... sprawling and colorful ... The novel ably bounces between these four narratives, while dozens of secondary characters weave into each, all moving, slow and steady, toward a climactic event. The novel’s rich details are both its allure and its occasional undoing. The motivations and inner struggles of the main quartet are palpable ... How each comes to terms with, or pushes against, these issues makes the book prescient and powerful. At the same time, the story is larded by extraneous information, as of the minutiae of poker play. That it still manages to pack a sizable punch is due to the strength and depth of its tart narrative. Sneaking sly wit and subtle profundities into its wide-ranging narrative, Paradise, Nevada is a wonderful saga that’s both reflective of, and critical of, our modern age.
... a sprawling Tolstoy-ian drama ... Part of the joy of the novel is watching how Las Vegas punishes or rewards the characters, how it helps or hinders them on their individual journeys ... The collision between Italy and America is sounded repeatedly in the novel, and some of Diofebi’s most beautiful writing happens when he meditates on poker player Tom’s former life in the shabby Roman suburbs ... There isn’t a single American who doesn’t hold a strong idea of what Las Vegas is, and I believe part of Diofebi’s undertaking in this novel was to show not only the soul of the city, but all the ways in which Las Vegas is imagined in the American consciousness. It is as though Diofebi dropped a dome on the city and meticulously cataloged all that he found. Tolstoy similarly set himself the task of capturing an entire world in his narratives ... To call Paradise, Nevada, then, a poker novel, or a thriller, or a bildungsroman, or a critique of the information economy, while all true, would miss so much. It is a novel that contains multitudes, with characters and places and history and future living inside the pages like Jorge Luis Borges’s fictional infinite tome from his short story The Book of Sand. Each character seems to contain more characters within; each location—Paris, Las Vegas, or a fictional recreation of the Shibuya crossing—functions in triplicate as character, metaphor, and critique. In order to capture something so elusive and grand as the soul of a city, perhaps this has to be the case. Or perhaps, because Las Vegas is the blinking, gyrating fantasy that it is, nothing can be taken for what it seems and everything must stand in for a larger idea. A half-scale model of the Eiffel Tower is either the low point of American mediocrity or a spectacularly maximalist homage, depending on who you ask. Diofebi presents both arguments in his novel, with the truth resting a foot on each side ... What Diofebi shows in his debut is all the thousands of machinations happening in the background, producing what is ultimately a glorious illusion.
... a throwback to the sprawling 1990s systems novel on both a conceptual level and a sentence-for-sentence basis ... With a narrative whipsawing among four neurotic protagonists, Paradise, Nevada charts a collision course through the gaming industry, grappling with Vegas’s objectifying entertainment complex and accelerating tech sphere ... While Diofebi’s exposition and extensive footnotes owe a debt to Wallace’s work, his closest analogue is Tom Wolfe, whose breathless reporting and visual detail prompted critics to wonder why he bothered writing fiction at all. In Diofebi’s case, the conceit is clear enough — if anything, his characters feel too much like mouthpieces for his arguments, and not enough like people. The protagonists are earnest rubes, the antagonists villainous caricatures, and as in Wolfe’s best-selling tomes, the unlikely subplots thread into a fiery, calamitous climax ... It’s reductive to criticize such an ambitious debut for its length, but there’s a great little poker novel buried within Paradise, Nevada — one which, admittedly, would have been a harder sell to the literary presses. The book’s drama unfolds at the card table — the rivers, the flops, the risks and consequences — in a way that jolts adrenaline regardless of your familiarity with the game ... Diofebi’s scuzzy ambiance is delicately crafted, his scenes deftly taxonomizing tiers of desperate gamblers and casino staff like species in a field guide ... Diofebi is oddly wary of all the poker talk, frequently reminding us that Texas Hold ‘Em was a short-lived fad among unshaven young men. He needn’t apologize — it’s clear that he’s fascinated by these decadent Obama-era subcultures, and the book’s consideration of pickup artists and fraternity brothers is more compelling than his writing about the labor movement and the border crisis. He also displays a thorough understanding of the Mormon Church and its history, although his efforts to draw throughlines to our uneasy present often feel labored. Diofebi is a keen observer of power structures, and any one of these themes might have warranted a full book’s examination. Paradise, Nevada brims with big ideas, even if they don’t always cohere into a single systemic critique.
