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<\/p>\nMax Callimanopulos reviews the new edition of John Gregory Dunne\u2019s classic \u201cVegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season.\u201d<\/p>\n
Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season by John Gregory Dunne. McNally Editions, 2025. 304 pages.<\/p>\n
IN 1973, John Gregory Dunne left his wife and child for Las Vegas. He spent a summer there, living in a grotty motel and prowling casinos; he talked to card sharks and comics, prostitutes and private eyes, executives and bail bondsmen, lowlifes and high rollers alike, collecting their histories. He wrote a book about it afterward. All right, you might think, nothing so unusual in that. Dunne was a writer, and the sad sleaze and deranged excess of Vegas have had a magnetic effect on writers since Bugsy Siegel threw open the doors to the Flamingo in 1946 and the city became a chintzy Gomorrah in the high desert. An incomplete list of those who have filed dispatches from Las Vegas makes for a neat who\u2019s who of 20th-century literary journalists: A. J. Liebling and Michael Herr, Martin Amis and Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion and, of course, Hunter S. Thompson. But Dunne\u2019s book, Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season (1974), is better\u2014funnier, sadder, more appealingly vile\u2014than these other attempts by his contemporaries to pin Sin City to the page.<\/p>\n
By the time he got to Vegas, Dunne had already written a history of 20th Century Fox (1969\u2019s The Studio) and the California grape-pickers\u2019 strike (1967\u2019s Delano). He would go on to write about his Irish American upbringing and his years as a screenwriter in Hollywood (his credits include the 1971 screenplay for The Panic in Needle Park and the 1976 Barbra Streisand version of A Star Is Born, both co-written with his wife, Joan Didion). But Dunne found his perfect subject in Las Vegas, a place that reflected all the themes of his life and granted him, in the middle of his Dantean \u201cdark season,\u201d the opportunity to take full stock of himself\u2014to find, as he puts it, \u201cabsolution through voyeurism.\u201d<\/p>\n
Vegas opens in Los Angeles, where Dunne is mired in a very American variety of midlife malaise. His marriage has gone frosty. \u201c[L]iving with her,\u201d he says of Didion, \u201cwas like living with one piranha fish.\u201d Now entering middle age, he has only recently realized that one day he will die: \u201cI began to wonder if my death would merit a \u2018Milestone\u2019 in Time.\u201d Never mind that Dunne is by this point a successful writer with two books, a couple screenplays, and a few hundred bylines to his name. On a routine trip to the doctor\u2019s office, he is diagnosed with \u201csoft shoulders.\u201d \u201cIf ever there seemed a perfect metaphor for my life that season, that was it,\u201d he writes, with the smug vindication of the patient who has, at last, been offered a name for their condition.<\/p>\n
Scared of his wife and paralyzed by the fact of his mortality, Dunne resorts to alarming measures in an attempt to relieve his angst. He drives up to San Francisco, hundreds of miles from Los Angeles, for a loaf of bread. He buys a jackknife. He masturbates while watching Julia Child, focusing \u201cwith fertile imagination on all six feet two inches of the chef in her television kitchen.\u201d This is pitiable stuff, but Dunne knows that his \u201cfertile imagination,\u201d when not reconnoitering unusual onanistic terrain, will provide him an escape from the doldrums of late-thirties ennui. As he makes clear:<\/p>\n
There is a therapeutic aspect to reporting that few like to admit. What is a reporter except a kind of house detective, scavenging through the bureau drawers of men\u2019s lives, searching for the minor vice, the half-forgotten lapse that is stored away like a dirty pair of drawers. Reporting anesthetizes one\u2019s own problems. There is always someone in deeper emotional drift, or even grift, than you.<\/p>\n
There we have Dunne\u2019s voice\u2014dry, intelligent, candid, slightly guilty, probing\u2014as well as his modus operandi. All he needs is \u201cthat perfect place where one could look for salvation without commitment.\u201d Voil\u00e0! This affable sad sack is going to Las Vegas, to write his way out of his crisis.<\/p>\n
If every memoir, to paraphrase Vivian Gornick, has a situation and a story\u2014the situation is the context, the story the emotional experience that occupies the writer\u2014then the situation of Dunne\u2019s roman \u00e0 clef is obviously Vegas of the mid-1970s, an \u201cidiot Disneyland\u201d fallen on hard times. The book\u2019s story is harder to isolate. Like any new arrival, Dunne takes a little while to orient himself. Once ensconced in suitably decrepit lodgings, he takes to the telephone \u201clike an electronic Mr. Lonelyhearts,\u201d flipping through the Yellow Pages and dialing whoever seems like they might have a story. He talks to a graphologist, a craps dealer, and a condom salesman, but three characters particularly snag his interest. There\u2019s Artha, a prostitute possessed of a \u201cferal instinct for survival\u201d; Buster Mano, a private eye suffering from a blocked colon (once comfortable, \u201cBuster abandoned all side about his constipation and farted openly and frequently\u201d); and Jackie Kasey, a washed-up comic, \u201cthe $10,000-a-week never-was and never-will-be.\u201d<\/p>\n
