Traditional autobiographies wish to help you understand how the adult was "formed." I suppose most human beings, like clay chamber pots, are "formed" - and are used accordingly. But I? I am born anew at each green fall of the die, and by die-ing, I eliminate my since. The past - paste, pus, piss - is all only illusory events created by a stone mask to justify an illusory stagnant present. Living flows, and the only possible justification of an autobiography is that it happened by chance to be written - like this one. Someday a higher creature will write the almost perfect and honest autobiography: "I live."Sophomore year in college I bought a really idiotic book called something along the lines of, America's Best Cult Fiction. What can I say? I wanted (okay, fine - want) to be a cool kid, and that meant (means) reading more obscure - but good - books than anyone else. So I read a book to tell me what books to read to be cool. (See that awesome logic there?) Ultimately, being the poor person I was (am), I could only afford to buy one real book after the purchase. So, after carefully studying my options, I bought The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart (which is a pen name - henceforth when I'm speaking about the author, I'll refer to him by his real name, George Cockcroft (yes, that is a ridiculous surname) to avoid confusion). I then ignored it for three years. I do that a lot, I know.Two months ago I hauled it back with me to New York from California, and I finally got around to starting it last week. And couldn't stop. Which, for the first time in my history as a reader, actually worried me a bit. There was something freakishly seductive about the book and the lifestyle it was fictionalizing, something oddly compelling about abandoning the construction of self for a life lived purely based on the whims of chance.The premises of the book is thus: What if you left every decision up to the roll of a die?Luke Rhinehart is a perfectly dull psychiatrist living in New York City. He is bored with his life, depressed, and considering suicide. Then, one night after playing a game of cards with his colleagues, wife, and neighbors, as he's cleaning up he decides to follow an irrational - and therefore incredibly powerful - impulse; if the hidden die he's about to pick up has a one face up, he will rape* his colleague's wife. When he looks, the die shows a one.* Before we continue on with the review, let's take a moment to pause and delve into my personal reaction. Because this is my blog, dammit, and I get to do that if I want to. I'm a feminist. And like all feminists, I have my own definition of what it means to be a feminist. Rape is one of my 'hot item' issues. So you can imagine my shock when on the 36th page of 300 page novel, the main character blithely decides to go downstairs (Luke's colleague is also his neighbor) and rape a woman. Especially since it becomes clear that we're not supposed to find the act all that despicable. If I hadn't been 15 minutes into an hour long commute to work, I probably would have put the book down and frowned a great deal. However, good books aren't always about things we're necessarily comfortable with, and I'm very happy that I got over my initial hesitation and continued reading. Thanks, ridiculously long commute!After convincing the at first reluctant woman (Arlene), the rape takes place with great pleasure and abandon from both parties, and Rhinehart's dicelife begins.** At first, Luke keeps his experiment limited to small, private, matters. What to tell his colleague (Jake) about the affair with his wife, if anything. What to do about said affair. Buying and reading magazines he wouldn't normally look at twice. Being especially kind to his wife. Then he ups the stakes. He goes to random bars and assumes roles to act out among strangers. He starts treating his patients with methods, and personalities, determined by the dice. He pretends to be Jesus while treating men in a mental hospital.** Does this mean it was still a rape? Given the way it is depicted in the novel, I would say no, as Arlene does eventually gives consent, even if she doesn't instigate and calls it a rape along with Luke. Does the the term and how liberally it is used in the novel still bother me? Yes. Do I feel uncomfortable calling it 'not a real rape' when the woman was clearly reluctant? Yes. Discomfort noted? Excellent! Now, to continue on with the review!Luke's goal is simple - he will destroy the personality, since the personality destroys multitudes and change, which are in of themselves the very nature of man. A firm sense of self, he decides, is a construct created to make an individual stable, 'sane.' It is not, however, representative of a person's true self, since there is no consistent true self. Therefore, it makes much more sense to instead encourage people to dedicate themselves to chance, since chance is reliably unreliable.Eventually, Luke attracts followers, dice-ing becoming a way of life, a psychiatric theory, and even a religion.Fun, right? And we haven't even talked about the structure of the book. The novel is presented as an autobiography (which is being written because the dice ordered Rhinehart to write one exactly 160,000 words in length, obviously). It oscillates between first and third person (often within the same chapter, as Rhinehart can often refer to "Rhinehart" as a role he's playing). It contains smatterings of article clippings, letters, and even a TV segment. Its timeline jumps all over the place. We switch points of view. Major events are glossed over, while minor ones are given ridiculous amounts of attention. Important pieces of literature, music, and even the religious texts are sampled from and reappropriated to relate to dicelife.I would think that this scattered narrative would lead to a slightly traumatic literary experience, but it was actually the opposite. The randomness of it all made the entire read all the more compelling. How much time would we spend with Luke as he looses his license to practice psychiatry? How about his homoerotic experiences? Will we be able to see how the CETREs (Centers for Experiments in Totally Random Events) function? And how much explanation would we be given when Luke is forced to leave his wife and family forever because of the die? Will the dice order him to kill his son? Will he help 37 mental patients escape from a hospital?And on and on and on. You are constantly in suspense, because literally anything could happen next. It's not exactly a highly sophisticated or well-structured narrative, but it certainly is a compelling one that retains a progressive structure despite everything (and there's a lot) working against it. And that's not even including the author himself. George Cockcroft is a real-life diceman. Although he never went to the extents that his fictional doppelganger does (I hope) he actually uses dice to make life decisions, and did have a band of hippie followers in the 70s. Which then adds an additional layer of confusion as to how much of this fictional autobiography is an actual autobiography.Ultimately, the book becomes about Rhinehart's fall into anarchy. Normally, I would consider that sort of thing to be a tragic end to a novel, but here it's a triumph. The book concludes in total chaos, without any sort of satisfying finish, and with no notion as to what exactly the reader is supposed to do with the experience the novel has given them.As such, it ends in the same spirit in which it was written.So the night I finished The Dice Man, instead of trying to ascertain a great meaning behind the novel I had just finished, I pulled out my apartment's Monopoly set and decided what to eat for dinner based on the roll of the die. It landed on a four. Peas, applesauce and yogurt. Damn delicious.
