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Paradise, Nevada by Dario Diofebi
THE MAJORITY OF the Las Vegas Strip sits not in its namesake city but in the unincorporated town of Paradise, contrived by casino executives who didn’t want to pay extra taxes. Of the 45 million tourists who visit each year, most never venture north of the Stratosphere Tower and thus never set foot in the actual city of Las Vegas.
This tidbit of southern Nevada history can serve as a dividing line between those who enjoy Las Vegas as a thrill-seeking visitor and those who are more intimately entangled with the city beneath the glitz. This distinction animates Dario Diofebi’s debut novel, Paradise, Nevada, a comedic saga about poker and the weight of class-consciousness in which characters are led into surreal circumstances.
As Diofebi writes, “Las Vegas is a city of stories.” It’s also one of the most transient cities in the United States. Migration ebbs and flows with the stock market. Three out of four residents were born somewhere else. For any writer who wants to capture its shifting demography, Paradise is the natural place to go because its casino employers, affordable housing, and unionized labor give transients a reason to stay for a bit before moving on. But as Diofebi acknowledges, not everyone who comes here leaves here; “the stories of those who stay” are the scaffolding for his satirical version of Paradise.
Diofebi weaves the fictional narratives of four primary characters with smaller interludes about the larger forces that have shaped Paradise’s physical landscape. Ray is trying to regain his confidence in the world of live-action Texas Hold’em. Mary Ann is a self-obsessed cocktail waitress battling depression. Tomasso is a working-class Italian who overstays his vacation to earn a living playing cards. True to Nevada form, only one character, Lindsay, grew up in the area. A local journalist who lives in nearby Henderson, she peers into casino corruption after reporting on discrimination against aging cocktail servers.
A Vegas enthusiast will enjoy Diofebi’s allusions to real people and places. The primary setting for the novel, The Positano (or as the regulars call it, “The Pos”), is a hyperbolic version of The Venetian, a replicate of a different seaside Italian town, complete with “[t]he cliffs, the sea, down to the fucking lemon trees!” Its owner, Al Wiles, is a composite of casino moguls. His life mirrors Sheldon Adelson’s marriage, Steve Wynn’s divorce, and Howard Hughes’s agoraphobia. Within descriptions of hipster bars, pawnshop museums, gentrified real estate, and the eccentric tech baron Zach Romero, readers will recognize former Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh and his effort to revitalize the city’s old downtown.
Through some misguidance, circumstance, and chance, all four characters get caught up in an underground class war involving Wiles, casino staff, and some of Romero’s “downtown coder dudes.” They share a belief that Las Vegas could be their own personal turning point. Ray wants to win again. Mary Ann wants to be seen. Tom wants financial security. Lindsay wants to write fiction. These desires lead all of them to The Positano, where their disparate stories collide in an explosive finish that ends with a bomb, a fire, and a casino patron “doomed to an eternity in Paradise.”
Diofebi’s storytelling is at its best in the perspectives of Ray and Tom. Diofebi spent several years as a professional poker player, and he offers an inside look into that peculiar culture where tribalism, alpha masculinity, and the size of complimentary Fiji waters are real dramas. Diofebi does not hesitate to poke fun at his own kind. He introduces readers to many over-the-top personalities, all of whom are equally outraged that too many professionals are filling up poker rooms and not enough amateur players to siphon off losses from. I’m a former casino cocktail waitress, and I can attest to the verisimilitude in these scenes.
Ray is the most sharply drawn figure, with a “clear-cut identity as a man of Numbers.” Diofebi underscores this with the use of footnotes that detail Ray’s mathematical approach to the game. But Ray abhors any description of himself as the gambling type. He claims that “poker is not gambling […] has absolutely nothing to do with it.” This line of reasoning is common among professional poker players, a title which, as one of my former casino colleagues always joked, is a euphemism for “unemployed.” With big wins and losses, most full-time poker players alternate between lifestyles of extravagance and poverty. Despite his inner stability, Ray eventually finds himself in the same mental prison common to gambling addicts: a belief that just one more risky bet will hit big and stave off financial ruin.
Tom is less concerned about big jackpots. He sees poker as a pragmatic way to bypass a life of working-class drudgery. Unsure of what to do with so much liquidity, he carries around cash in his underwear. He debates splurging six dollars on mashed potatoes. There’s a clear class difference at work: Ray has the privilege to bet big and enjoys the winning more than the money. In Diofebi’s poker room, the tourists are the elites, the poker regulars are the little guys, and the house is the beating heart of capitalism that pits them against each other and always comes out on top. The reader is left to decide whether Ray and Tom are cautionary tales or passionate advocates for the unconventional career choice. Regardless, Diofebi paints Las Vegas poker room mythos with precision and unmatched authority.
