This is a re-read. Originally read this in 1971 and remembered it to be a funny and scathing satire on all the faddish psycho-therapies and theories that inundated the 60s and 70s. Should be interesting to see how it holds up......
Well. it did not hold up very well. While The Dice Man enjoys a cult following it is still a book locked in the 60s and not treated all that well in the 21st century. The 60s and 70s was a time of upheaval for psychotherapy. There were some exciting ideas in the air but also a lot of scams. The novel is a satire on many of the outlandish fix-all therapies that existed and also a look at whether anyone can truly "destroy the ego". Luke Rhinehart (a pen name if ever I heard one) writes about Dr. Luke Rhinehart (a pretentious literary gimmick if ever I've seen one) who creates a therapy using dice to determine the person's action potentially exposing our illusion of free will, freeing the person from a destructive and controlling society, and destroying the ego (a popular pastime for the more extreme cultist ideas). But Dr. Rhinehardt is a megalomaniac and even he realizes the destroying the ego actually inflates it. The premise is a good one for a 70s novel and, for the reader who remembers the period, it has many moments of, as the gestaltist would say, an "ah-ah! experiences. The bottom line is that Rhinehardt (the character not the author) is a selfish prick if not totally insane. How does this relate to the movements of the 70s? If you replaced Rhinehart with the names of Fritz Perls, Albert Ellis or especially Timothy Leary., You would not be stretching reality all that much.
Yet the book is a disappointment on the second read. It wanders all over the place. I suspect author Rhinehart is trying to emulate the dice life but it mainly just becomes annoying. Rhinehart (the character) is such a prick that he loses any sympathy in the first hundred pages which also means the book is way too long for its one punch line story. It is funny but the laughs wear thin after the first few hundred dice rolls and the first dozen sex orgies. Sexual liberation was a big thing in the pre-AIDS days yet the author's sex scenes are for the most part, dull which equates it with the other big potboiler-disquised-as-wisdom book of the era, The Harrad Experiment.
So, this reread simply didn't pan out well. A previously 4 star book sinks to 2 stars. Is this rating based on my increased maturity or simply a role of the die? You decide.