I'm planning to add a more thorough review later, but for now, I want to defend a few things about this book that seem to have made people utterly furious. It can be summarised thus: this is not meant to be a work of realism and careful psychological characterisation, with clear and sensible motivations. It is meant to illustrate an interesting, imperfect theory while poking fun at every facet of psychiatric tradition, and many of human nature.I have no idea how so many people could misread this as a wholly serious novel, when it's clearly satire. Fairly effective satire at that, under suspension of disbelief. Honestly, when a book features a man breaking routine one day (as ordered by the dice) by urinating in a potted plant, sleeping under the bed, and jogging to work in a tuxedo and t-shirt, you're not meant to criticise the improbability of this occurring in real life. Yes, an actual psychological theory is presented- it's also run through a series of absurd scenarios designed to test it to extremes. It is so clearly disastrous in implementation that I can't even begin to understand how one could think the author supports it. This book is not meant to support dice theory. The theory is espoused by an intentionally unlikable and probably insane narrator and mocked thoroughly through its failures. In fact, everything gets a sound criticism- Freudian theory, psychiatric hospitals, psychiatric research, religion, logic, family structure, etc, etc. That's just the kind of book it is.Another quick note on what has been criticised in other reviews- misogyny. Yes, the women are far from three dimensional and are portrayed as somewhat dim witted sex objects, and it's understandably irritating. It would also be highly offensive if it weren't for the fact that every character is equally simplistically (and negatively) characterised and dim witted. They are tools to move along the plot of growing dice fanaticism and to thoroughly explore the possibilities of dice theory. Certainly, it can be annoying, and over the course of the book even I had tired of their cartoonish appeal. But, especially considering the original date of publication, the women were equal with the rest of the characters.It's an absurd book with a ridiculous premise, and its value lies in the unexpectedly rational explanations of a theory that would seem the opposite, and the questions it raises. Not a masterpiece, certainly, but a quick, thoughtful, and thoroughly humorous read. I enjoyed it.
What do You think about The Dice Man (1999)?
