Thompson's hallucinatory account of a road trip through the Nevada desert — part journalism, part novel, entirely its own category. The founding document of gonzo journalism: total immersion in the subject, paranoid clarity about American culture, and the desert Southwest rendered as a fever dream that is somehow more accurate than straight reporting.
You already know what this book is. A lawyer and a journalist drive a rented convertible full of ether, mescaline, and a shaving kit of other chemicals from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, ostensibly to cover a motorcycle race. They don't really cover the race. They don't really cover anything. What Thompson does instead is write the book that invented a genre — gonzo journalism — and, under the cover of the drug jokes, delivers the most devastating document anybody has written about what happened to the sixties when the sixties ended.
The Vegas of this book is not a city. It's the desert in its most malignant form — an artificial oasis pumped full of money and ugliness, a place where the American promise has been turned into a slot machine and the slot machine doesn't pay. Thompson has been on the road long enough to see it clearly, and the drugs don't make him see wrong, they just strip away the cover he'd otherwise put on what he sees. The famous wave passage — the one about how you can almost see the high-water mark where the sixties broke and rolled back — is in here, and it's maybe the best single paragraph of prose about American disappointment ever written.
I bring this book up at the river because Thompson understood the desert as a place of consequence. When he's inside the Mint Hotel he's funny. When he's out on the open desert between Barstow and Vegas, he's something else — reverent isn't right, more like dead serious. The desert is what's real. The city is what America built to avoid having to look at the desert. That's a frame worth carrying on a trip through Nevada, Utah, or anywhere downstream of a big western engineered oasis.
The jokes hold up better than you'd expect. The politics are sharper than you remember. And the central move — a journalist telling the truth about America by making himself the absurd figure in the foreground — has been copied so many times since that it's easy to forget how radical it was in 1971. Thompson didn't invent the first-person narrator. He did invent a specific kind of first-person narrator who could be a ridiculous drug-mangled outlaw and also the only sane person in the room.
Read it before a trip to the desert. Read it on a red-eye. Read it aloud to a crew on a long shuttle drive. And pay attention to the quiet passages between the explosions — that's where Thompson buried the actual argument.
