On "Leaving Las Vegas" by John O'Brien
Gen X Avunculicide
John O’Brien’s 1990 novel Leaving Las Vegas led to the 1994 Sheryl Crow single of the same name, the 1995 film adaptation that won Nicolas Cage an Oscar, and, finally, the suicide of O’Brien.
The novel is a portrait of the relationship between a prostitute named Sera and an alcoholic named Ben. The only place the two ever leave is Los Angeles (by separate paths); Las Vegas is where they get stuck and eventually meet. The novel is Sera’s story first and primarily, and the opening fifty pages in particular that hew to her point of view are unrelentingly claustrophobic and bleak. Inertia is of course not a byproduct of Las Vegas: It is a design feature. Casino floors are low, expansive, and designed to obscure any potential natural light, and the result is a perpetual neon and artificial hour that has nothing in common with night or day. Sera’s preference is for blackjack; at the table, “The casino has made damn sure that there is no line of sight to the outside, so she won’t know when it gets light.”
On film, Ben and Sera’s relationship can be charming and slapstick, because Ben and Sera look like what they are, which is movie stars. As a piece of music, what this sounds like is uplifting and resilient; there’s the illusion that whoever is singing about leaving Las Vegas did in fact make it out, and that’s how they wound up singing the song. David Letterman surmised as much when Crow performed the song on the show in 1994. In the post-performance interview he asked her if the song was autobiographical: She answered yes.
The answer was, technically speaking, correct. The song is autobiographical, it was just O’Brien’s autobiography, and not Crow’s. O’Brien was watching and was livid. The next two weeks of phone calls are documented in Richard Buskin’s book about Crow called No Fool to This Game, and while the conclusion is that while Crow’s usurpation of O’Brien’s story (part of a pattern of more general credit-hoarding with respect to her first record) was not a cause of O’Brien’s suicide, it didn’t help his morbid state of mind.
Leaving Las Vegas was O’Brien’s only novel published in his lifetime, and despite the lengthy and salutary shadow it cast across disciplines of the decade, it is not a hidden masterpiece. After all the care invested in the unsparing and unsentimental individual initial portraits of Ben and Sera, when they finally meet the story gets really treacly (and surprisingly, mawkishly, juvenile) really quickly.
O’Brien, Crow, and Cage—born 1960, 1962, and 1964, respectively—are, strictly speaking, too old to be members of Generation X; the demographic cut off is 1965. As a piece of fiction, Leaving Las Vegas is probably not the paradigmatic Gen X novel avatar. But the relentless commercial extraction of the sentimentality of the work, and the subsequent expulsion of O’Brien from the narrative of his own life, with its tragic consequences, is the paradigmatic Gen X artists’ allegory.
Leaving Las Vegas
Author: John O’Brien
Pages: 189
Year: 1990
Genre: Fiction
OSR Tier: Marginally Canon
Next: The Evening of the Holiday, by Hazzard