Dice AngelAuthor: Rouff, BrianGenre: General Novels Publisher: HardWay Press Released: 2001 |
A Review by Laurie Edwards
08/21/2003
And so it is with Dice Angel, Brian Rouff's hilarious and sensitive novel about Las Vegas. In a place full of day-trippers who lose their life savings and gamble away their families, Rouff has chosen to write about natives whose on-the-edge-of-disaster lives make them a helluva lot of fun to read about.
The story itself seems, at first, to be pretty basic: A bon vivant named Jimmy Delaney owns a bar called Jimmy D's, and his ex-brother-in-law, Owen, keeps the books. Jimmy D's is popular with the locals, and its owner's doing well enough in life...until the day quiet, well-mannered, deeply religious Owen disappears with all the money—after having failed to pay the taxes.
Nobody will give a loan to a guy whose property has an IRS lien against it. The IRS, personified by a corrupt Jimmy Buffet purist, gives Delaney only until Friday to come up with the fifty grand he owes. How will he get that much money in that short a time?
Enter the Dice Angel. She's a frumpy woman with an iffy past whose one real talent in life appears to be manipulating karma to help people win at craps (for a fee, of course). She does her thing, Delaney wins his $50,000, and...
To Rouff's credit, he doesn't end Dice Angel all cheery and plastic. There's a wonderful, sentimental little twist that changes the entire "feel" of the book—and the impression we have of Jimmy Delaney, making him a more sympathetic character than we see earlier. It's a wonderful story, and the ending takes it to a higher level, especially since you'll never see it coming.
I usually complain when a book has very little narrative. There should be a careful balance between narrative and dialogue, but even better is when one can replace the other without a detriment in quality. In this case, Rouff's dialogue is so good, he's able to tell the story through it, making the lack of straight narrative no loss at all. Rather, the dialogue-heavy style makes Dice Angel exciting; you feel like you're there as the story unfolds.
Though there are serious bits in the book, Rouff's humor shines constantly. It's a bitter, self-deprecating kind of humor, based mostly on the fact that, successful as he may be, Jimmy Delaney is a loser and knows it. I laughed out loud several times, as a smalltime bar owner tries to finesse his personal and professional worlds into things he can be proud of. Until the end, however, he's defeated at every turn, and his jokes while his life falls apart are well-written and entirely believable. I felt for Delaney at the same time I laughed at/with him; Rouff has created a central character strong enough to bring forth both sympathy and contempt.
Also excellent is the way Rouff ties up loose ends and unimportant characters by the time the book ends. Too many authors add characters just to give their work some kind of "depth," but then they give them nothing important to do and kill them off for no reason, making it clear the characters were just there to fill out the story and take up pages. Rouff doesn't do that; his seemingly extraneous characters and situations dovetail nicely by the end of the book, becoming important enough to base the story's resolution on them. In the end, nobody's left out, and everybody's presence makes sense.
Yeah, finding authors whose work isn't (yet) widely known is the best thing about working here. Brian Rouff's Dice Angel is the latest example I've gotten of a writer whose faith in his work is completely justified, and I both look forward to whatever he comes up with next and recommend this one with 4½ stars.
© Copyright CultureCartel.com 08/21/2003
