Forty years after the publication of Leaving the Land, Pulitzer Prize finalist Douglas Unger returns with his fifth novel, Dream City, an excoriating tale of hope, greed, and betrayal in Las Vegas. C.D. Reinhart is Unger’s fatally flawed protagonist, a failed actor bent on self-improvement who is forced to be the public face of his company when a construction worker dies in a terrible accident.
Dream City stands out among contemporary novels for tackling the subject of money head on. In his brilliant portrayal, Unger reveals every level of casino economics, from the bottom to the top, and gives the reader a terrifying view of a world where the individual is always playing against the house, and the house is American finance. In doing so, Unger lays bare the role of illusion and greed in our system and proposes that people place risky bets so they can briefly experience the luxury of hope.
Douglas Unger presently teaches writing at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, where he is cofounder (with Richard Wiley) of the Creative Writing MFA. We met Unger decades ago when he taught in Syracuse University’s Creative Writing MFA program. In this conversation, we spoke to him about writing political fiction and how his Las Vegas novel is a cautionary tale about aspirational greed, the casino economy, and “a culture that puts a price tag on everything at the expense of humane values.”
Sorayya Khan & Laura McNeal: You describe your work as political fiction. How have your interests as a novelist developed over time, and are you surprised that your journey as a novelist has taken you from small town life in Leaving the Land and The Turkey Wars, to political strife in Argentina in Voices from Silence and El Yanqui, and now to Las Vegas in Dream City?
Douglas Unger: It’s been twenty years since I’ve published a new book, so it’s nice to think there might be continuity with the others. I’m not surprised. I’ve always been drawn to books and plays about social changes and how they affect the characters, to stories written against something. Some reviewers tagged my early fiction as “political” with Leaving the Land, a novel that takes on the death of the family farm and its replacement by a macro-scale system of corporate owned farms (along with everything else). The Argentina novels, especially Voices from Silence, I wrote in deep pain at murderous injustice. I witnessed the rise of a brutal military dictatorship that “disappeared” two of my student-exchange brothers and subjected the surviving family I loved and many friends to horrific abuse. I’m experiencing PTSD right now as I follow the rise of violent fascism in the United States—all seems in place for a dictatorship here. I feel we must prepare, with no little urgency. That’s a future story, one I still hope won’t happen.
Dream City takes on a system motivated by aspirational greed. The main character measures his self-worth by money, and by how far he climbs a corporate ladder. I hope his destiny set within the metaphor of Las Vegas and the casino economy acts as a kind of cautionary tale for a culture that puts a price tag on everything at the expense of humane values. Also, I mean to write against the usual Las Vegas-mobster story cliché. Dream City shines light on a Wall Street gang. Is it political? I hope so, but more importantly that it might be interesting.
SK & LM: What is Dream City saying about capitalism and morality? Is the novel an indictment of capitalism, or is it a story about a character, Curtis “C.D.” Reinhart, who is a flawed capitalist? Was the income inequality in the book inspired by things you see happening in the US now?
Douglas Unger: For years, I carried a copy of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century on a Kindle and kept re-reading it, mindful also that what economist John Kenneth Galbraith predicted in The New Industrial State has already happened: the line between big business piracy and elected governments has disappeared. Early drafts of Dream City started about midway through what’s now the third major section—C.D. has lost his job and his money, and he’s stuck in the shock of that, like an existential illness. A stuck character examining his life, just thinking, is not the best beginning, so I rewrote the story more chronologically to develop the boom and bust straight into the crash. Las Vegas was one of the most devastated places in the nation by the Great Recession, with highest jobless numbers and foreclosures. The big casino-resorts fell into receivership or hovered at the edge. I know many people financially ruined, who lost jobs and homes, because of what? As books about that era make clear, Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big To Fail, McDonald’s and Robinson’s A Colossal Failure of Common Sense, Michael Lewis’ The Big Short, our economy isn’t capitalism anymore, in the Adam Smith or Milton Friedman sense (whose lectures I attended at the University of Chicago). The economy became a pyramid-like betting scheme fueled by insidious greed of powerful people with large concentrations of wealth, backed by trick-and-trap practices of a banking culture that deceived and exploited hard-working people. With the Roberts’ Supreme Court rulings that trash financial regulations, similar three-card monte games are recycling around again. There’s no free market capitalism left except for a small business sector, farmers’ markets, maybe eBay. The whole system favors monopolies or cartels. C.D. senses this, though he doesn’t quite understand it as it’s happening all around him. He sets out to join a circle of rich and powerful pirates who inhabit his world. That he fails, after modeling himself after the business elite he knows, leaves him baffled, his whole life upended. His solution, I hope, might suggest a remedy: to renew basic human values that matter most—love, family, neighbors helping neighbors, and to leave the money-chasing delirium behind.
