John O'Brien's debut novel was published in 1990, making it the only one in his very short body of work that was published before his death by suicide in 1994, only two weeks after finding out that his novel would be made into a movie. The way O'Brien's life ended might be the reason why Leaving Las Vegas feels so honest and real.

This is less about how to deal with addiction than about the moments after Ben's decision to end his life, and the resolve that follows. Ben is too far gone for a miraculous all-encompassing cure that suits the society's concept of redemption and happiness. Ben is at the end, at a point when he can't go back, but also - most of all - doesn't want to go back. He moves into a different direction at the crossroads than you'd expect, just waiting for that final snap to come while walking through a limbo of motel rooms and empty bottles.

Some consider Leaving Las Vegas a romance, but I'd say it's about a connection deeper and less flimsy than that, almost primeval. A connection that allows Ben and Sera to act like themselves without the need to pretend or to hide something in themselves they don't want or need others to see. They show their true selves, true intentions, innards, and find their souls in each other.

According to Erin, John's sister, he was a devout atheist, but Erin notes the presence of religious icons in his works and suggests he might have been thinking about spirituality during his last years. Erin considers Sera a shortened form of a seraph. Seraphim are the highest form of heavenly beings in Christianity and caretakers of God's throne, and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite's description of seraphim in The Celestial Hierarchy is actually very relevant to Sera and how she's portrayed in relation to Ben:

"The name seraphim clearly indicates their ceaseless and eternal revolution about Divine Principles, their heat and keenness, the exuberance of their intense, perpetual, tireless activity, and their elevative and energetic assimilation of those below, kindling them and firing them to their own heat, and wholly purifying them by a burning and all-consuming flame; and by the unhidden, unquenchable, changeless, radiant and enlightening power, dispelling and destroying the shadows of darkness."

Although Ben's journey feels like an endless period of wandering, Sera is there to unconditionally make it a little brighter and meaningful. O'Brien doesn't lower himself to preaching a moralistic lesson about salvation, but instead challenges to think about an alternative path. In the end, Sera and Ben accept each other's actions and understand, sometimes even without words, what the other needs. It's the kind of companionship not everyone are able to experience in this life.

Ben's motivations are largely left unexplained, and it's the lack of easy answers that makes the novel so involving and full of life. Knowing where all's going to end up is painful, but there's comfort in knowing that Ben has had the chance to live on his own terms and spend his last moments with someone like Sera. For those who are willing to see it, there are moments of beauty along the way, but they're just masked with the lights of strip joints and the stench of a stale casino carpet.

We can never know what O'Brien would have thought about the movie adaptation, but in my opinion it does justice to his work. For one, the cinematography is gorgeous. It's like the visual equivalent of the feeling you get when you're reading the novel. Obviously, the book delves a little deeper and the relationship between Ben and Sera is probably more fleshed out, but otherwise the movie is very much worth two hours of anyone's life.

Originally, I slapped a four star rating on this, but my undying love of slow-burn stories has struck again, and so the amount of days I have thought about this since I read it warrants a full-blown five stars. A very rare occurrence with me, I might add.