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Tricky Business by Dave Barry Rating: • (Read only if your interest is strong)
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Treading Water Readers who enjoy a weekly chuckle or laugh from Dave Barry’s weekly columns might appreciate a dozen or so pages of the 300 contained in his new novel, Tricky Business. For the remainder of the book, Barry is treading water, trying to weave together a plot, some narrative, dialogue and a reason for readers to both turning another page. Patient and addictive readers will go ahead and read Tricky Business, in the same way that sometimes a TV watcher will just glom their eyeballs in front of whatever is on. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of Chapter 2: “The Extravaganza of the Seas was a 198-foot, 5,000 ton cash machine, an ugly, top-heavy tub with 205 slot machines and 29 gaming tables in two big rooms glowing the cheesy neon, reeking of stale smoke and beer-breath curses. The ship’s sole function was to carry gamblers three miles from the Florida coast each night, take as much of their money as possible, then return them to land four hours later, so they could go find more money. Gambling cruises are a big business, especially in South Florida, where more than two dozen ships take roughly 8,000 customers out nightly. Nobody really knows how much money these ships make; it’s a cash business, which means it’s easy to present nosy outfits such as the United States government from finding out where it all comes from, and where it all goes. There are many mysteries in the gambling-cruise business, besides the profits. The identities of the real owners of the ships are often hidden via dummy corporations and silent partnerships. And since the gambling takes place unregulated, in international waters, nobody has any idea how honest the games are. If you were a gambler, you might suspect that the roulette wheel was rigged, or the blackjack deck was stacked, or your chances of hitting a jackpot on the slot machine were about as good as if you’d been throwing your coins directly overboard. But who are you going to complain to? Seagulls? There’s no state gambling commission out there in the Gulf Stream. Of course, none of this keeps the gamblers from coming. Gamblers need action, even when the odds suck. And so they return to the ships night after night – the slot-machine ladies, clutching their plastic cups of quarters; the shouting hard-drinking craps-table crowd; the roulette addicts, who truly believe, all evidence to the contrary, that there is something lucky about their birthdates; the blackjack loners, with their foolproof systems that don’t work – all of them eager to resume the inexorable process of transferring their cash to whoever owns the ship.” Tapping the deep mine of unusual South Florida characters, Barry presents an ensemble in Tricky Business, including nursing home escapees, mobsters, drug runners, an undercover coast guard agent, a beautiful croupier with flatulence, members of the untalented band on a gambling cruise ship, and workers a hapless news station. He stirs them up, puts them in a tropical storm, and by the time the weather clears, some action has occurred, and some funny things happened. Several running gags become tiresome and even some of the funniest episodes, like the news station covering itself, seem like throw-aways or asides to the main action. I came away from Tricky Business with a plan to stick to Barry’s short works and take a pass on any of his future novels. Steve Hopkins, October 16, 2002
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