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" This weekend, the Wolfpack heads back to Vegas for The Hangover Part III. Don&amp;#039;t waste your money. Instead, hit up an online used bookseller for a copy of John Gregory Dunne&amp;#039;s long out-of-print 1974 novel Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season. Not only is it guaranteed to be funnier and raunchier than Todd Phillips&amp;#039;s retread \u2014 save for Back to the Future, has any great film ever been more maligned by the transparently cash-grabbing trilogy treatment than The Hangover? \u2014 it&amp;#039;s also the best book about Sin City ever written. Yes, better even than Hunter S. Thompson&amp;#039;s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  These days most people know Dunne as the late husband of Joan Didion \u2014 his sudden heart attack at age 71 being the subject of her award-winning 2005 memoir The Year of Magical Thinking. But he was a brilliant and prolific writer himself, publishing a dozen or so works of fiction, nonfiction, memoir, and criticism, and regularly contributing to The Saturday Evening Post, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Review of Books, and Esquire. His most frequent subject was the movie business, and few have better captured its absurdity, certainly none with as much poetry and humor. (His 1967 book The Studio, a behind-the-scenes look at Twentieth Century Fox, shows how little the Hollywood machine has changed in more than four decades.) His insight was owed, in part, to the fact he wasn&amp;#039;t merely an outside observer. With Didion, he co-wrote several produced screenplays, including The Panic in Needle Park \u2014 Al Pacino&amp;#039;s first leading film role \u2014 and the adaptation of his own bestselling novel True Confessions, starring Robert De Niro and Robert Duvall.  Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season was his first novel, published when he was 42. It received plenty of good press, including an excerpt in Playboy and three separate notices in The New York Times. But sales were slight \u2014 and not surprisingly, as there were several things working against it.  For one, it&amp;#039;d only been three years since, in the words of Tom Wolfe, the &amp;quot;scorching epochal sensation&amp;quot; of Fear and Loathing. Why would anyone need another book about the seat of Clark County, Nevada?  Dunne wasn&amp;#039;t riding Thompson&amp;#039;s coattails. &amp;quot;It wasn&amp;#039;t influenced by Fear and Loathing,&amp;quot; Didion told me by e-mail. &amp;quot;In fact, I don&amp;#039;t recall ever discussing Fear and Loathing with him.&amp;quot; And as Dunne wrote in the introduction to his 1978 essay collection Quintana and Friends, &amp;quot;In general, I stay away from the &amp;#039;big story.&amp;#039; I like to find something that no one else has done...&amp;quot; Vegas was born, rather, of existential strife. Dunne had signed a contract with Random House for a nonfiction book about Las Vegas. &amp;quot;There is probably no place in America that so epitomizes [the] moral county line where I am professionally comfortable...&amp;quot; he wrote in that same Quintana and Friends introduction. &amp;quot;I have a weakness for Vegas, for the people I find there, for the stories I hear there.&amp;quot; But as the Saturday Review reported in a 1982 profile of the couple (wincingly titled &amp;quot;New Direction for the First Family of Angst&amp;quot;):  [H]e couldn&amp;#039;t bring himself to complete the research... For a dispiriting 18-month period he had writer&amp;#039;s block. The Malibu beach house the Dunnes had bought with script fees from Play It as It Lays [Didion&amp;#039;s 1970 novel] was under messy renovation. Dunne would go on long, senseless drives. The couple came close to a breakup. &amp;quot;We had a small child, we had no money and no house, she was working very hard, I wasn&amp;#039;t working at all,&amp;quot; recalls Dunne. &amp;quot;It was simply a difficult time.&amp;quot; The drives became longer and longer. &amp;quot;I reconnoitered a clothing store in Santa Barbara, a Sears in San Diego,&amp;quot; he writes in Vegas. &amp;quot;One morning I went out to buy a loaf of bread for breakfast and finally picked it up at a Safeway in San Francisco. It is 476 miles to San Francisco... I went to Brawley for three days, to Ukiah for a week.&amp;quot; One day while driving through Hollywood he saw a billboard that read, &amp;quot;Visit Las Vegas Before Your Numbers Up.&amp;quot; He did, and stayed for six months, trying to find himself amid the motley company of a poetry-writing hooker, clarinet-playing bondsman, constipated private investigator, &amp;quot;semi-name&amp;quot; standup comic, four-foot-nine bookie, artificial-limbed landlady, one-breasted handwriting analyst, toupee salesman, casino-dealer instructor, and rodeo cowboy.  