(Bought at the Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn): "His office was downtown, near the courthouse, on the ground floor of the parking garage, two rooms and the smell of small tragedy and petty defeat, of insignificant adultery and unpaid bills." I love that sentence from John Gregory Dunne's bizarre memoir of his blighted sojourn in Sin City in the 70s. He clarifies that this book is a mix of fact and fiction, chronicling a mental breakdown when he leaves his wife and daughter in LA and holes up in Vegas to clear his mind, I guess. The crisis which brings his departure about is never clearly explained. He spends his time gathering material for a profile of the gambling mecca and pals around with a private dick (whose office is described in that sentence above), a second-tier comic, a prostitute, and a bail bondsman. He explains these people are fictional; I think they are probably composites of people he encountered. He insightfully explores and lays out the workings of the city from the hotels, the casinos, the day-to-day patterns of life in a community founded on chance, luck, and skirting around the law. I've never read Dunne before, but I have read books by his wife Joan Didion and it's interesting to compare their styles.
Perhaps most shocking is the casual racism, homophobia, and misogyny exhibited in the attitudes and speech of the Las Vegas residents. African-Americans, gays, Jews, Italians, women are called every slur in the book that Archie Bunker used to employ and nobody thinks anything of it. If anyone spoke that way today they'd get slapped down. Dunne does not endorse such language, but he is showing the bigoted, oppressive culture of America in the 1970s and how Vegas exemplifies it.
Dunne acts as a sort of neutral confessor to the denizens of Sin City. He wants to be with people who won't judge him and therefore he won't judge them. It's a colorful, intoxicating journey into a neon-lit Dante's inferno.
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