CASINOLABS

A farcical comedy that revolves around a deeply dysfunctional family, the strange cosmos of casinos, and nuclear testing in the deserts of Nevada.

Psychologist Steve Nichols has been treating Bill Waterhouse for many years, always confidently unconvinced of his client’s principal grouse in life: Decades ago, Bill witnessed a nuclear test in Nevada at close range, an event he identifies as the sole source of his relentless troubles, which include a terrible stammer and erectile dysfunction. As a therapeutic measure, Nichols helps Bill fill out a governmental claim—a role-playing strategy—but it backfires when Bill in fact files it and receives an enormous payout from the government. Nichols is at first worried he is implicated in a fraud, and then furious that he has no payout of his own, but then he begins to wonder if maybe Bill was telling the truth all along. At the heart of this meandering comedy is the emotionally disheveled Waterhouse clan—Morton, Bill’s 20-something son, is a wayward graduate student in history enamored by Marcus Aurelius, harboring a “private obsession with all things Roman.” He works as a lowly greeter at Caesars Empire casino, forced to don a toga and “plastic aquila scepter.” When the casino attempts a brand makeover under the tutelage of Casinolabs, a “thematic design consultancy,” his academic expertise is noticed, and an opportunity for his own rebranding as a “wunderkind” becomes a possibility.

The author’s humor shines brightest when he satirizes the insipid commercial culture of the casino business. Here, Scarlett, Morton’s sister, explains the future of Caesar’s Empire: “Now Rome can truly rise to its destiny as a kid-friendly, multifarious, multicultural empire. No longer confined to a stuffy Mediterranean peninsula, it goes beyond borders to incorporate all the known world. So it’s more inclusive; its Egyptian, Punic, and Arabian territories are given more meaningful representation.” The “This is Circus-to-the-Maximus” concept is genuinely inventive and funny, as is the entire project to disingenuously mine the past for modern marketing gimmicks. Also, the conclusion of the book, though entirely implausible and disappointingly contrived, has the virtue of being surprisingly unpredictable. However, the novel, for the most part, is a rambling, ill-disciplined mess that conflates an absence of literary structure with comedy. There is hardly a page without a handful of jocular witticisms, and after a short while, this relentless barrage of one-liners becomes utterly exhausting. Finally, the work feels less like a novel and more like a very long standup routine. This is the challenge of such a lightsome farce—there are simply too many jokes, and the reader becomes desensitized to them; as a result of the absence of any gravity, none of the characters ever rise to full development. Some of the author’s jokes land, and there is much in Scrivner’s book that heartily entertains, but even at its best it does little more than that, and therefore never moves past the realm of superficial comedy into something more meaningful.

A satire that is both only funny and not funny enough.