The quintessential Las Vegas novel has yet to be penned

By J. Patrick Coolican

Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2011 | 2 a.m.

Like God before it, the novel is dead, or so we are told.

“The book can’t compete with the screen,” Philip Roth, the old master, has said.

The hegemony of digital media is now assured — our culture given over to what the novelist Jonathan Franzen once called “attractively priced electronic panderings.”

And yet in that same essay, Franzen speaks about being at a low point in his life and picking up the Paula Fox novel, “Desperate Characters.” He finds beautiful communion: “That I could find company and consolation and hope in an object pulled almost at random from a bookshelf — felt akin to an instance of religious grace.”

By the same measure, although the Vatican’s influence has properly waned, Christ’s message remains as profound and revolutionary as ever.

Back to the novel. In 2008, Andrew Kiraly, who is now editor of Desert Companion magazine, wrote 4,000 words for CityLife about the Las Vegas novel, or more accurately, the lack thereof. This was upon the release of a big, celebrated, social literary novel that Las Vegas could call its own — “Beautiful Children” by Charles Bock.

Kiraly was dismissive of “Beautiful Children,” calling it a “drippy botch of a novel.” His essay was accompanied by a memorable photo of him stomping on pages of the book, which happened to be on fire. (I have my own problems with “Beautiful Children,” but I’ll let Kiraly play bad cop here.)

Kiraly’s chief critique is one he also reserves for himself: “ ‘Beautiful Children’ arrived as a touchstone for our furtive, slow-boiling frustration — a frustration felt as both readers and writers — over how difficult it is to get Vegas right in fiction.”

Mostly, we get genre fiction, or literary tourists who bathe in a Bellagio pool of cliché. Then there are the more hardened locals, who are so obsessed with leaving out the Strip and the plastic cannons of neon that they wind up forgetting that that’s who we are, too. They write stories that feel like they could take place in San Bernardino or Albuquerque.

Given his tough critique and the expectations they naturally engender, Kiraly is probably smart not to have made his recently published first book a stab at the great Las Vegas novel.

It’s called “Crit.” Kiraly will read at 7 tonight at the Marjorie Barrick Museum at UNLV, with a reception beforehand at 6.

(Disclosure: I know Kiraly and have socialized with him two or three times. He asked me to write a piece for the magazine he edits, but as of this writing I haven’t written it, and he hasn’t paid me. As the politicians always say when I call them out on conflicts of interest: It’s a small town.)

“Crit” is the story of music critic Gabe Sack, who writes for the beautifully named fictional L.A. music mag Bang Bang. His cynicism is such that he no longer even listens to the music before impaling it with withering reviews. When angry musicians encounter him at one boozy L.A. music venue or another, he often lands on the floor.

“I like story!” Kiraly told me once. (No postmodern puzzles here, or — like “Beautiful Children” — character-driven set pieces that are little more than meandering journeys through a literary bramble.)

Kiraly’s approach is reader friendly — and he amps it up by ripping through page after page of funny, allusive, quick writing that sends up the whole genre of music criticism.

Here’s one of the reviews: “Like a fumbling band of S&M Vikings expelled from Scandinavia, Nunpuncher has plundered the worst elements of heavy metal — namely, grade school sex and death fixations and clichéd Guitar 101 licks that led to the horrific cheese metal epidemic of the 80s — and forced them into painful, prison shower copulation you don’t so much as listen to as endure.”

Inevitably, this leads to a soul-destroying — and music-destroying — cynicism, “hating on cruise control.” The phony reviews only ratchet up the hatred. “In turn, the fact that I was so often correct in my blind opinions about music fed a contempt for it, a mutation having grown mordantly fearful of being pleasantly surprised.”

Sack decides to quit, but his boss Kraft demands he complete one more assignment, a trip to Vegas to find washed-up lounge singer Hambert Larkin.

(Kraft here evokes Tad Allagash of “Bright Lights, Big City”: “To Kraft, introspection was like a dislocated shoulder. By pushing on it, maybe he could make it go away.”)

“Crit” ends in Vegas, and Sack must decide whether to slough off his cynicism or embrace it anew.

Read it, though I recommend with a quaalude, as Kiraly can be a little speedy.

And I hope Kiraly does slow down and eventually uses his considerable talents to take his shot at the great Vegas novel.

For great cities aren’t just described by great novels. They are defined and shaped by them.

I used to live in Chicago and would read Saul Bellow while commuting to and from work on the El. I could look out the window and see his city, the row houses and corner bars, as the wheels screamed on the tracks.

Today Las Vegas isn’t shaped by a novel. The novelized journalism of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” comes closest, but is of another era and written by an outsider.

Instead, our city is molded by capitalist pleasure captains and the architects who built for them. No harm in that. But the novel provides something else. As Franzen writes, “Readers and writers are united in their need for solitude, in their pursuit of substance in a time of ever-increasing evanescence: In their reach inward, via print, for a way out of loneliness.”

The troubles of Las Vegas provide the perfect palimpsest upon which to write the novel that will shape us — that will reveal to us, from the courthouse to the Strip to the Gamblers Anonymous meeting, our corrupt and yet striving essence. And, the novel that will ask the questions that will help us understand ourselves even though they can never be fully answered.

As I was considering how to write this column I was also in need of a new book, having mercifully finished “Beautiful Children.” Lately, I’m reading mostly history, embarrassed by my incomplete knowledge of the past. But then I saw on my shelf a classic, Bellow’s “The Adventures of Augie March,” with its stupendous opening line, “I am an American, Chicago born ...”

Who will be our Bellow?