Douglas Unger’s “Dream City” takes a complex look at Las Vegas.

Douglas Unger’s Dream City is the most ambitious novel ever written about Las Vegas. It’s an audacious attempt to explain what makes the city tick. Unger has taken up Tom Wolfe’s call to make research—reporting—the bedrock of a big, realistic work of fiction. The result is a novel in which Las Vegas is the main character, as much as if not more than the humans who populate the narrative.

Dream City chronicles the Las Vegas growth boom of the 1990s and early 2000s through the eyes of C.D. Reinhart, a midlevel casino marketing executive who has a front-row seat to the high-stakes development of a large Strip resort. As a witness to all facets of the project, from pitching investors to developing the marketing plans that will draw customers, Reinhart finds himself intoxicated, not least by the prospect of becoming wealthy in the process.

Las Vegas, of course, has long been a popular setting for crime novelists—think James Ellroy, Michael Connelly, and Tod Goldberg. Other novelists, too, have sought to write about the city: Larry McMurtry in The Desert Rose, for instance, or John O’Brien in Leaving Las Vegas. Yet none has tried anything so daunting as what Unger undertakes.

Indeed, in its account of the rise of modern Las Vegas, Dream City sometimes reads more like a history than a novel. “The town left behind its former era of sprawling garden motel complexes laid out behind the one-story neon storefronts of the casinos,” writes Unger. “The desert oasis concept transitioned into a new era of themed resorts and supercasinos offering complete fantasy worlds. The plate tectonic shift of this transformation also marked a sea change in who ran the city.”

Unger’s focus is neither racketeers such as Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel, who kick-started Las Vegas, nor entrepreneurs such as Howard Hughes and Kirk Kerkorian, who nudged the mob out of town. His interest is in the “limitless bankrolls of Wall Street,” which catapulted Las Vegas to an entirely new level when they came to town. Described locally as the “megaresort era,” the period of the novel is one in which aging hotels were replaced by the Mirage, Excalibur, MGM Grand, Luxor, Paris, the Venetian, Bellagio, and Mandalay Bay.

In his 2002 book Neon Metropolis, historian Hal Rothman deftly identifies where Las Vegas fits into the 21st-century United States. Rothman describes the city as “the last Detroit,” producing experiences instead of physical products. Las Vegas, he writes, represents “the triumph of postindustrial capitalism.”

Unger, for his part—and under Rothman’s influence—compares a Las Vegas resort to “a gigantic Broadway musical production, one with thousands of performers all putting on a show.… All would have to be well rehearsed in their roles.… They would all have to play their parts in one seamless, continuous performance that would keep cycling through the same actions and lines and songs day after night after day, never stopping, no curtain call, for a show that never closed.”

The resort company where Unger’s narrative unfolds is based loosely on Circus Circus Enterprises, later renamed Mandalay Resort Group and eventually acquired by MGM Resorts International. The novel’s past-his-prime boss is patterned after William Bennett, who built his brand by appealing to budget-conscious customers. The character of Reinhart resembles Glenn Schaeffer, who succeeded Bennett and spearheaded several large resort projects.

One need not guess why Unger took an interest in this story. Before he became a casino mogul, Schaeffer earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Later, he donated millions to fund creative writing programs at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Unger, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his first novel, Leaving the Land, was recruited from Syracuse University to help develop UNLV’s creative writing MFA.

While Unger always has his eye on the big picture, his narrative stays close to Reinhart’s career and family life. Yet it is also through Reinhart that Unger paints a darker picture of Las Vegas civic life. Surrounded by money and all its surface pleasures, Reinhart is driven to make and spend more. “Those were glory years,” Unger writes, “as C.D. later thought of them, years when everyone from the bottom up through the many levels and ranks…everybody got some. Money kept flowing in as if from everywhere.”

Meanwhile, Reinhart’s wife, Grace, more down-to-earth, remains wary of money’s allure. The custom-built house with a view, the expensive painting over the mantel—it’s all her husband’s doing. Her fears prove well-founded when, during the Great Recession, Las Vegas hits the skids. For all that, however, the couple’s story struggles to match the intensity of the larger narrative. As the fairly predictable arc of their lives played out, I found myself wanting to know about other, more complicated characters.

Ultimately, Dream City makes the case that Las Vegas thrives on a relentless obsession with money, which can—and does—have dire consequences. Unger depicts people living well beyond their means in a city that experiences inevitable periods of boom and bust. This rings true, as anyone who recalls the go-go 1990s can attest. But if he is not wrong about Las Vegas, Unger overlooks something more concerning: What happens in Las Vegas is not unique to it. As journalist Marc Cooper explains in The Last Honest Place in America, Las Vegas is different only in that it does not pretend to be anything other than what it is: “the American market stripped completely bare, a mini-world totally free of the pretenses and protocols of modern consumer capitalism.”

Still, Unger’s achievements with Dream City are admirable. He has done the hard work required to eschew stereotypes and depict the city with authoritative depth. He gets the details right, while too many writers rarely bother. If Dream City comes up a little short on narrative punch, it nonetheless should serve the vital purpose of inspiring others to take Las Vegas as seriously as Unger has done.•