Casino

Casino – by Nicolas Pileggi

Like most people, I probably would not have read this book had I not seen the wonderful Martin Scorsese movie of the same name. Sadly, I didn’t enjoy this book nearly as much as the movie. In fact, I didn’t really enjoy this thing at all. I thought it was poorly written and am quite surprised how Scorsese managed to take something like this and turn it into such a beautiful piece of cinematic art. That says a lot of a film director. We must also remember that the movie was “based on” the book. Scorsese takes a lot of liberty with the script and, for whatever reason, he changes all the names of the real people. So Lefty Rosenthal became Ace Rothstein (DeNiro), Tony Spilotro became Nicky Santoro (Pesci), Geri became Ginger (Sharon Stone), etc. etc.

Speaking of character names, this is by far the biggest weakness of this entire book. For whatever reason, author Pileggi feels obligated to name every single minor character in the book. This is not at all necessary when the characters really don’t add anything to the story. This only manages to confuse the reader since one’s brain really shouldn’t have to be forced to assimilate so many names of people throughout the course of the book. Let’s look at an example of what I mean. I would propose the following statement is ideal:

“John drove across town in his car with three of his friends.”

However, the way Pileggi would write that statement would be:

“John drove across town in his car with Bill Thomas who was his next-door neighbor that owned a dry-cleaning business. Also in the car was Mark Dillon who John knew since high school. In the last seat of the car was George Miller who was John’s second cousin from his first marriage.”

Now, assuming we never come across Bill, Mark, or George again in the story, we really don’t need this excess of description stated in the above paragraph. After a while, your brain starts to automatically tune out these superfluous names as soon as you come across them. This is not a good thing because if the character JUST MIGHT be relevant to the remainder of the story, you’ve now trained your conscious to ignore them, so it becomes more burdensome when you read their name again and you can’t quite place them. This was a big, big hindrance for me.

Another problem that I had with this novel is it didn’t really flow into an easy-to-understand story. Pileggi throws so many stories from so many people into his narrative, and many of them don’t really even take place in a casino or even Las Vegas. This book seems more of anecdotal recollection of many of the mob personalities that are closely related to the key players. Again, the movie tended to do this, but when you have a master like Martin Scorsese, he can take all of this jumbled information and still tell a decent story while making sense out of all of muddled stories and episodes that are randomly thrown at us. I never really felt like there was any linear progression here, and when you did see relationships progress (such as the love triangle between Lefty, Tony, and Geri) it’s told in such a haphazard fashion, that a lot of the emotion the reader should feel simply isn’t there.

Other times, the author includes things such as entire transcripts of police reports, entire court transcriptions, and entire news stories verbatim. Probably the highlight (emotion wise) of the book is when Lefty and Geri are having their last fight and she’s screaming at him outside of their house while loaded on drugs. Yet right in the middle of this drama, Pileggi haphazardly includes the arrest report and it seems to throw the drama off too much. I mean, I could understand the author including this arrest report as a postscript at the end of the chapter, but why include it right in the middle of the event as he’s describing it?

I think that the approach that the author should have taken would have been to not include so many verbatim interviews that he conducted with related individuals, and instead try to incorporate the stories into an easy flowing narrative. He should have then maybe included an appendix with this multitude of individuals instead of flooding his readers with this information throughout the story.

I must confess that as I write this review, the vast majority of other reviewers on Amazon have given this book a very high rating. So maybe I’m just missing something. I simply didn’t enjoy the book and thought the overall experience was extremely tedious. Oh well, it did lead to a great movie.