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"Zero Pays the House": The Las Vegas Novel and Atomic Roulette

1992; University of Wisconsin Press; Volume: 33; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/1208481

1548-9949

Ken Cooper,

Modern American Literature Studies

T he history of Las as we know it almost exactly coincides with the nuclear age, beginning with the construction of Bugsy Siegel's Flamingo Hotel in 1945. In the 1950s, this city in the middle of nowhere suddenly found itself next to the Nevada Test Site, prompting one native to complain, It annoys me to read about some statesman saying that the world is living with the atomic bomb. . . . Damn it, it's not the world. It's Las Vegas (Lang 100). While this resident was correct about the radioactive fallout from nuclear testing, he underestimated the power of imaginative association. Just as Nathanael West, E Scott Fitzgerald, and others had found Hollywood to be a fitting extrapolation of American culture, a new generation of writers has come to use a peculiar conflation of Las and the bomb as the symbol and landscape of the cold war and its attendant reign of terror. The group of writers I discuss is necessarily large-including Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Stephen King, Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, J. G. Ballard, and Hunter S. Thompson-because I wish to demonstrate their unanimity in associating Las with the bomb.