Rats of Las Vegas
by Lisa Pasold
Winnipeg: Enfield & Wizenty, 2009, ISBN 978-1-894283-92-2, 358 pp., $29.95 cloth.

Millard Lacouvy, the first-person narrator and main protagonist of Torontonian Lisa Pasold's engrossing first novel, describes herself as unattractive and too short (under five feet). But we soon discover, as she makes her way in a man's world, that she's one of the feistiest young women in recent Canadian fiction.

Born in the BC interior and abandoned by her father, Millard moves with her mother to Vancouver. It's the Dirty '30s, and they occupy the main-floor apartment of a house owned by the Ahern family, who live upstairs. Mary Ellen Ahern is a midwife, while her husband is a gambler; though we see little of him, we learn that he not only becomes Millard's mother's lover, he teaches Millard all about cards.

By the time the Second World War approaches, Ahern has taken off, leaving a son named Teddy, and Millard has dropped out of school. For a while she works part-time in the laundry at the Vancouver Hotel, where her mother toils as a cook. But soon Millard is spending a lot of time in the back room of Dermot McMann's Gastown bar, playing poker with the men.

"Poker isn't math," says Millard, "the most useful qualities to hold in a game aren't cards or odds. What's more crucial is basic human observation. With that, if the cards are in my favour, I'm as close to unbeatable as any one person can be." (27)

She's a master at recognizing "tells, the series of motions and notions betrayed by a man's gestures. Tells reveal what you need to know about anyone's game. . . . I always watched the way a man reacted, after I placed my bet--if he had a strong hand, his shoulders would invariably relax." (10)

As children, Millard and Teddy are playmates; in their mid-teens, they become lovers, but, attractive as Millard finds Teddy, she's never distracted by romance. "Love was a warmth I could do without, a fire I was not going to get burned by." (117) Teddy lies about his age to enlist in the army and is soon gone from Vancouver.

By this time, war is raging, but Millard is pursuing her career as a gambler. She's expanded her horizons beyond Dermot's, taking her poker prowess onto the trains that cross the west. When she's not riding the rails, Millard lives in a Vancouver boarding house, having been more or less disowned by her mother, who's appalled at Millard's choice of occupation.

Hard to believe that anyone could spend all the years of the war playing poker on trains, but Millard explains her fascination: "Poker is risky, like going to war, or making love. . . . Five stud, seven stud, hold 'em, it didn't matter--poker was better than being made love to, the game really mine, really in my hands, a game of skill and knowledge and luck. I could walk away with a purse full of money, and still have some self-respect, which a girl can't really say about a tumble across the sheets, however enjoyable it might be at the time." (135)

At mid-novel, life in the nefarious world of gamblers catches up with her--a bad loser has her beaten up by a thug. However, it isn't long before Millard is moving on to the fledgling gambling mecca that is Las Vegas in the 1940s. Even the return of Teddy, literally scarred by his experience as a Hong Kong prisoner of the Japanese, doesn't hold Millard back.

Though her protagonist is virtually super-human in her talent for winning, author Pasold skillfully builds suspense into every game. As a reader, you don't have to be a card shark or even a casual player to get caught up in the poker scenes. Part of the intrigue lies in Millard's identifying of a meaning for every card: "I dealt an eight of Diamonds--financial instability--and then a nine of Diamonds--surprise with money. Surprise can really go either way. I dealt a three of Spades, for unfaithfulness . . ." (235)

Millard's relationship with Teddy is complex; his comings and goings affect her play to the point where he is more jinx than inspiration. In the late stages of the novel, he shows up with a monkey that Millard teaches to play cards--this plot twist smacks of that old adage about vaudeville comedians' acts: "If you're dying out there, bring on an animal." Suffice it to say that Pasold's plot is lively enough without the monkey.

What is remarkable too is the re-creation of a bygone era--especially the streets and buildings of Vancouver and Las Vegas in the '30s and '40s.

While Pasold's main purpose seems to be to show us that the headstrong Millard can stand on her own, there are throughout the novel fatherly men who look out for her. Yet Rats of Las Vegas is first and foremost a good yarn about a solitary woman asserting herself in a man's world--not through glamour or sex but through sheer wits and determination.

Dave Williamson is a Winnipeg novelist and reviewer.

Buy this book at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.

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