Or did he?  That was another likely reason for the book&amp;#039;s tepid sales: confusion over whether it was a novel or a memoir. A preface makes clear that, &amp;quot;This is a fiction which recalls a time both real and imagined,&amp;quot; and the book&amp;#039;s final lines offer the additional caveat, &amp;quot;What you have read is a myelogram of six months of my life. I can offer no guarantee that everything you read actually happened, only that insofar as it was perceived by my fractured sensors it was true.&amp;quot; Yet in the various Times notices, Vegas is described as &amp;quot;journalism-as-therapy,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;to some degree fictitious,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;personal journalism,&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;subjective.&amp;quot; Even the book&amp;#039;s publisher was flummoxed. &amp;quot;Random House said, It doesn&amp;#039;t read like a novel,&amp;quot; Dunne told The Paris Review in 1996, &amp;quot;and I said, A novel is anything the writer says the book is, and since I made most of it up, it can&amp;#039;t be nonfiction. So we ended up calling it a fiction.&amp;quot; (What an illuminating piece he might&amp;#039;ve written on the James Frey controversy had he lived to see it.) A probable third strike against the book was its vulgarity. Just two years before, George Carlin had debuted his monologue &amp;quot;Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.&amp;quot; In Vegas, Dunne used them all, liberally. Even by today&amp;#039;s standards, many of the book&amp;#039;s passages are absolutely filthy; the lewdest imaginings of Todd Phillips seem G-rated by comparison: We were having breakfast at the coffee shop in the hotel and he was trying to fix me up with a date. His girlfriend was a keno runner at the Taj Mahal and her roommate shoveled sundaes at the ice-cream shop at the Oasis, nineteen years old, name of Teddi, and she&amp;#039;ll suck you and fuck you. I demurred. Not that I had anything against sucking and fucking. It was the nineteen that was bothersome... There is nothing that can make the sexual imperative die quicker than trying to explain to a teenager with great tits the difference between VE Day and VJ Day. &amp;quot;This is a hundred-fifty-dollar ring and I got it for fifty dollars... [S]ee, I&amp;#039;ve got this john, he&amp;#039;s in the wholesale jewelry business, and I liked this ring and he said he would give me a discount, you know, if I let him give it to me up the ass. Up the chocolate freeway, you know? That&amp;#039;s a hundred off the price of the ring right there... He got out the Vaseline and lathered it all over my ass, we were going to do it dog style, right? Well, he poked me in one cheek and then he poked me in the other cheek, he couldn&amp;#039;t get it in, and then he came before he got it in my crack and I got the ring for fifty dollars. He really laughed. He told me I really drove a hard bargain.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Want to eat some pussy?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Not particularly.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;How about some chili?&amp;quot; There&amp;#039;s no disputing Fear and Loathing&amp;#039;s masterpiece status. But that&amp;#039;s more to do with its frenetic, freight-train prose than its depiction of Vegas. When it comes to that, Dunne has Thompson beat. His grotesqueries aren&amp;#039;t drug-induced, they&amp;#039;re very real. His is the genuine Vegas, the one in which all those trashed hotel rooms must be cleaned by a minimum wage-earning housekeeper. And in such gloomy truth, Dunne discovered salvation. For him, Vegas was not a place where, as Thompson wrote, &amp;quot;the possibility of mental and physical collapse is very real,&amp;quot; but exactly the opposite: a psychic rehab. &amp;quot;I had arrived in Vegas an emotional paraplegic, obsessed by death,&amp;quot; Dunne writes, &amp;quot;and there I found a kind of peace. There in that Genet vision of hell my own version seemed tolerable; there among the Snopses of the free-enterprise system life did not seem so bad... Then the pieces were back together, and in the fall I went home.&amp;quot;  To put it another way, what happened to John Gregory Dunne in Vegas didn&amp;#039;t stay in Vegas, and he was all the better for it. So will you be after reading this phenomenal book. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a22740/vegas-book-john-gregory-dunne/>