The characterizations of non-gamblers, however, are a bust. Mary Ann is described primarily by her beauty, shallowness, and self-absorption. Despite earning one of the most coveted jobs in Las Vegas, one that is known to lift women out of poverty and place them securely in the middle-class, Mary Ann is miserable as a cocktail server, and the source of her dissatisfaction is never fully explored. When it comes to understanding what makes Mary Ann tick, readers don’t get much depth beyond, “She was hot, like, movie-hot, you know?”
Diofebi’s prose reflects the extravagance and indulgence that most associate with Las Vegas casinos. He squeezes every last detail out of scenes that would actually benefit from restraint. We get a neon splash of every narrative trick a novel can offer: comedy and noir, cliché and originality, shallow entertainment and complex social commentary, plus a prologue, an epilogue, emails, footnotes, social media posts, and even a mid-novel screenplay. Readers may become overwhelmed just as Tom did after his first casino buffet, the various entrees under heat lamps largely indistinguishable. The consumer is left stuffed enough to convince themselves that they’ll never eat (or read a novel) again.
To claim that Paradise, Nevada is a truth-telling novel about Las Vegas is inaccurate. It is an unruly parody of the casino industry sales pitch: that anyone can be a winner here. That you, too, can change your life. The explicit references to “the stories of Las Vegas” appear so often that the theme eventually feels as artificial as The Positano’s underground crystal caves. Diofebi never holds his characters responsible for their serious flaws. Each gets their own paradisiacal ending, most of which are far away from Paradise. So, despite the author’s promise, this turns out not to be a novel about those who stay in Las Vegas but rather those who bail when their luck runs out. In a city full of stories, this hoary old fable is the one we’re served?
The real Paradise south of the city limits is a diverse city of working-class people who take great pride in their work, their union, and their jobs, and have little interest in burning their places of employment to the ground. As Tom accurately recognizes in one of the book’s winning lines, “Not all that glitters is sad.”
Brittany Bronson is a writer based in Las Vegas. She writes about the service industry, labor issues, and Nevada’s working class.
This tidbit of southern Nevada history can serve as a dividing line between those who enjoy Las Vegas as a thrill-seeking visitor and those who are more intimately entangled with the city beneath the glitz. This distinction animates Dario Diofebi’s debut novel, Paradise, Nevada, a comedic saga about poker and the weight of class-consciousness in which characters are led into surreal circumstances.
As Diofebi writes, “Las Vegas is a city of stories.” It’s also one of the most transient cities in the United States. Migration ebbs and flows with the stock market. Three out of four residents were born somewhere else. For any writer who wants to capture its shifting demography, Paradise is the natural place to go because its casino employers, affordable housing, and unionized labor give transients a reason to stay for a bit before moving on. But as Diofebi acknowledges, not everyone who comes here leaves here; “the stories of those who stay” are the scaffolding for his satirical version of Paradise.
Diofebi weaves the fictional narratives of four primary characters with smaller interludes about the larger forces that have shaped Paradise’s physical landscape. Ray is trying to regain his confidence in the world of live-action Texas Hold’em. Mary Ann is a self-obsessed cocktail waitress battling depression. Tomasso is a working-class Italian who overstays his vacation to earn a living playing cards. True to Nevada form, only one character, Lindsay, grew up in the area. A local journalist who lives in nearby Henderson, she peers into casino corruption after reporting on discrimination against aging cocktail servers.
A Vegas enthusiast will enjoy Diofebi’s allusions to real people and places. The primary setting for the novel, The Positano (or as the regulars call it, “The Pos”), is a hyperbolic version of The Venetian, a replicate of a different seaside Italian town, complete with “[t]he cliffs, the sea, down to the fucking lemon trees!” Its owner, Al Wiles, is a composite of casino moguls. His life mirrors Sheldon Adelson’s marriage, Steve Wynn’s divorce, and Howard Hughes’s agoraphobia. Within descriptions of hipster bars, pawnshop museums, gentrified real estate, and the eccentric tech baron Zach Romero, readers will recognize former Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh and his effort to revitalize the city’s old downtown.
