‘Vegas’, by John Gregory Dunne: a wild bet on imaginary journalism | Babelia

The existential crisis for the journalist, writer and screenwriter John Gregory Dunne (1932, Connecticut-2003, New York) came when he was 35 years old. “Simply, and for no reason, I was terrified of dying,” he writes in the first pages of the story about the bizarre adventure he undertook trying to free himself from that sticky annoyance. His death will take a few decades to arrive and will be a literary phenomenon thanks to the pen of his wife, Joan Didion, with The year of thought magical. Now, the rescue of Vegas, news of a negative seriesoriginally published in 1974, it resurrects the voice of that ghost, showing another side of it, the vital disenchantment that Dunne feels and the emptiness that resonates like an echo in the people he meets.

With carefully dry prose, scenes and characters follow one another lost in the vortex of the Nevada desert. “There were days when I told myself that it was through the difficulties of others that I could understand myself,” he writes. The New Journalism that brought the tools of fiction into the journalistic genre with flair and treachery in the mid-20th century United States at the hands of Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, and Didion herself, among others, takes on a more fictional aspect in this Dunne chronicle. No lysergic journey as in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; Dunne’s book has a more bitter and less criminal flavor.

The author warns that it is “a work of fiction from a real and imaginary era” and that, although he has encountered private detectives, prostitutes and second-rate comedians, these people do not exactly fit the characters who parade through the pages of this sort of diary of a disenchanted reporter.

So Dunne tries to stop his free fall by setting his sights on that strange world of Las Vegas, without a clear direction. This is part of the charm and also part of the problem of his story: raw, without avoiding the eschatological, masculine without dissimulation, overflowing with brilliant descriptions that evoke an entire underworld atmosphere, the scenes follow one another without a defined thread, because life doesn’t have one and Dunne chooses not to impose it, or simply decides to play with that existential chaos. The disjointed order reflects the inner nonsense of the narrator and the world around him, it is part of the experiment, from which it does not emerge entirely successful, perhaps because success has no place in the characters who populate these pages. Dunne lives for a few months in what he describes as “an antechamber to purgatory” plagued by “emotional deprivations.”

The book has a bit of a film script, shot with a long take in which a detective finds runaway husbands, or a comedian who puts on the same show every evening in a half-empty room in which a prostitute with a gold tooth receives more attention than her laborious jokes. That poetry of failure, of the city of vice and its lost souls, all forced to play their worn out and never dazzling role, has a somewhat outdated flavor. It is indebted to a bygone era, although it retains its splendor.

The edition of this chronicle, beyond its narrative value, adds new pieces to the puzzle of didiomani. YESand intersperses the story of Las Vegas, syncopatedly and elliptically, Dunne and Didion’s marital crisis, their calls and arguments: “I won the battles, but it seemed like she was winning the war.” And finally, perhaps something Dunne writes about Jackie Kasey, the Las Vegas comedian with whom he spends much of that sweltering summer, can be applied to his history as a writer and Joan Didion’s partner: “He’s the star’s squire, funny but not too funny: the headliner should never be overshadowed.”