Having found his subjects, Dunne, limpet-like, latches on. For most of Vegas, we\u2019re treated to an over-the-shoulder look at Artha\u2019s, Buster\u2019s, and Jackie\u2019s lives. At first pass, it feels slightly pointless, a novel-length exercise in New Yorker\u2013style profiles of three oddballs, Dunne indulgently giving free rein to his \u201cgift for voyeurism.\u201d What do these characters mean to him? How, we wonder, might they lead Dunne out of his dark season?<\/p>\n
They don\u2019t, really\u2014each of them is certainly worse off than he is, and none pay much attention to him, even as he takes a steam bath with Jackie or follows Artha on her nightly rounds. What they offer Dunne is that uncertain idea of \u201csalvation without commitment.\u201d By now, the canny reader may have detected a rather Catholic bent to Dunne\u2019s writing. Although long-lapsed, Dunne is still preoccupied with issues of salvation and absolution, and Vegas\u2019s spiritually arid sprawl prompts him to reconsider the Catholicism of his childhood, \u201cthe one salient fact of [his] life.\u201d<\/p>\n
Vegas deepens and broadens in the chapters describing the young author\u2019s education in a series of grubby-sounding boarding schools. Like many of us who spent our childhoods trudging sleepily to Thursday morning masses, Dunne regards his Catholic school years as an explanatory text, the mold that made the man. We see him, sexually inexperienced, hopelessly horny, \u201ca virgin until four days before [his] twenty-first birthday,\u201d and suddenly his interest in Artha, who \u201clooked like one of those parochial-school girls [he] used to try to pick up when [he] was in [his] teens,\u201d makes a lot more sense. We glimpse him at Princeton, where he was awarded \u201c\u2018Summa Cum Luncheon,\u2019 a Princeton Latinate euphemism for \u2018out to lunch,\u2019\u201d and understand that Dunne, in spite of his real-life success, sees himself as a lifelong underperformer, someone for whom the iron was simply never hot. His kinship with Jackie Kasey, who grates on every page (\u201c\u2018Speaking of Italians, they had birth control long before the pill.\u2019 A beat. \u2018They called it garlic.\u2019\u201d), becomes an exercise in self-loathing when viewed in light of Dunne\u2019s forgettable college career. \u201cWatching a comic flailing against an indifferent audience seemed a refraction of my own depression,\u201d Dunne notes.<\/p>\n
Regardless of his depression, Dunne recognizes that Artha and Jackie are fantastic characters. He feels bad about this. \u201cI tried not to think how ultimately I would use him,\u201d he writes, watching Jackie fire off another groaner. Despite some self-conscious hand-wringing over the ethics of his journalistic method, Dunne knows that the tension between journalist and subject will inevitably become grist for his mill. \u201cWe\u2019re both in the Peeping Tom racket,\u201d Buster Mano, the constipated private eye, remarks to him. \u201c[H]e knew it made me uncomfortable,\u201d Dunne writes, sounding surly. One suspects, however, that his discomfort with Buster\u2014a detective whose caseload is entirely composed of missing husbands\u2014may have more to do with Dunne being a missing husband himself.<\/p>\n
Dunne gets to spend a summer exorcising himself in the company of crash-outs and has-beens, but what of his family? At the time the experiences that make up Vegas were being lived, Didion and Dunne were contemplating divorce, but to those looking for juicy insights into their marriage, be forewarned: the former surfaces only sparingly. Didion\u2019s cameos, however, may titillate her devotees. As the summer wears on, Dunne begins to call her more frequently.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen are you coming home?\u201d she said.\u00a0It looked like the technical discussions were also going to get bogged down. \u201cAs soon as I get my life in order.\u201d\u00a0\u201cWhy not try living it?\u201d she said. \u201cFor a change.\u201d<\/p>\n
You can practically hear the phone lines freezing over. Piranha-like or not, Didion has a point. Dunne knows it too. The city of his book is neither glamorous nor sexy; on the contrary, it\u2019s a lonely place, isolated and isolating. Martin Amis, in town for a poker tournament, gleefully declared that if he were to use one adjective to describe Las Vegas, it would be \u201cun-Islamic.\u201d I\u2019ve got another, to describe the feeling that reading Vegas leaves you with: \u201cunwashed.\u201d One gets the impression that the book was written speedily, each chapter the result of a bleary night out or a morning\u2019s strange encounter.<\/p>\n
The process was likely an exhausting one. As V. S. Pritchett once said of memoirs: \u201cIt\u2019s all in the art. You get no credit for living.\u201d Dunne didn\u2019t find salvation there, but he poked around in the bureau drawers of enough strangers\u2019 lives to feel better about his own\u2014which, in Las Vegas, might be the closest thing to grace you\u2019ll get.<\/p>\n
LARB Contributor<\/p>\n
Max Callimanopulos is a writer who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.<\/p>\n
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Copy link to articleLARB Staff Recommendations<\/p>\n
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