SK & LM: Is Dream City an exposé of the Las Vegas casino business in the way that Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle was an exposé of the 20th-century meat industry? It felt, to us, like a brilliant form of muckraking.
Douglas Unger: The Las Vegas in Dream City is a metaphor, meant to evoke the business ideologies of the 21st century not only for casino-resorts. In many ways, the casino industry is more honest than most other businesses—odds are against the players, but at least the odds are posted and available to anyone who asks. I’ve simplified and fictionalized some industry complexities. But, yes, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Frank Norris’ The Octopus, Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier and The Titan, and Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt, are influences. So is John Updike’s third novel in his trilogy of the boomer generation, Rabbit is Rich. Rather than muckraking, I mean one takeaway to suggest a vision similar to Hieronymus Bosch’s allegorical triptych painting, “The Haywain”; or a vivid scene in the baroque Spanish masterpiece novel by Luis Vélez de Guevara, El diablo cojuelo: the parade of Fortune, in which the unlucky or blithely unaware get crushed beneath the wagon wheels.
SK & LM: Tell us about the research that went into creating the scenes that give precise details about construction and finance in Las Vegas.
Douglas Unger: Research for Dream City relied mainly on talking to people and listening: to casino-resort executives, ironworkers, electricians, teamsters, culinary workers, hotel designers, dealers, salespeople, and front desk clerks. Through my wife, Dr. Carola Raab, a professor in UNLV’s famed College of Hospitality, I frequently joined the “breakfast bunch” of her colleagues who met monthly on a Sunday, all of them experts in finance, marketing, gaming, management, and who had lived and worked in Las Vegas for decades. The book Super Casino, by Pete Earley, is influential; as is John L. Smith’s Sharks in the Desert, along with his columns about local issues, personalities, and books about the casino moguls. Sally Denton’s foundational The Money and The Power is a must-read about the origins of the at times shady business culture in Las Vegas. For theory and insight into what drives the place (and the country), I rely on the late great historian (and friend) Hal Rothman, his Neon Metropolis. Over the many years I’ve spent co-founding and building the Creative Writing International program at UNLV (why I moved to Las Vegas 33 years ago), we’ve depended on donors, and in the early years, on one generous donor especially who worked as a top casino executive. We established a nonprofit institute that funded readings, panels, Ph.D. fellowships, grants for journals and presses, and City of Asylum for dissident writers. All this morphed into the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute that has helped to grow a thriving literary culture in Nevada. The “donor cultivation” experience provided me glimpses into a circle of the Las Vegas wealthy and elite, as did my obsessive work with political campaigns. In my opinion, the best research for a novel, or at least the contemporary realist novel, is to talk to people and listen. Every scene or chapter based in finance, business or construction has its seed in a story told to me.
