Chris Abani's "Secret History of Las Vegas" Given the extraordinary truth of Las Vegas, a city that began after all as a glint in a mobster's eye, you might wonder what possible iniquities are stored up in a novel purporting to tell its secret history. Is it, perhaps, a double-bluff, in which the real life of the city is one of stable communities and spiritual growth - Marilynne Robinson's "Gilead" with slot machines? Not according to Chris Abani, whose exhilarating new novel heads out into the desert, sets the destination to Vegas-noir, dials the intensity up to Grand Guignol and then floors it. The result is an unsettling and complex entanglement of outsiders, freak shows, secret government experiments into mental illness, racism, sexual exploitation and fighting dwarfs. The story opens with the flash of a nuclear test - the kind whose low-pressure wave swept through the city frequently between 1951 and 1962. These were the years of atomic picnics, the atomic cocktail (vodka, brandy, champagne and sherry) and the atomic hairdo (don't ask). Chris Abani Photograph courtesy of Chris Abani Irradiated by a blast, pregnant Selah gives birth to conjoined twins, Fire and Water, then contracts leukemia and hangs herself. Fast-forward to the present day, and Water has grown into a handsome fellow of six feet, while Fire is "little more than a head with two arms projecting out of Water's chest. . . . He was bald, and a large skin caul, like a turkey wattle, drooped down one side of his head. Fire and Water find a home in a sideshow, which, far from exploiting them, turns out to be a place of refuge and empowerment. One of the best aperçus in the book is this line from Fire: "If a circus is an escape, . . . a sideshow is a confrontation." Nevertheless, they end up as suspects in a series of murders and find themselves being evaluated by a psychiatrist named Sunil Singh. The book's exuberant interest in its minor characters for a while conceals the fact that Sunil is the novel's protagonist. A South African of mixed ancestry - part Sikh, part Zulu - he works for a shadowy government-sponsored institute investigating the military applications of drugs that can induce psychopathic behavior. In a city of last chances, Sunil is an ethical bankrupt. The urgency of his need to reckon with his past is given literal force by the appearance of Eskia, an assassin who intends to dispense belated justice to Sunil for his crimes. Sunil barely holds on to our sympathy as his past reveals a tale of moral compromise that leads back to the torture chambers of apartheid. The urban theorist Mike Davis has described Las Vegas as a "strange amalgam of boomtown, world's fair and highway robbery." Abani takes this as an initial stake and keeps on raising, aiming to out-Vegas Vegas in surreal detail and outlandish characters. What keeps the story anchored in reality are the unfolding revelations of Sunil's previous life in South Africa. Just as Robert Towne's script for "Chinatown" used the true tale of water theft to give his noir a force that went beyond melodrama, Abani juxtaposes the truth of apartheid-era South Africa with his invented Las Vegas to ask where the real abomination and absurdity lies. It feels as though "The Secret History of Las Vegas" is the harbinger of a kind of international noir, where the consequences of apartheid are being played out in the deserts of Nevada. At first glance the diabolical schemes of Sunil's American boss, a madman named Brewster, seem rather too broadly drawn. But the novel asks us to consider them in a global context. Brewster, the book implies, is the fun-house reflection of the real-life individuals who ran Vlakplaas, the secret apartheid prison that broke or disposed of the regime's opponents. One of the motors of the book is a kind of moral fury that asks how we can begin to comprehend the extraordinary crimes and disjunctions of the modern world. Abani exploits the great potential of genre writing, which reflects the truth that we dwell in a world stranger than the one imagined for us by the naturalistic novel. Chance, paradox, violence and absurdity reign at both a subatomic and a global level: We live in Borges's "Aleph," not Flaubert's "Madame Bovary." "The Secret History of Las Vegas" is, among other things, a bold appropriation of a defining piece of Americana. The Nigerian-born Abani is the author of novels set in Lagos, London and Los Angeles. His writing has the scope of a person who has lived and imagined widely. America is refracted through the eyes of a global citizen, someone who can write with equal confidence about sea monkeys, Twinkies, shebeens in Soweto, the etiology of personality disorders and the logistics of getting an injured prostitute out of a Las Vegas hotel. His outsider's eye can make the familiar seem mordantly fresh; here Sunil sees the snack shop in a Las Vegas hospital: "Pausing by the door, he took it all in - shelves of chocolate and candy, sugary treats and drinks, and nary a piece of fruit in sight. It was as if the hospital were trying to drum up repeat business. Sometimes you wish Abani had heeded noir's lessons in the laconic, in which morally ambiguous characters protect their secrets and vulnerability with scorn and sharp one-liners. Occasionally his instinct is to add where less would be more. Here, a piece of description first upstages the action it's supposed to enhance before dissolving into a fuzz of abstract nouns: "There was a tenderness in this scene, the sheer sorrow that stills anger into a river of serenity, into a clarity so cold its brittleness is more threatening, quivering before shattering into a rage that can obliterate." Each additional clause weakens the impact of the sentence. There is also some really humdrum exposition, which reminds you - again - that some of the hardest work in writing is not crafting the fine sentence, but getting characters to walk across rooms. "He really wanted to solve this case," Abani insists, somehow raising a doubt about one of his characters that didn't exist before he mentioned it. And then he overexplains: "Not just for his career, or because he had been working on it for so long, but because there was the matter of the dead teenage girl who had been found in the second batch of dead homeless men two years ago." The unfortunate chime of "dead teenage girl" and "dead homeless men" devalues both, and you feel a writer rather too sweatily trying to establish a character's motivation. In the end, what lifts the novel is its energy, the audacity of Abani's imagination, and most of all the breadth of vision that supplies its moral context. "The Secret History of Las Vegas" has a global sweep and - what's often aspired to, but rarely achieved in a novel - a feeling of thematic unity. Fire and Water may perform at the Carnival of Lost Souls, but the true lost souls of the book are the ones with not physical but moral deformities. Fire and Water's relationship finally becomes the emblem of a mutuality that has vanished from Sunil's life. The most obviously damaged turn out to be the purest of heart. By Chris Abani Paper, $16.