The Madonna of Las Vegas

[Dave Monroe]

Novelist Gregory Blake Smith stages a postmodern
smackdown (plus love story) in Las Vegas
BY EMILY CARTER

"Carnivalesque" is one of those overstretched
adjectives used to describe anything without an
earth-toned color scheme. But there is also an actual
ethos, a culture of Carnevale, like the one described
by Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, who believed that
the creative hilarity of the carnival led to all that
was wonderful in art and literature ever since
Rabelais made his first rude noise on paper. His
influential book Rabelais and His World describes
carnival as basically putting reality in a bottle,
shaking it up, and soaking the world in seltzer.
Carnival culture is the opposite of holiday culture,
but holiday culture imitates carnival, giving us a
sanitized version. The perfect example of holiday
culture is Las Vegas, an entire economy promising
carnival and delivering only its sugar-free
substitute. It's where artifice itself is turned into
imitation, and it's where Gregory Blake Smith's book
The Madonna of Las Vegas arrives like a troupe of
clowns gleefully kicking over billboards and pulling
off virtual-reality helmets. Cosmo Dust, the book's
hero, is literally and figuratively a little guy. Up
until the death of Cosmo's wife, the universe has been
kind, but now it's turned against him, chasing him
through the hall of mirrors that is Vegas. He's there
painting an exact replica of the Sistine Chapel
ceiling, and replicas multiply in this book at such a
merrily frantic pace, you don't know what the genuine
article is anymore.

[...]

"I wanted the story to take place somewhere where the
rules were suspended," Smith says, "as if you had two
doors to walk in. One was reality, but you walked in
the door right next to it." This is the door earlier
opened by writers like Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut,
and Tom Robbins, and it leads not to the American
Dream but to the Dream About America. In this kind of
carnival, things go topsy-turvy; distinctions of class
and background are temporarily upended. Thugs talk
cultural criticism and cocktail waitresses quote
Gnostic texts in High Latin. Whimsy is the order of
the day, and anything can happen.

[...]

Like any book involving pageantry and masquerade, The
Madonna of Las Vegas is rife with Roman Catholic
imagery. Smith was raised Methodist, but admits that
Catholicism offers "the better dog and pony show."
Smith says his use of religious imagery and narrative
is not derogatory. "It's intense," he acknowledges,
"but not negative." Which isn't to say that the novel
isn't a poke in the ribs of orthodoxy. The Internet
Encyclopedia of Philosophy says of the Carnival ethos
that it "uncovers, undermines, even destroys any one
idea that claims to have the final word." But The
Madonna is also a simple, sad love story. In Venice's
Carnevale, after all, one of the masked characters is
always Pierrot, the heartbroken lover. The playful
cleverness of postmodernism wafts through this book,
but as Smith says, "none of that cerebral cleverness
is worth much without heart."

[...]

http://www.citypages.com/databank/26/1293/article13686.asp

Smith, Gregory Lake.  The Madonna of Las Vegas.
   New York: Three Rivers Press, 2005.

http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9781400081868

http://www.readinggroupguides.com/guides3/madonna_of_vegas1.asp


		
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