Synopsis: Bored New York psychiatrist begins living his life according to the roll of a dice in order to escape the constraints of his personality.  Unpredictable, but ultimately boring.

My Take: There’s promise in the premise of this book. I first heard of “The Dice Man” gimmick via the highly entertaining Discovery Channel travel series of the same name. The concept of someone making decisions according to the roll of a dice certainly adds a healthy dose of conflict and unpredictability to a narrative.  Similarly, a mechanism that allows an individual to explore one’s ‘minority self’, the ‘parts’ of you that might want to do something unusual that are ordinarily repressed by your dominant personality, is also intriguing.

However, I just couldn’t get onto this novel’s wavelength. After finishing it, I couldn’t quite work out whether it was satire (and if so, what the main target was – 70s psychiatry? Society in general?), whether it was intended to be subversive or whether it was simply a comic farce. Of course, it shouldn’t matter what the book’s purpose/genre is so long as it’s engaging, but while it is amusing in parts, the novel’s plot aimlessly meanders for so long that by the end, the appeal of the gimmick is thoroughly exhausted.

And so as I was reading “The Dice Man” I was left wondering “What is the point?”. On the one hand the novel is clearly scathingly and amusingly satirical about 70s psychiatry. However, one the other at times the book seems to come perilously close to genuine advocacy of “dice life” as a response to the repressive absurdities of modern society.  If you think that this is a naïve reading of an intentionally satirical text, consider that the author claims to have actively used ‘dicing’ himself for a decade before writing “The Dice Man” after musing on the nature of freedom while teaching Nietzsche and Sartre as a psychology lecturer.  I may be wrong, but there were plenty of moments while reading “The Dice Man” that my mindset shifted from ‘This is amusing’ to ‘This is absurd’.

While it’s not without redeeming characteristics, unfortunately, I can’t recommend “The Dice Man” to others.

Highlights:

“I shared my office on 57th Street with Dr Jacob Ecstein, young (thirty-three), dynamic (two books published), intelligent (he and I usually agreed), personable (everyone liked him), unattractive (no one loved him), anal (he plays the stock market compulsively), oral (he smokes heavily), non-genital (doesn’t seem to notice women), and Jewish (he knows two Yiddish slang words). Our mutual secretary was a Miss Reingold. Mary Jane Reingold, old (thirty-six), undynamic (she worked for us), unintelligent (she prefers Ecstein to me), personable (everyone felt sorry for her), unattractive (tall, skinny, glasses, no one loved her), anal (obsessively neat), oral (always eating), genital (trying hard), and non-Jewish (finds use of two Yiddish slang words very intellectual). Miss Reingold greeted me efficiently.”

…

“If that dice has a ‘one’ face up, I thought, I’m going downstairs to rape Arlene. ‘If it’s a one, I’ll rape Arlene’ kept blinking on and off in my mind like a huge neon light and my terror increased. But when I thought if it’s not a one I’ll go to bed, the terror evaporated and excitement swept over me: a one means rape, the other numbers mean bed, the die is cast. Who am I to question the dice?’

…

Now the curious reader will want to know what kind of an analyst I was. It so happens that I practiced non-directive therapy. For those not familiar with it, the analyst is passive, compassionate, non-interpretive, non-directing. More precisely, he resembles a redundant moron. For example, a session with a patient like Jenkins might go like this:

JENKINS: ‘I feel that no matter how hard I try I’m always going to fail; that some kind of internal mechanism always acts to screw up what I’m trying to do.’

[Pause]

ANALYST: ‘You feel that some part of you always forces you to fail.’

JENKINS: ‘Yes. For example, that time when I had that date with that nice woman, really attractive – the librarian, you remember – and all I talked about at dinner and all evening was the New York Jets and what a great defensive secondary they have. I knew I should be talking books or asking her questions but I couldn’t stop myself.’

ANALYST: ‘You feel that some part of you consciously ruined the potential relationship with that girl.’

JENKINS: ‘And that job with Wessen, Wessen and Woof. I could have had it. But I took a monthly vacation in Jamaica when I knew they’d be wanting an interview.’

‘I see.’

‘What do you make of it all, Doctor? I suppose it’s masochistic.’

‘You think it might be masochistic.’

‘I don’t know. What do you think?’

‘You aren’t certain if it’s masochistic but you do know that you often do things which are self-destructive.’…

The intelligent reader gets the picture. The effect of non-directive therapy is to encourage the patient to speak more and more frankly, to gain total confidence in the non-threatening, totally accepting clod who’s curing him, and eventually to diagnose and resolve his own conflicts, with old thirty-five-dollars-an-hour echoing away through it all behind the couch.

And it works. It works precisely as well as every other tested form of psychotherapy. It works sometimes and fails at others, and its success and failures are identical with other analysts’ successes and failures.

My Take: In my first year at university I went through a bit of a nihilistic phase in my reading. I started devouring authors like Chuck Palahniuk, Irvine Welsh, J. D. Salinger and above all, Bret Easton Ellis. I can’t say I really know what precipitated this phase – maybe it was just the first time I had had the opportunity to access literature like this having just left small town Queensland for the (relative) retail literary diversity of the Gold Coast (you mean there are alternatives to Dymocks??). My own outlook on life wasn’t particularly grim at the time and I certainly wasn’t some kind of Goth/Emo morbidly luxuriating in the negativity of it all.  But I do recall feeling that experiencing the darkest perspectives of literature would enrich my appreciation of the more uplifting things in life. In this sense, I can certainly say that having worked through the Brett Easton Ellis cannon, I felt much more optimistic about my experience of the human condition.

