The Lucky by H. Lee Barnes

Abstract

B o o k r e v ie w s 35 1 erature on memory, respectively, as “collective” and “individual” memory. The critical literary work on cultural ephemera like advertising and memoir has much to gain studying the worldview of ordinary people within the public memory established by powerful interests in American society. However, the author’s digestion of the critical literature on memory is weak overall, espe­ cially reading in the seminal works on memory produced from 1929 forward at University of Strasbourg under historians Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, founders of the journal Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, and the pio­ neering work of Maurice Halbwachs on the social construction of “collective memory.” Historically, much of the literature developed through Marxist emphases on social class. Wrobel does admit, albeit in a footnote, that “for the most part, though, the genres of promotional writing and reminiscence were quite separate in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century” (202). Struggle with the field of memory studies could better connect collective representations with their reception in society. The work is not quite as com­ manding as Michael Kammen’s Mystic Chords of Memory (1991), John Bodnar’s RemakingAmerica (1992), David Blight’s Race and Reunion (2000), or John Walton’s Storied Land (2001). One also wonders about the importance of promotional tracts and especially pioneer memoirs between 1865 and 1915 in the national marketplace of imagination and memory, when Civil War mem­ oirs dominated the middlebrow literature of reminiscence in American maga­ zine and book publishing. The wealth of archival sources utilized by the author should steer those in western literature in the right direction. The production of the book exhibits a creativity as imaginative as its content, with two very strong photo-essays to show the visual form of memory within booster writings and pioneer memoirs. The author’s footnotes are encyclopedic. I heard high praise from my students in American cultural history who were assigned the book. Promised Lands excels for David Wrobel’s insistence that scholars of the American West take seriously the possible and remembered worlds of western economic interests and those individuals determined to settle the region. So many contradictory and con­ tentious interests shaped western memory that scholars of the region should sus­ pend the usual dismissive tone to look freshly at the sources once again. The Lucky. By H. Lee Barnes. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2003. 416 pages, $22.00. Reviewed by Cheryll Glotfelty University of Nevada, Reno “If Scott Fitzgerald were alive today, I have no doubt that he would choose Las Vegas as the setting of at least part of The Great Gatsby,” writes critic John H. Irsfeld in East ofEden, West ofZion: Essays on Nevada (1989), where he calls Las Vegas “West Egg” (170). Indeed, Las Vegas today has something—youth, W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e F a l l 2 0 0 4 hope, hype, money, magnetism, excess—that New York had in the 1920s, a transplant of the urban heart of America from East to West, yet it is a city almost completely overlooked by western American literary scholarship. H. Lee Barnes’s impressive novel The Lucky, set in Las Vegas and elsewhere, from 1956 to 1987, is a Great Gatsby of the contemporary West. Narrated in the first-person by Peter Elkins, the story is both a coming-ofage novel and a virtuoso character study of Willy Bobbins, a Jay Gatsby-esque owner of a casino called The Lucky. Pete, whose single mother neglects her children in pursuit of ill-fated lovers, is first hired by Willy to be a bus boy and then adopted by him, giving Pete an inside view of the turbulent Bobbins fam­ ily. Willy Bobbins closely resembles real-life Vegas legend Benny Binion, illit­ erate underworld tycoon, suspected murderer, and operator of the Horseshoe casino, famous for no-limit betting and for hosting the annual World Series of Poker. Readers will love, hate, pity, and fear Willy, a man whose power is formidable, whose methods are ruthless, but whose heart is vulnerable, intelli...