Dig it, Daddy-o

The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is one of those cult books that was in my TBR pile for decades. The Dice Man is part Been Down So Long It Looks Up to Me and part Naked Lunch. This was my second attempt at reading it, the first being in the mid-90s when I saw a pile of copies in a bookstore with a sign that read, "This book will change your life . . ." I thought, boy I should really get around to reading it if people are still so enthusiastic about 20 years later. I could only get about 80 pages into it. This time I stuck out and it paid off--a little--a little more than I expected, at least. But it did take me a month to plow through it.

It's an interesting premise--a psychiatrist who decides to add randomness to his life by assigning the options for every decision in his life to numbers on a die and then casting the die and allowing it to dictate which option to choose. He then starts to treat his patients with his dice therapy to some spectacular success but, mostly, to dismal failure. But the dice therapy idea catches on and becomes a cult, a kind of religion, eventually becoming a national phenomenon, despite being discredited by leading authorities.

The novel is a bit dated, written as it was in 1971, but does accurately reflect the time period of the book, specifically, August 1968 to April 1971, when the world seemed obsessed with finding new ways of living and elevating spiritual awareness though drugs or different religions. The Dice Man is essentially a satire of the time.



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