Dream City fictionalizes certain figures and personalities, combining and recombining them into characters that are pure inventions. It does the same with some of the casino-resort corporations and their characters, reimagining them with made-up names. I’ve braided these inventions into a narrative alongside easily recognizable histories and tales of iconic casino-resorts and some powerful people drawn from the era of the 1990s through the Great Recession. Also, during the time-period of Dream City, the Las Vegas Sun published a series of exposés on the shocking deaths and safety deficiencies caused by shoddy, negligent practices in the construction industry, for which the newspaper won a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Worker safety is an important undercurrent in the larger story. I know ironworkers and members of trade unions who fought those battles. And I spent hour after hour researching statistics and facts: financial reports, gaming, real estate, banking, foreclosures, layoffs, worker safety. I had to simplify and omit so many complexities to make a readable story. I worry about oversimplification, what purists about Las Vegas might think about this. I also worry about too many facts. Advice to writers: do not attempt a novel based on so many facts! You risk getting lost in them!
SK & LM: We both loved the novel’s reference to King Lear in Part Three: “In college, for a class in Shakespeare’s tragedies, one of C.D.’s assignments had been a close study of King Lear.” C.D. recalls that the class “learned how tragedy can happen in a conceptual space between nothing and never, everything in between becoming some otherworldly playing out of actions already doomed.” This seems like an excellent summing up of the novel and C.D.’s character. His awareness of his impending doom is what makes him pitiable. When did you decide C.D. would be a theater student and a failed actor—from the beginning, or later on? And can you tell us anything about the source of this scene?
Douglas Unger: This interpretation of Shakespeare’s King Lear is my variation on thoughts from the late great poet and dear friend, and teacher, too—my friends have always been my best teachers—Hayden Carruth. His essay “Lear” appears in his collection Suicides and Jazzers. Hayden and I talked about “King Lear” along with many other poems, books, plays, and writers, at his kitchen table or mine in upstate New York and when he visited in Las Vegas. He talked about “Lear” as Shakespeare’s longest poem. How it’s bookended between five repetitions each of the words “nothing” and “never” expresses an existential truth. Writing about the boom and bust Las Vegas economy when it crashed into bankruptcy, this concept summed up for me what had happened. The action moves directly downhill, no stops, from disaster to insanity to catastrophe.
Dream City started with a character, the failed actor, lost to himself, moving from role to role in his life. There’s a whole book of cut chapters about his theater studies, his fledgling career and failures, also what it is to be his type of sexually attractive male to so many women and men, and how he learns, painfully, to be more human. He represents for me how, in contemporary society, most men start out as lost, insecure beings who don’t really know what their social or cultural role should be anymore. They have a natural power, partly a sexual power, but they’re unsure how that power should be used. For some, this insecurity results in a tendency to withdraw and grow quiet, with simmering unhappiness; others act out through aggressive, too often abusive behaviors shunned by society, which is also unhappy, and can get dangerous. Or—as happens with C.D.—there’s a choice to pursue money as a substitute for self-worth, which is, sadly, the most acceptable male role in American society.
In his thoughtful book, Enigmas of Identity, scholar and theorist Peter Brooks suggests that a character’s search for identity is the motivating force in literary fiction. He asserts that most of us have at least two identities bound up in the same person: the identity we conceive ourselves to be and project to the world plus another one continually investigating, interrogating, and making unstable our conceived identity. I feel this is probably true. Still, I suspect Brooks’ theory applies better to male characters than female characters in stories. It seems to me that most women, also women characters in literature, are more secure about who they are, or at least they have more resources to draw upon to develop and nurture their identities. Of course, women have more external, difficult obstacles to overcome to self-actualize, all socially inflicted, most often by direct male oppression or by cultures of male hegemony (in addition to the natural pressures of motherhood or the choice or life circumstances not to be mothers). This identity principle feels important to Dream City, because, deservedly or not, the women in his life save C.D. from himself. I hope that rings true. In a larger sense, too, I hope I’ve done justice to the ever-shifting identities of Las Vegas. It’s been too long between books. I’m experiencing a bit of stage fright about this. Twenty years! Still, I’m grateful Dream City is out there now for anyone who might be interested. After so long, that feels so very good.