Author Too in Love with his Own Concept to See the Gaping BlindspotsThis is a novel which was recommended to me by friends as "if you liked Fight Club you'll love this." Though I can see the comparison, I liked Fight Club and I really didn't like this one. Fight Club was lean and taut, this was bloated and outdated - like some lecherous late middle-aged guy you run in to at a party, who proceeds to trap you in a conversation you’d rather not be in. Once I started reading I discovered that my friends' explanation of this book made more sense and appealed more than the book itself does. Yes, if you decide to assign random actions to different sides of dice and throw them - you will (by your own made up rules) have to go do the thing it lands on. But don't you dare lose track of the fact that you're the one who put those six outcomes on that die. You're still in control, stupid. Psychologist narrator decides one day to just play with possibilities. His very first one is "if this die is a one, I'll go rape my neighbour." It is. He does. Lovely. How very free. I'd been told about this bit, but I'd always assumed it was further along in the book, something dark and disturbing which he builds up to. But nope - it happens straight away, which doesn’t strike me as very good plotting. Also, the neighbour loves it, so it's not really rape. Women are always gagging for it, aren't they?Rad, dude.The problem at the core of this book is that narrator Luke Reinhart and the author Luke Reinhart are, (I’d venture) pretty much one and the same in their viewpoints . And it's a one-dimensional, pseudo-revolutionary viewpoint with no regard for other human beings. They both think that living randomly is awesome. Like, so totally awesome that the narrator throws away most of his established life in the process of following this dumb idea of the roll of the dice. He loses his job, wife and family along the way but it's cool, 'cause now he's living wild and crazy and free and doing stuff he’d never normally do. Well, it’s definitely wild and crazy, but I fail to see why that's the stated aim, and I don’t believe the new experiences are worth what each ‘Dice Experiment’ character throws away in the process. Frustratingly, the plot does light on all my counter-arguments (always put forward by the narrator's psychologist colleagues), but they're always just brushed aside as unhip. Nevermind this square life where you don't rape your neighbours - this dude's living free! They fired him at work? Great: now he can really get on with his work! It's the same dumb TV logic which sees cops only catching the murderer once they're suspended from the case.This book is a big-assed brick of a novel, and if you're not charmed and amused by the narrator, or if you're not into the machismo - yet lack of sense of self (ie personality or scruples) - which the narrator character enthuses about for most of the book, it's going to be a trudge.I wonder how different my reading of this might have been if I'd read it in social context when it came out in 1971 (the same year as the Stanford Prison Experiment, as it so happens). It seems to be bourne of that same Stanford Prison Experiment thinking which is willing to risk treading on people en route to gaining a deeper psychological understanding of human nature. I also wonder how different this novel would be if it hadn't been written in the early 70s. The two seem inextricably linked, and not in a good way. Like I said – think bloated middle-aged guy at a party. Oh, and he’s just bought his first motorbike and wants to tell you all about it. “It’s really powerful, sensual, raw. You should try it some time, come for a ride with me.”All in all - Luke Rhinehart - you're icky and please take your midlife crisis elsewhere.
—Hannah Eiseman-Renyard
The Dice Man resembles comic narratives set in academia, such as David Lodge's Small World: An Academic Romance or Robert Grudin’s Book. However, this is not only a satire of the psychiatric industry in America; at times, it reads like the type of radical re-thinking of reality that often accompanies the emergence of a new religion. Its protagonist is Luke Rhinehart, a professional psychiatrist who decides early in the novel to let dice determine his actions. Before long, his dice-throwing has serious consequences both in his personal and professional life.Not long ago, I wrote a negative review of Terry Southern’s The Magic Christian; there, I complained about the lack of depth in the main character and the somewhat formulaic plot. For me, The Dice Man makes obvious what I find problematic with Southern’s novel. Rhinehart’s protagonist is complex, and while some of his dice-dictated behaviours are merely whimsical and eccentric, others go against his own sense of morality. The question, then, is how far is Rhinehart willing to go in allowing the dice to decide for him? In addition, in contrast to Southern’s Guy Grand, who is wealthy and can afford to lose money, Rhinehart frequently experiences real loss as a result of his dice-throwing, and is almost always at risk of losing more.The novel half-seriously includes passages from “The Book of the Die,” a fictional work that comments on the “dicelife” in language that parodies the Bible. I refer to this as “half-serious” because in fact the novel makes a strong argument that throwing dice to make decisions is just as sane and wise as any other method of determining one’s future actions. In this respect, The Dice Man resembles some of the great novels of ideas, like The Brothers Karamazov or The Magic Mountain. In its philosophical gestures, The Dice Man is not too far from the work of Herman Hesse. Although the book gets into big ideas, the writing is rarely abstract. In this, the author follows Henry James’s writing in the preface to Daisy Miller that the novelist must “dramatize.” Nor does Rhinehart experiment with prose; apart from the scriptural parodies, most of the passages that stand out stylistically are those depicting sexual actions. In addition, the prose has a very contemporary tone to it—apart from some references to Vietnam and encounter groups, there is little making this novel feel “dated.”The novel is well-plotted. As Rhinehart refers more and more of his decisions to the dice, there is an escalation of the amount of the risk into which he puts himself. For much of the narrative, this increased risk results in comic situations. Late in the novel, however, Rhinehart’s dice-throwing involves some life and death decisions (and there is one such decision that some readers may find has turned out a little too conveniently—but if it had turned out much differently, this would have been a different kind of novel). The author maintains the plot well and, in comparison to many other novels, the conclusion to which the narrative builds is one of the most satisfying I have seen; it is certainly one of the best kinds of conclusions one could employ with regard to the ideas the novel explores.To sum up, The Dice Man is entertaining, funny, philosophical and worth the time. Read it, and you too may find yourself questioning what is “normal.”
—Dan
Roll a die. If it lands even, read this book. If it lands odd, read this book twice. But if you want to know a bit more… I don’t like superheroes. I don’t like comic book dudes with capes and magical powers they obtained because of radiation or scientific experiments gone wrong. I just can’t relate to them. I’ve tried, but they leave me feeling miserable. And inadequate. Even Batman, with his fortune, leaves me feeling like a bit of a loser. I want a superhero I can believe one. One that allows
—Dot Gumbi
