Vegas

"The best book about Sin City ever written . . . [Dunne's] grotesqueries aren't drug-induced, they're very real. His is the genuine Vegas." (Esquire) "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, Joan Didion, and their three-year old child for the solitude of a crummy apartment off the Vegas Strip. His plan: to write a book about the city he describes as a "prison of yesterdays." In his desperation, he connects with a remarkable trio of characters: 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, their world becomes Dunne's. Vegas 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.

John Gregory Dunne (1932-2003) began his writing career as a reporter for TIME magazine. He published five novels, a volume of criticism, and seven works of narrative nonfiction, including The Studio and Monster: Living Off the Big Screen, both about the movie business. With his wife, Joan Didion, Dunne collaborated on a number of screenplays, including Panic in Needle Park, Play It As It Lays, and A Star Is Born.