On a Roll (The Dice Man - Luke Rhinehart)

Member Name: sandrabarber

Product:	The Dice Man - Luke Rhinehart
Date:	17/10/02 (153 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: funny, thought-provoking

Disadvantages: very politically incorrct

Are you bored with the predictability of your life? Are you bored with yourself, with the way you always take the 'safe' option because of your mortgage/job/family/personality? Or maybe you're overwhelmed with responsibility and feel you just can't stand the stress of making another big decision. Ok, imagine never having to make a decision again?

Imagine having all your decisions made for you, and that those decisions are quite random. You are absolved of all responsibility. You never know what each day will bring. The person you once were is replaced by someone completely different, someone capable of ANYTHING.

That is the premise of 'The Dice Man', a spoof autobiography, and it's a very funny, appealing, disturbing and potentially dangerous premise indeed.

Dr Luke Rhinehart is a psychoanalyst. His life is humdrum. He feels that his work does little for the greater good as one by one his patients troop into his office with the same boredom, frustrations and unhappiness they feel they cannot control. He wonders what life would be like if it was ruled by random chaos. Would it, as he hopes, set people free?

Rhinehart thus develops a way of living by the dice. He takes an ordinary dice, and assigns 6 actions to each of the numbers. Whichever number the dice falls upon, that is what he does. Most of the actions he assigns to the dice are rational, reasonable responses. But at least one is always quite mad.

His first dice decision is to rape a friend of the family. Scary, yes. Politically correct, no. But don't worry, the woman in question thinks it's a game when he turns up and announces what he's going to do, and she's been dying for some excitement in her life. Thus begins an affair that Rhinehart doesn't really want to continue, but that the dice keeps telling him he must.

The dice keeps telling him to do all sorts of things he knows he shouldn'
;t. But he's committed now, and the word of the dice must be followed.

Naturally, he ends up getting struck off the medical register. Naturally, he loses friends and alienates his wife. He even tries to turn his child into a dice-follower.

Word spreads, Rhinehart becomes famous, and soon the cult of the dice is taking over the world. Letters arrive from abroad saying things like, 'I discovered my sixteen year old daughter on our living room couch with the postman this afternoon, and she referred me to you. What the hell is this all about?'

Eventually, Dice Centres are set up around America, where anything and everything goes. And everything starts to go very, very wrong.

'The Dice Man' is a very, very funny book. Not farcical funny, or slapstick funny, but that kind of I-shouldn't-be-laughing-at-this-but-I-can' t ?help-it funny. It is in exceedingly bad taste.

It is full of sex, hatred, abuse and alienation.

It is also supremely intelligent, brilliantly pacy and based on an inspired and innovative concept.

And it makes you think. The fact that the six dice options are chosen by Rhinehart himself in the first place raises questions about human nature when it is given free rein. It is he who chooses the bad one - the rape, the murder, the cruelty - and assigns it to the dice. It also, of course, means that he is not really absolved of responsibility at all. And again, living by the dice is not freedom, or chaos, but is enslavement to the dice that for Rhinehart becomes quasi-religious.

All of this is helped enormously by Rhinehart's fluid prose-style and sense of timing - he knows exactly when to end a chapter and cut in with a new one from a different perspective. He's also very good at setting scenes and creating rounded characters with just a few lines. His ear for dialogue is equally adept, making his conversations a joy.

'The Dice
Man' is one of those books that establishes itself firmly in your mind and never lets up. It's unputdownable, and you think about it when you're at work, in the car, trying to sleep. You find yourself going around thinking 'what if, what if'. No one I know who has read this book has not thought about trying the dicelife out. Once, though. Just the once.

Highly recommended.

ISBN 0006513905

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