Two weeks before his twenty-first birthday, Las Vegas native Bobby Ingersoll finds out he’s inherited a crushing gambling debt from his scumbag father. The debt is owed to an even scummier bag named Fraser Ruphart who oversees his bottom-rung criminal empire from the classy-adjacent Trump International Hotel. Bobby’s prospects of paying off the note, which comes due the day he turns twenty-one, are about as dim as the sign on the tower’s façade.
The two weeks pass in the blink of a (snake) eye, but before Bobby’s luck runs out, he stumbles upon enough cash to pay Ruphart off and change his family’s fortune. More importantly, he finds himself with a new, for lack of a better word, faith.
Bobby does not consign his big break to a “higher power"—what Penn Jillette hero ever could? Instead, he devises and devotes himself to Random, a philosophy where his life choices are based entirely on the roll of his “lucky” dice. What follows is a hilarious exploration into not so much what defines us as what divines us when we give over every decision—from what to eat to whom to marry to how or when to die—to the random fall of two numbered cubes.
Combining the intellectual curiosity of Richard Dawkins with the humor and grit of an Elmore Leonard antihero, Jillette’s up-on-his-luck Ingersoll is the character we need to help us navigate the chaos of the post-truth era.
Well, unless his roll runs cold.
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“Random is everything you would hope from Penn Jillette and so much more. Random numbers are seemingly crazy, unconnected, and unpredictable: this fabulous, wondrously compelling, funny, and original novel is all that too. As for laughs—it passed the the fling-up-the-head-snort-and-slap-the-thigh test a dozen times in the first few pages alone. Hugely recommended.”
—
Stephen Fry