Published by Bloomsbury Publishing on April 6, 2021
Dario Diofebi develops the parallel stories of multiple characters in Paradise, Nevada. The stories connect and interweave. Las Vegas is their focal point.
The action centers around the Positano Luxury Resort and Casino. The resort is modeled upon the Italian surfside village of the same name, complete with a mountain and a beach.
The most interesting character in the ensemble is Ray Jackson. Ray is a math whiz who dropped out of Stanford and moved to Canada, where he could legally play online poker. Ray’s decision to drop out disappointed his father almost as much as his decision not to pursue the failing family business. After losing a poker competition to a computer, Ray decides to play high stakes in-person poker in Vegas. For Ray, success depends on understanding the ever-changing odds. He doesn’t believe in watching other players for tells. The other players are always watching Ray.
Also of interest is Tommaso Bernardini, who comes to Vegas after winning a poker tournament in Rome. Tom overstays his tourist visa to play low stakes poker in Vegas, hoping to accumulate wealth. Tom was bullied as a kid and has always felt like a weakling and a loser. The story will give him a chance to discover that there is more to weakness than the absence of physical strength.
Tom meets Trevor, a man who oozes strength and self-confidence. He is in many ways Tom’s opposite. They agree to share an apartment to minimize their expenses. Trevor makes money through his videoblog and happens to have chosen Vegas as one of the destinations he documents. Trevor and Tom take a road trip that harms their friendship while giving Trevor more fuel for his vlog.
Mary Ann is a pretty woman who craves to be seen. She finds a waitressing job at the Positano through her Aunt Karen and becomes involved in a labor movement to extort higher wages by damaging the Positano’s profits. She is swamped with guilt when she becomes the victim of a scheme to destroy more than profits.
Rounding out the cast are Al Wiles, wealthy owner of the Positano; Ben “Graywolf” Richards, a far-right provocateur; Trevor’s frat boy friend Patrick; Orson Peterson, a pessimistic Mormon; Orson’s optimistic sister Lindsay, who ponders Orson’s criticism that she would be “selling out” if she agrees to write Wiles’ biography; and a man sometimes known as Walter Simmons, a grifter who describes himself as “practically a Disney villain” while excusing his embrace of evil.
Doing justice to the free-wheeling plot would be impossible. Plot elements include the science of poker and the social engineering practiced by professionals who dupe amateurs into joining high stakes games; a scheme to extort Tom for immigration fraud; a plan to sabotage profits at the Positano as waitresses fight for better wages; and a plan to cause mayhem at the Positano while blaming organized labor, antifa, and social justice warriors for violent threats to capitalism. The plot has its ups and downs — Paradise, Nevada is an ambitious novel, and some the plot diversions could have been excised to make it tighter — but the novel’s strength lies in how the characters respond to adversity rather than the unlikely struggles they encounter.
Diofebi’s characters try on philosophies of life for size as they try to shape themselves. Ray concludes that humanity is “a multi-agent system, slowly refining itself over time and countless mistakes . . . a large neural network, connected by feelings, striving toward good.” In other words, in the long haul, enough humans behaving decently will overcome the harm caused by those who don’t, and humanity will finally achieve its utopian potential. But that won’t happen until long after we’re all dead, and it depends on the less decent not killing us all before that potential is realized. From the perspective of those who die during lulls in humanity’s incremental progress, humanity is a “parade of solipsistic monsters.”
Diofebi indulges in postmodernist storytelling by having a character, shortly after his death, comment unfavorably upon the novel’s plot. He suggests that humans need to stop focusing on stories of individuals (stories in which we see or imagine ourselves) “while the tide brews and finally sweeps us away.” He counters Ray’s philosophy by expanding the gambling maxim, “the house always wins,” to explain his belief that life is not a network striving toward good, but an “inextricable tangle of hierarchies of evil, and that within this tangle we are so powerless and meaningless, so ignorant and frail, that the house is to us every last thing outside our weak little selves.” History provides ample evidence to support each of the competing philosophies.
Other themes include: greed; empathy and its absence; the evolving and unpredictable nature of selfish and unselfish friendships (“the transactional marketplace of human relationships”); the qualities of winners and losers; the difference between what we want, what we need, and what we deserve; the nature of freedom (true freedom, Tom discovers, is “freedom from doubt”); and whether we learn from crises or merely survive them (or as pessimistic Lindsey suggests, learn the wrong lessons from them).
Paradise, Nevada gives the reader a lot to chew upon. While Diofebi’s reach for profundity sometimes exceeds his grasp, he is an intelligent author who blends comedy and absurdity with dramatic moments that ring true.
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