Hijinks erupt even from the title, which one character reveals is the name of the township that encompasses most of Las Vegas. Its more common nickname is Sin City, and Diofebi’s hectic spectacular makes room for all its carrying on ... Mary Ann’s journey to wholeness may be the most moving, the richest ... But the ride’s wild for the entire quartet and some of Diofebi’s finest surprises are saved for the climax ... Paradise feels encyclopedic, rife with the arcana of casino operations as well as the entire region ... Now, a hyper-realistic funhouse ride doesn’t necessarily make for a convincing novel. This one intends a teeming human comedy, but it roves so widely among so many minor figures, that at times the spectacle flattens into farce. A lot of energy goes into pointing out the smoke and mirrors, always drawing the same moral ... is it a criticism to say that Diofebi risks doing too much, too brilliantly? To say he recalls David Foster Wallace? His sharp eye for the flimflam renews our enchantment ... Trick by trick and hand after hand, Diofebi proves a gifted young maximalist.
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. 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 ... The characterizations of non-gamblers, however, are a bust. Mary Ann is described primarily by her beauty, shallowness, and self-absorption ... When it comes to understanding what makes Mary Ann tick, readers don’t get much depth ... 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 ... 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 ... Diofebi never holds his characters responsible for their serious flaws. Each gets their own paradisiacal ending, most of which are far away from Paradise ... 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.
Las Vegas is so gauche, this line of thinking goes, so unabashed about its own vulgarity, that it is a perfect metonym for that original embarrassment, America. The same might be said of this gaseous, bloated 500-page exemplar of narrative sprawl ... The omniscient third-person narrator weaves in and out of their thoughts, along with those of a chorus of minor characters — so many that the book feels fractured and lacks momentum ... The ersatz elements of the Positano raise the question of the book’s own imitative impulses. It somehow unspools like a heist film that is also emulating David Foster Wallace poorly. Many of the sentences are so long that I don’t have room to quote one here, but watching them pinball around is disorienting; you have no idea where they’re headed next. Diofebi is similarly unrestrained when it comes to structure, tossing in email exchanges, footnotes, charts and vlog scripts, most of which feel superfluous and obscure ... It’s commendable that Diofebi addresses class, that great taboo subject, but he seems to have either contempt for his working-class characters or precious little experience with their real-life analogues ... In the end, all the characters, whose story lines obliquely brush against one another throughout the book, converge on the Positano for a dramatic, cinematic set piece that seems written with a Hollywood adaptation in mind. Rather than illuminating the cheesiness of Las Vegas, Diofebi succumbs to it.
... the surprise in this debut is that it’s power rather than money that drives the disparate cast of characters ... Through these loosely linked storylines, Mr. Diofebi, a former poker professional, aims to present a complete picture of Las Vegas in all its sprawl and chaos ... Dickensian ambitions, though it has more in common with slangy, hyperverbal David Foster Wallace-inspired doorstoppers that are sometimes affixed with the label 'hysterical realism.' There aren’t scenes so much as onslaughts of information ... It’s a dizzying experience, full of noise and flashing lights and only infrequent brushes with believable human behavior. Extraordinary and dull gets it about right.
This is a heady read, filled with surprising turns of phrase and unexpected relationships. The deep analysis of game theory—Diofebi left professional poker for writing—will appeal to fans of Michael Kardos’ Bluff (2018). Readers of complex literary fiction will appreciate the sharp and nuanced writing.
... [a] sprawling, eloquent debut ... Diofebi pieces together a revealing mosaic of the city. In between he lays bare the cold machinations of casino operators, such as a series of layoffs of nonunion female employees revealed in an exposé by Lindsay, the fallout described by Diofebi with scathing precision. With intelligence and empathy, Diofebi delivers a powerful and unapologetic slice of Americana.
This sprawling, delightful debut book captures the artificial worlds within worlds in the casinos ... The author, who spent several years as a professional poker player (both online and live), knows these people and their habitats, and he brings them to life in colorful, page-turning detail; even if you’ve been to Vegas, he makes you feel as if you’re seeing it with fresh eyes. Even when he gets a little too cute—for instance, footnoting Ray’s inside-poker jargon—there’s something around the corner to make it all worthwhile. This is a tremendously funny book, but it earns its laughs through human frailty. It makes fun of the powerful and the ridiculous, but even then there’s nothing easy ... An intimate epic set in a virtual but deeply human world.
