Fiction

Jon Wynn, The Set Up (Belt Publishing), 320 pp. Paperback, $20.00.

In multiple interviews he gave in the later years of his life (from one with Dick Cavett in 1973 to one with Larry King in 1994), Marlon Brando—a difficult interviewee in any case—frustrated hosts who wanted him to talk about his special gifts as an elite professional actor. “We’re all acting,” Brando would insist. “Acting comes easily to everybody.” Brando was channeling a vein of the “method” he had learned from Stella Adler, though he wasn’t articulating it terribly well for television. But his point—as suggested by Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956)—was valid: a certain amount of acting is routine for everyone, and those who can perform with a greater degree of self-consciousness may have certain social advantages.

No stranger to Goffman’s work, Jon Wynn is a professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His recent turn to fiction, The Set Up, plays on the theater of the everyday by featuring a multi-level guerilla marketing firm that offers on-the-ground influencer services in Las Vegas. The actors working for this firm—known as “The Set Up”—might promote new apps on the street, serve as secret shoppers in stores, or provide clandestine crowd control at parties. Their skills are essentially improvisatory; they are hired to manipulate behavior in real life. As one character puts it, “We’re just putting our thumb on the scale of everyday life.”

Wynn’s novel chiefly follows three characters. Ally is a young barista and wannabe actress who seemingly stumbles into a job with The Set Up to make some extra cash. Web, a veteran member of The Set Up’s “performance marketing troupe,” shows Ally the ropes and mentors her in her movement through the shadowy program. Marshall, meanwhile, is a middle-aged, has-been Vegas newspaperman who now finds himself working at UNLV as an adjunct professor of journalism. An anonymous tip leads him to reconsider his investigation of a suspicious fatal accident on Fremont Street from many years earlier.

One could certainly worry about the ethics of The Set Up. Is it wrong to push consumer products in public through seemingly casual conversations with strangers? Does America’s postmodern economy encourage a crass inauthenticity detrimental to our personal integrity? But the big question in the novel is whether The Set Up’s services also include more nefarious activities. Who is being set up for what? Might this underground organization be covering up theft—or even murder?

And who else is operating under the radar? The Set Up includes a mysterious religious sect that has split off from the Unification Church—the movement led by Sun Myung Moon until his death in 2012 (members of which were sometimes known as “Moonies”). Part of the novel’s plot revolves around the planned construction of a “peace center” for the Unification Church, which would seem to be a reference to the real-life IPEC LV, the “International Peace Education Center” on Bermuda Road, a convention venue built by the Unificationists a decade ago.

Wynn handles the mix of spycraft and detective work to great effect. His present-tense narration propels the action forward, and the interplay between Ally, Web, and Marshall keeps readers on their toes. It’s never immediately obvious who’s playing whom. Ally, for example, seems to be a naïve college student who will happily take on a shady assignment if it can pay for fancy clothes. But Web gradually learns that Ally hasn’t been entirely honest with him when it comes to her background. Is she an ingenue or an ingenious mole?

What is the role of the underground in a city that bears its vices boldly on its surface?

And despite his home base in Massachusetts, the appropriately named Wynn has a good read of Las Vegas. He deftly uses the Sin City setting to offer an updated version of noir fiction—less dark, perhaps, for all the bright lights. Crime manifests a little differently in modern-day Southern Nevada—a place where “even pot’s legal. There might be plenty of fences, but there’s no wrong side anymore. You either have money, or you don’t,” as one character observes. What is the role of the underground in a city that bears its vices boldly on its surface?

And locals will appreciate how many details Wynn gets right. When Web, for example, drops by UNLV’s Lied Library and conducts research on one of the computers, he “breaks the stare, sits back, and surveys the nave-like cavern. The soft lighting and quiet conspire to make him sleepy. He wonders how students can study here. It’s like an anti-casino.” It’s certainly an off-Strip novel. Characters spend little time at casinos and nightclubs; it never feels like promotional literature for tourists.

Wynn has published a “study guide” for the novel that draws attention to prominent sociological theories and though experiments (citing ULNV sociologists Barb Brents and Michael Ian Borer). But The Set Up is not a didactic tool for social science majors. It’s a suspenseful page-turner with the kind of snappy language appropriate to the genre. Web, for example, observing Ally, thinks, “She couldn’t look more middle of the road if he’d dressed her up in two yellow lines.” When Ally struggles to follow the threads and find the connections in what increasing appears to be a criminal plot, the “details danced in [her] head like glittering stars without constellations. She was searching for shapes in the dark.” Readers will enjoy keeping up and connecting those dots.