Vegas

"In the summer of my nervous breakdown, I went to live in Las Vegas, Clark County, Nevada.' So begins John Gregory Dunne's neglected classic of first-person writing, a mordant, deadpan, grotesque tale that blurs the line between autobiography and fiction, confession and reportage.

“The best book about Sin City ever written . . . [Dunne’s] grotesqueries aren’t drug-induced, they’re very real. His is the genuine Vegas.” —Sean Manning, Esquire

“A fine, wry, perceptive, graceful book that does as much for the dark side of the American funhouse as Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas did for the manic side.” —Jonathan Yardley, The New York Times Book Review

“In the summer of my nervous breakdown, I went to live in Las Vegas, Clark County, Nevada.” So begins John Gregory Dunne’s neglected classic of first-person writing, a mordant, deadpan, grotesque tale that blurs the line between autobiography and fiction, confession and reportage.

Panicked by his own mortality, despondent over his many failings as a writer and a man, Dunne leaves his wife and their three-year old child for the solitude of a crummy apartment off the Vegas Strip. There he plans to write an account of the city as he finds it; the book he ends up writing is “a fiction which recalls time both real and imagined.” The remarkable central characters are Artha, a student at cosmetology college by day, a sex worker by night; Buster Mano, a private detective whose specialty is tracking down errant husbands; and Jackie Kasey, a lounge comic who opens for Elvis at $10,000 a night and wonders why he is still only a “semi-name.” Pimps, bail bondsmen, parking-lot moguls, used-car tycoons, ex-jockeys, and women who look as if they had “spent a lifetime meeting guys in Vegas or Miami Beach or Louisville for the Derby”: these are the people who wander through the lives of Artha, Buster, and Jackie—and, for a dark season, the life of the narrator.

John Gregory Dunne captures a low point in American culture and in one American life with rare vitality, honesty, and perception. Sad, powerful, wildly funny, Vegas is like no memoir before or since.