'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas'

Reviewed by CRAWFORD WOODS

New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/1972/07/23/books/thompson-1972-vegar.html

Published: July 23, 1972

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold." The hold deepens for two days, and the language keeps pace for 200 pages, in what is by far the best book yet written on the decade of dope gone by.

"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" is a number of things, most of them elusive on first reading and illusory thereafter. A solid second act by the author of "Hell's Angels," it is an apposite gloss on the more history-laden rock lyrics ("to live outside the law you must be honest") and-- Don Quixote in a Chevy--a trendy English teacher's dream, a text for the type who teaches Emily Dickinson and Paul Simon from the same mimeograph sheet. It is, as well, a custom-crafted study of paranoia, a spew from the 1960's and--in all its hysteria, insolence, insult, and rot--a desperate and important book, a wired nightmare, the funniest piece of American prose since "Naked Lunch."

Its author comes complete with more than fair credentials for the venture. His previous book, "Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs," was a running history of that evil club (whose members first accepted him and ended by stomping him) and a hard-breathing assault on "media rape," which is what Thompson calls the methodical misrepresentation of the Angels--and just about everything else--by the traditional press. A hatred of journalists and journalism burns deep in the new book as well, though it must be self- hatred to a considerable degree: Thompson has worked as a sportswriter in Florida, as South American correspondent for The National Observer, and is now covering the Presidential race for Rolling Stone. (He brings to this assignment, with considerable success, the hellish methods of "Gonzo journalism" developed in "Fear and Loathing.")

After the elections, he will no doubt be found at his home in Woody Creek, Colo., raising unpleasant dogs and cleaning his handguns--the same recovery act he did after "Hell's Angels," at which time he also ran for sheriff of Aspen under the flag of Freak Power, drawing national attention and upsetting local novelist Leon Uris no end. Not to mention the Democrats, who, Thompson later claimed, owed him the governorship of American Samoa.

What a lot of madness! These are the tracks of a man who might be dismissed as just another savage-sixties kook, were it not for the fact that he has already written himself into the history of American literature, in what I suspect will be a permanent way. Because, regardless of individual reader-reactions, his new book is a highballing heavyweight, whose ripples spread from Huckleberry Finn to F. Scott's Rockville grave.

The bones of the story are no more than spareribs. Thompson ("Raoul Duke" in the book), under contract to Sports Illustrated, travels with his attorney, Dr. Gonzo, to Las Vegas. They have been summoned to cover a dirt-track motorcycle race, the Mint 400, by a mysterious phone call. "But what was the story? Nobody had bothered to say. So we would have to drum it up on our own. Free Enterprise. The American Dream. Horatio Alger gone mad on drugs in Las Vegas. Do it now: pure Gonzo journalism."

Down the desert. The trunk of their car looks like a "mobile police narcotics lab"; a towel soaked in ether washes vapors over them from the floorboards. But their reception in the city is none too friendly, even when they represent themselves as the factory crew of the Vincent Black Shadow, the world's most frightening motorcycle--perhaps because they are stoned into a state of sustained paranoia that turns everyone they deal with into some sort of reptilian foe.

A flurry of picaresque disasters alters their plans as the dope alters their minds. Drug and dream, event and recollection become inseparable. (Thompson now says that when he rereads his book he can't remember what he made up and what really happened. Pure Gonzo journalism. Pure Gonzo fiction.)

But the sporting life collapses in any case when a wire comes from Rolling Stone, keeping the crew in Las Vegas to report on a national district attorneys' conference on dangerous drugs. Coverage of the conference is the book's centerpiece. It includes an imbecilic meeting of narcotics agents, where the officers are solemnly assured that a marijuana butt is called a roach "because it resembles a cockroach"; and a macabre, incredibly funny conversation with a Georgia cop, who is warned of a smackhead migration to his state because they like warm weather. Vegas, Duke decides, "is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted."

The book is about that twisting. Like Mailer's, Thompson's American dream is a fanfare of baroque fantasy. It should not, despite its preemptive title, be mistaken for a synopsis of the American experience (even though the narrator comes to think of himself as a "monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger"). But its limits are no narrower than the limits of lunacy, and its method is as adventurous as any to be found in all the free-fire-zone writing of the past dozen years.

"Writing" is as exact a label as the book will carry. Neither novel nor nonfiction, it arrives with fashion's special sanction. Its roots are in the particular sense of the nineteen-sixties that a new voice was demanded--by the way people's public and private lives were coming together in a sensual panic stew, with murder its meat and potatoes, grass and acid its spice. How to tell the story of a time when all fiction was science fiction, all facts lies? The New Journalism was born.

But who taps fashion for wisdom gets poison in the sap, and "Fear and Loathing" is the quick assassin of the form it follows. Not the least of Thompson's accomplishments is to suggest that, by now, the New Journalism is to the world what the New Criticism was to the word: seductive, commanding--and, finally, inadequate. The form that reached apotheosis in "Armies of the Night" reaches the end of its rope in "Fear and Loathing," a chronicle of addiction and dismemberment so vicious that it requires a lot of resilience to sense that the author's purpose is more moralizing than sadistic. He is moving in a country where only a few cranky survivors-- Jonathan Swift for one--have gone before. And he moves with the cool integrity of an artist indifferent to his reception.

For the things the book mocks--hippies, Leary, Lennon, journalism, drugs themselves--are calculated to throw Thompson to the wolves of his own subculture. And the language in which it mocks them is designed to look celebratory to the stolid reader, and debased to established critics. This book is such a mind storm that we may need a little time to know that it is also, ting! literature.

Much the same thing happened with Henry Miller--with whom Thompson has perhaps even more kinship than with Burroughs. Hero of all his books, drowning in sex and drink, Miller makes holy what Thompson makes fundamental: appetite. In both writers, the world is celebrated/excoriated through the senses. But the taste of the one is for rebellion, of the other for apocalypse writ small.

Apart from the artistry, it is a modestly eschatological vision that lifts "Fear and Loathing" from the category of mere funky reminiscence. It unfolds a parable of the nineteen-sixties palatable to those of us who lived them in a mood--perhaps more melodramatic than astute--of social strife, surreal politics and the chemical feast. And it does so in language that retires neither into the watery sociology of the news weeklies nor the zoo-Zen of the more verbally hip. Far out. Thompson trusts the authority of his senses, and the clarity of a brain poised between brilliance and burnout.

"We are all wired into a survival trip now," he notes, "No more of the speed that fueled the Sixties. . . a generation of permanent cripples who never understood the essential fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody. . . is tending the Light at the end of the tunnel."

The book's highest art is to be the drug it is about, whether chemical or political. To read it is to swim through the highs and lows of the smokes and fluids that shatter the mind, to survive again the terror of the politics of unreason. Since plot has been scrapped, the whole thing must be done in the details, in cameo sketches and weird encounters that flare and fade into the backdrop of the reader's imagination. These details are technically accurate, which is a contemporary form of literary precision, with all ambiguity intact.

The same accuracy is preserved in the use of drugs as metaphor. The suggestion is that to drop acid in 1966 was to seek the flower at the heart of the cosmos, but to shoot heroin in 1972 is to hide from the pain of the President's face. ("It is worth noting, historically, that downers came in with Nixon. . .") Dope--once mystic, private and ecstatic--has become just another way to kiss goodbye.