When I think of Las Vegas I picture the brightly lit strip, the casinos filled with slot machines, and attractive women wearing boas. By random chance alone, people can become wealthy from a dice roll or the spin from a roulette wheel. Random by Penn Jillette paints a different picture of Vegas involving gambling debt, criminals, gangs and how dumb it is to gamble. Random also tells of an interesting philosophy to use dice to make your decisions more random.
The Summary
Bobby, the unlikely protagonist, drives a billboard on the strip to make his living. He finds out that on his 21st birthday a loan shark will murder him and his entire family due to his fathers unpaid gambling debt. Bobby realizes his hourly wage from billboard driving can never pay off his fathers debt, so he looks to other methods to make money. He then decides to visit the local gang, with no plan in mind, to see if he can come up with the cash. In a total coincidence, Bobby manages to steal half a million dollars during a chaotic gang shootout.
This money still couldn’t cover his fathers debt. At midnight on his birthday, Bobby takes the money to a casino and bets it all on one roll at the craps table. By pure chance, Bobby became a multimillionaire. Bobby acquired enough money to pay his father’s debt, buy his mom a house, afford his sister’s medical school, and have enough left over to live the rest of his life comfortably.
Bobby received the most thrill during the roll of the dice. He decides that will be how he makes the majority of his decisions. When he is 100 percent sure of something he will not roll the dice. When he is unsure or he has multiple choices to make, he will assign each decision to a number on the dice He assigns the decisions he wants to do less to the rolls that are more improbable, like 2 and 12, and the ones he wants to do more to numbers that come up more frequently, like 7. By assigning things he would never do or things he wants to do less to the infrequent numbers, it allows them to still be rolled and picked. When the number is rolled Bobby does what he assigned to the dice with no questions asked.
This leads to a humorous story where random events happen. One such event, Bobby ends up buying a private investigators office, because he thinks his dice give him a super power. Bobby wants to help those in need with his super power. He takes a case where a man gets blacklisted from every casino by cheating. The man admits he did not cheat. This leads to an exciting climax where they solve the case, but a most disappointing ending, that left me frustrated.
The Good
Two things stood out to me the most in this novel. Jillette knows humor, considering he’s a comedian magician. This book made me laugh at some of the most unexpected situations. The ways Bobby’s dice managed to get him out of trouble made me chuckle more often than not. Jillette manages to approach the darker side of Las Vegas with humor and lighter tones throughout the novel.
Secondly, I enjoyed the entire concept of using dice to decide things. Using dice to decide, say, where to eat at would eliminate the difficulties in decision making. I also enjoyed the math and statistics behind the dice rolls. Using dice, you can assign your greatest wants to the numbers rolled more frequently, allowing random chance but a higher chance to get the choice you want most. The Vegas setting along with the casinos and gambling in the book made it an entertaining read, for the most part.
The Bad
Sadly, the bad in this book outweighs the good. Penn Jillette is a comedian, a magician, and an author. However he is not a fiction writer. You can find countless passages with passive voice and way too much telling rather than showing. Reading through the prose often made me stop and put the book down. For example on page 154, “There were chihuahuas barking and Pam was yelling at them to shut up.” The very next paragraph, “The parlor was dark. The walls were covered with posters and pictures.” Jillette crammed sentences like these throughout his novel. A simple edit could fix the majority of them. For example the first sentence could read, “Pam yelled at the barking chihuahuas to shut up.”
The next issue I had with the books is the needless sexual content. I love smut in books as much as the next guy, but the majority written added nothing to the story. Sure, it takes place in Las Vegas known for its nightlife, but when it adds nothing to the book, except maybe word count, shouldn’t it be removed?
Lastly, and maybe my biggest issue with the book is the ending. The book ended with a deus ex machina. To me, it seems like lazy writing. It says I don’t know how to resolve the conflict so I will just end it with this unexpected turn. The narrator even mentions how it’s a deus ex machina. Does that make it better or worse? You’ll have to decide for yourself. Maybe Jillette wanted a random ending to a book titled Random, but Bobby did not use the dice to make random decisions in the solution to the story, This ending left me disappointed, longing for a better one.
The Review
If you are a fan of Jillette I would recommend reading Random. I laughed at the comedy in the book at times and the concept of random chance made it a unique read. If you are an avid reader, like myself, I would not recommend the book because too much passive voice, the ending was bad, and too much unneeded sexual content. I would not recommend anyone under 17 reading this novel, sorry kids.
Not good 4/10.
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As always, happy reading!
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