“Less Than Zero” is a relatively brief, very tightly written debut novel that Ellis published at the obscene age of 19(!). While it’s not as rich or layered as his later works (in particular “American Psycho”) it’s fair to say it was spectacularly successful, becoming a best-seller and being adapted as a movie starring Robert Downey Jr.  Appropriately described by one Amazon reviewer as being “like The Catcher in the Rye on Crack”, “Less Than Zero” is a harrowing exploration of the alienation and disconnection of the children of the wealthy elite of LA in the 1980s. Given Ellis’ own privileged LA upbringing, it’s difficult not to see him writing from personal experience here.

While I can’t say I’m too sympathetic to “Poor Rich Boy” literature in general, “Less Than Zero” is notable for its extremism if nothing else. Amidst the pages of this thin novel, the protagonist and his fellow travellers manage to confront or engage in endemic drug use, forced prostitution, anorexia, rape, paedophilia and a snuff film.  It’s seriously full-on stuff and ultimately no surprise that a novelist that could produce a debut like this would ultimately go on to pen something like “American Psycho”. However, despite its grotesque extremity, the most striking aspect of the book is the all encompassing numbness of its characters.  While the protagonist has a vague conception that he should be disturbed by what he is confronting, he is unable to feel anything beyond the generalised anxiety he feels about life as a whole. I guess this is kind of the point of nihilistic literature and I remember appreciating its import at the time, but in retrospect I can’t really see the appeal.

Highlight: The opening paragraph of “Less Than Zero” perfectly captures the sense of disconnection that pervades the rest of the book:

“People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles. This is the first thing I hear when I come back to the city. Blair picks me up from LAX and mutters this under her breath as she drives up the onramp. She says, “People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles.” Though that sentence shouldn’t bother me, it stays in my mind for an uncomfortably long time. Nothing else seems to matter. Not the fact that I’m eighteen and it’s December and the ride on the plane had been rough and the couple from Santa Barbara, who were sitting across from me in first class, had gotten pretty drunk. Not the mud that had splattered on the legs of my jeans, which felt kind of cold and loose, earlier that day at an airport in New Hampshire. Not the stain on the arm of the wrinkled, damp shirt I wear, a shirt which looked fresh and clean this morning. Not the tear on the neck of my gray argyle vest, which seems vaguely more eastern than before, especially next to Blair’s clean tight jeans and her pale-blue shirt. All of this seems irrelevant next to that one sentence. It seems easier to hear that people are afraid to merge than “I’m pretty sure Muriel is anorexic” or the singer on the radio crying out about magnetic waves. Nothing else seems to matter to me but those ten words. Not the warm winds, which seem to propel the car down the empty asphalt freeway, or the faded smell of marijuana which still faintly permeates Blair’s car. All it comes down to is the fact that I’m a boy coming home for a month and meeting someone whom I haven’t seen for four months and people are afraid to merge. “

My Take: I have mixed feelings about Graham Greene. One the one hand, he’s an extremely talented writer and a very sharp observer of the human condition. No one does world-weary cynicism as amusingly, or as insightfully as Greene. But on the other hand, his outlook on life is just too bleak for me to really embrace. I mean the guy is so curmudgeonly that he defamed Shirley Temple. Further, the source of a lot of Greene’s cynicism – Catholic guilt and the reaction against it – isn’t exactly a resonant theme to someone of my decidedly agnostic/protestant upbringing.  As a result, I find the experience of reading Grahame Greene to be almost equal parts head nodding and eye-rolling depending on the prevailing bitterness of his writing.

The End of the Affair is definitely one of the more misanthropic of Greene’s books. The story of the end of the relationship between the writer Maurice Benedrix and the married Sarah Miles has the kind of evocative bitterness that can only come from personal experience. In this regard, it’s interesting that the British edition of the novel is dedicated to ‘C’ and the American version to ‘Catherine’, dedications that are widely viewed as referring to Lady Catherine Walston, a married Catholic woman with whom Greene carried on a long-term affair. What Lady Walston felt about having a book dedicated to her that at times borders on the misogynistic in the strength of its hatred I have no idea – but it really gives Greene’s writing in this book a real intensity of emotion.

At this point, I’m sure lots of Greene fans are saying “You’re missing the point – the book wasn’t about hatred – it was about exploring the conflicts between love of another and love of God”. Well yes, I appreciate that. And the novel certainly succeeds in posing these philosophical questions in quite a challenging way. But it’s not a conflict that speaks to me. I don’t feel the presence of God intervening to bring me joy or sadness in any of my relationships. I’ve never blamed God for the rejection of a girl, thanked Him for the love of a woman or felt the need to choose between Him and another. I appreciate that it sounds shallow – but it all seems like pointless angst to me. If God can make you hate someone as much as Benedrix hated Sarah in this book, I know who I’d chose to end my relationship with.

Highlights:

“I wrote at the start that this was a record of hate, and walking there beside Henry towards the evening glass of beer, I found the one prayer that seemed to serve the winter mood: O God, You’ve done enough, You’ve robbed me of enough, I’m too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone forever.”

….

“I hate you, God. I hate you as though you actually exist.”

….

“Hatred seems to work on the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?”

…

“I became aware that our love was doomed; love had turned into a love affair with a beginning and an end. I could name the very moment when it had begun, and one day I knew I should be able to name the final hour. When she left the house I couldn’t settle to work. I would reconstruct what we had said to each other; I would fan myself into anger or remorse. And all the time I knew I was forcing the pace. I was pushing, pushing the only thing I loved out of my life. As long as I could make believe that love lasted I was happy; I think I was even good to live with, and so love did last. But if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly. It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death; I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.”