Vegas

The best book about Sin City ever written . . . [Dunnes] grotesqueries arent drug-induced, theyre 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 Dunnes 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 and their three-year old child for the solitude of a crummy apartment off the Vegas Strip. There he plans to write an account of the city as he finds it; the book he ends up writing is a fiction which recalls time both real and imagined. The remarkable central characters are 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 Jackieand, for a dark season, the life of the narrator. John Gregory Dunne 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.