Some men just buy expensive sports cars or a motorbike when they have a midlife crisis. Psychiatrist Luke Rhinehart decides to live his life by the whims of the die. He rapes his friend’s wife, conducts outrageous psychological experiments (mostly revolving around sex), frees patients from a mental hospital, leaves his wife and children, kills a patient - all because the die told him to do so. He calls this “dice therapy”, begins to treat patients by it and thereby starts a movement that turns into a full-blown religious cult with its own churches (the CETREs: Centers for Experiments in Totally Random Environments) where people blindly follow the word of the Die (with a capital D).
“The Dice Man” is one of those books that I enjoyed reading but that make me weary to publicly admit that I enjoyed reading because I know that there are wackos out there who take its content - quite unironically - as gospel (another good example for this would be “Fight Club” - no, it does not tell you to beat up other guys and to blow up buildings).
The book does (almost) everything to shock its readers and to undermine their expectations. No sexual debauchery too depraved to be described, no stereotype too contrived to be included, no sexist behaviour too hurtful to be portrayed (even though I have the slight suspicion that a lot of these behaviours would have been considered to be “OK” by many readers back when the book was published).
Only at the very end the author appears to have gotten cold feet: The die chooses Frank Osterflood, the child raping mental patient, to be Rhinehart‘s murder victim. By doing so, the author stops short of letting his character commit the ultimate sin of fictional murders, that is, taking the life of an *innocent* victim. Osterflood is a sadist child molester, after all. He is the opposite of innocent. Most would therefore agree that his death is by far less atrocious than, for example, the death of Larry, Rhinehart‘s son, who was also on the list of potential murder victims.
But maybe the author did not get cold feet but instead aimed for a “realistic” depiction of random decisions. After all, exclusively depicting decisions that are horrible and atrocious would not convey the feeling of utter randomness of a life lived by the die. Always letting the die opt for the morally or socially “worst” option would be just as contrived as letting the die always choose morally “good” options - even though a true “dice man” like Rhinehart rejects the notion of “right” or “wrong” in a moral sense altogether. “Right” is what the die decides. We as readers are left to ourselves when it comes to judging the consequences of these decisions - and the book makes sure to provide us with plenty of examples to do so.
That’s one of the three main aspects that made this novel such a captivating read for me: The ability of the author to let the story unfold in a seemingly random fashion by virtue of a deliberately chosen storyline. The reader is lulled into believing that the depicted events were the results of chance even though they are nothing more than any other (good) piece of fiction: A deliberate effort by the author to tell a convincing tale. The apparent contradiction between the depiction of seemingly random events and behaviours and the knowledge that these depictions are completely and deliberately controlled by the author (and thus the opposite of random) is dissolved by a neat narrative trick: The protagonist‘s name is the same as the author‘s, that is, the novel is framed as an autobiography. The reader is thus lead to believe that the events depicted in “the dice man” are not the work of non-random fiction but the accurate depiction of the truly random actions of the author (of course they are not, but the ambiguity of the matter provides much of the allure of the novel).
A second intriguing aspect of the novel is its examination of the importance of “genuine” human motivations. At times, Rhinehart lets the die completely take over. It decides how he behaves, what he says and what he does. As long as he does this without telling the people around him that he does it, he just appears odd/perverse/inappropriate/deranged/charming/etc. (depending on what the die told him to do). As soon as he lets people in on his secret, however, things get more complicated as they never know whether Rhinehart’s behaviour is “genuine” or “dice-dictated”. And for most humans, the difference in motivation matters greatly even if the outcomes are the same. In the words of Rhinehart: “The suffering our dice-dictated actions causes is clearly nothing as compared man for man to that caused by rational, civilized man. Dicepeople are amateurs at evil. What seems to disturb you guys is that others are sometimes manipulated not by an ego-motivated me but by a dice-motivated me. It’s the seeming gratuity of the occasional suffering we cause that shocks. You prefer purposeful, consistent, solidly structured suffering. The idea that we create love because the dice order us to, that we express love, that we feel love, all because of accident, shatters the fabric of your illusions about the nature of man.”
A third aspect that makes this novel stand out for me is how it shatters our notion of what is true and false: When questioned by the police about the escape of the mental patients and the murder of Frank Osterflood (the child rapist), Rhinehart lets the die dictate his answer. He changes his story on the throw of a die and thus blurs the line between reality and fabrication in his statement. Because all of this is done in full view of the detective, the statement becomes virtually useless, as it is impossible to tell whether its contents are true or not. All the cues that help us distinguishing true from false when people tell us stories (e.g. consistency with motivations and non-contradictory statements) are useless because the statement is random by default and we know that it is so. Hence, we can’t fool ourselves into seeing a hidden pattern or meaning in the statement because we know there is none.