearby coast towns, and Frederick (known as Rick) and his girlfriend wandered into a casino in Biloxi. After playing a few machines, they walked out with $1,100. Later, the same thing happened to Steve and his wife.
"We learned that this was typical," they write. "You win something sizable, and thereafter gambling takes up residence in your imagination ... Neither of us had any idea how much those first jackpots would eventually cost."
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