The Assault on Tony's

by John O'Brien

Grove Press, $21 hard

John O'Brien clearly has an affinity for four story elements: alcohol, booze, liquor, and self-destruction via excessive consumption thereof. The Assault on Tony's is the second book from John O'Brien, who also penned Leaving Las Vegas -- the novel from which the screenplay was adapted. Sadly, O'Brien's fascination with item number four became a little too personal as he committed suicide before finishing the manuscript (it was completed by his sister).

The backdrop for The Assault on Tony's requires only a little suspension of the probable. Five very white friends meet for drinks at Tony's, a bar at which a couple of the guys are regulars, when -- wouldn't you know it? -- the apocalypse, in the form of a nation-wide race riot, breaks out. This is not as inconvenient as it sounds. The potential doom provides the men a much-desired excuse to drink themselves to death. The five, along with a waitress and a busboy, barricade themselves inside Tony's for defense purposes, begin drinking heavily and waiting for nothing in particular.

The pros: It's a quick read. Save for one passage, O'Brien avoids abusing sexuality. Despite the similarities between Tony's and Vegas, O'Brien manages to detail extreme behavior without retreading over the same psychological ground. And it's witty more often than not. O'Brien occasionally displays a nice flair for the comically absurd. There is a wonderful, Nero-esque scene where, as the city outside burns, supposedly grown men violently debate whether J&B scotch is superior to Cutty.

The cons: It's easy to lose interest during the sections where the testosterone-driven dialogue dominates the text. O'Brien's penchant for omitting articles and verbs gets tiresome. And, metaphorical aspects aside, the charm of five obnoxious elitists isolating and slowly killing themselves has an upper limit.

Much like Vegas, the intended strength of Tony's is in the characters. They are vivid, although not necessarily as a result of O'Brien's own descriptive prowess. In fact, O'Brien is vague in most aspects. We never get a city name for the setting nor precise ages for the players. But O'Brien is clever enough to silently model the characters after familiar stereotypes. The men holed up in Tony's are ones who couldn't wait to go to college, join a fraternity, graduate, start raking in the dough, and become their parents -- assuming their parents were upper class -- as quickly and quietly as possible. In Tony's they are chronologically adult but psychologically infantile. -- Michael Bertin