Through some misguidance, circumstance, and chance, all four characters get caught up in an underground class war involving Wiles, casino staff, and some of Romero’s “downtown coder dudes.” They share a belief that Las Vegas could be their own personal turning point. Ray wants to win again. Mary Ann wants to be seen. Tom wants financial security. Lindsay wants to write fiction. These desires lead all of them to The Positano, where their disparate stories collide in an explosive finish that ends with a bomb, a fire, and a casino patron “doomed to an eternity in Paradise.”
Diofebi’s storytelling is at its best in the perspectives of Ray and Tom. Diofebi spent several years as a professional poker player, and he offers an inside look into that peculiar culture where tribalism, alpha masculinity, and the size of complimentary Fiji waters are real dramas. Diofebi does not hesitate to poke fun at his own kind. He introduces readers to many over-the-top personalities, all of whom are equally outraged that too many professionals are filling up poker rooms and not enough amateur players to siphon off losses from. I’m a former casino cocktail waitress, and I can attest to the verisimilitude in these scenes.
Ray is the most sharply drawn figure, with a “clear-cut identity as a man of Numbers.” Diofebi underscores this with the use of footnotes that detail Ray’s mathematical approach to the game. But Ray abhors any description of himself as the gambling type. He claims that “poker is not gambling […] has absolutely nothing to do with it.” This line of reasoning is common among professional poker players, a title which, as one of my former casino colleagues always joked, is a euphemism for “unemployed.” With big wins and losses, most full-time poker players alternate between lifestyles of extravagance and poverty. Despite his inner stability, Ray eventually finds himself in the same mental prison common to gambling addicts: a belief that just one more risky bet will hit big and stave off financial ruin.
Tom is less concerned about big jackpots. He sees poker as a pragmatic way to bypass a life of working-class drudgery. Unsure of what to do with so much liquidity, he carries around cash in his underwear. He debates splurging six dollars on mashed potatoes. There’s a clear class difference at work: Ray has the privilege to bet big and enjoys the winning more than the money. In Diofebi’s poker room, the tourists are the elites, the poker regulars are the little guys, and the house is the beating heart of capitalism that pits them against each other and always comes out on top. The reader is left to decide whether Ray and Tom are cautionary tales or passionate advocates for the unconventional career choice. Regardless, Diofebi paints Las Vegas poker room mythos with precision and unmatched authority.
The characterizations of non-gamblers, however, are a bust. Mary Ann is described primarily by her beauty, shallowness, and self-absorption. Despite earning one of the most coveted jobs in Las Vegas, one that is known to lift women out of poverty and place them securely in the middle-class, Mary Ann is miserable as a cocktail server, and the source of her dissatisfaction is never fully explored. When it comes to understanding what makes Mary Ann tick, readers don’t get much depth beyond, “She was hot, like, movie-hot, you know?”
Diofebi’s prose reflects the extravagance and indulgence that most associate with Las Vegas casinos. He squeezes every last detail out of scenes that would actually benefit from restraint. We get a neon splash of every narrative trick a novel can offer: comedy and noir, cliché and originality, shallow entertainment and complex social commentary, plus a prologue, an epilogue, emails, footnotes, social media posts, and even a mid-novel screenplay. Readers may become overwhelmed just as Tom did after his first casino buffet, the various entrees under heat lamps largely indistinguishable. The consumer is left stuffed enough to convince themselves that they’ll never eat (or read a novel) again.
To claim that Paradise, Nevada is a truth-telling novel about Las Vegas is inaccurate. It is an unruly parody of the casino industry sales pitch: that anyone can be a winner here. That you, too, can change your life. The explicit references to “the stories of Las Vegas” appear so often that the theme eventually feels as artificial as The Positano’s underground crystal caves. Diofebi never holds his characters responsible for their serious flaws. Each gets their own paradisiacal ending, most of which are far away from Paradise. So, despite the author’s promise, this turns out not to be a novel about those who stay in Las Vegas but rather those who bail when their luck runs out. In a city full of stories, this hoary old fable is the one we’re served?
The real Paradise south of the city limits is a diverse city of working-class people who take great pride in their work, their union, and their jobs, and have little interest in burning their places of employment to the ground. As Tom accurately recognizes in one of the book’s winning lines, “Not all that glitters is sad.”
¤
Brittany Bronson is a writer based in Las Vegas. She writes about the service industry, labor issues, and Nevada’s working class.
LARB Contributor
Brittany Bronson is a writer based in Las Vegas. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Times, and others. She writes about the service industry, labor issues, and Nevada’s working class. She has received awards and recognitions from the Nevada Arts Council, Vegas 7, and TalkPoverty.org.
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