Thompson is a master of using dialogue to pace his stories and to involve the reader with the action. The character of his narrator is established early in the book in humorously fractured exchanges with his attorney and with hapless bystanders. Another technique lending immediacy to the narrative is the use of tape transcription — pure dialogue — that reads much like a film script.

Interior monologues also reveal much about the narrator. Since these often take the form of drug delusions or hallucinations, the narrator ostensibly explores a raw consciousness, one driven to the brink of total breakdown, not only by the drugs but by the awful reality of the American dream. As an epigraph to his book, Thompson uses a quotation from Samuel Johnson: "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man." It is this pain, exacerbated by the bizarre hucksterism of Las Vegas, that drives the author to his beastly escapades. The marathon, five-day binge he describes results from his "super-sensitivity" as one commentator put it, his awareness of the discrepancy between American ideals and the harsh working out of America's brutal manifest destiny.

This fate, the national fate of delusion and greed exemplified in the Circus-Circus casino, is given shape and a voice in the narrator himself. His mad visions make him one with the frantic "believers" of Las Vegas. What sets him apart is his uncompromising drive to locate an authentic understanding of just what has gone wrong, with himself and with his country.

Thompson is effective in conveying what Tom Wolfe calls the status life of his characters — the complete pattern of behavior by which people reveal their social, cultural, and political identities, real or imagined. With only a few words of dialogue or a simple description, he places his characters firmly in a social class or niche.

Much controversy has been generated by the New Journalism of Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, and Hunter Thompson, in part because traditional journalists believe that the "facts" tend to be tainted by the style with which they are presented, and in part because the New Journalists created a genre of reportage which seems more engaging and interesting than the more objective, drier traditional approach. Part of the criticism levied at the New Journalists was rooted in the fear of returning to the "muckraking" reportage rampant prior to World War II. Unlike muckraking, however, the New Journalists insist on the accuracy of fact and detail — Thompson and Wolfe are both exceptional scholars and researchers — and it is this same insistence on accuracy that led them to present facts within a context rather than as pure information.

It is both interesting and predictable that Thompson and Breslin have sports reporting in their backgrounds. American sports reporters, especially baseball announcers during the radio era, developed descriptive powers and sound effects to bring the game alive for listeners and readers who had to enjoy the sport by osmosis. Wolfe, observing Breslin's ability to use "pop" words to describe action, experimented with the same technique in reporting the news. Following the cue of "Pop Artists" of the 1960s, these New Journalists combined the images and language of the ordinary world with the hard and often cruel facts which molded it.

Novelists have been quick to adapt the spirit of New Journalism to their more traditional form so that an identifiable genre of New Journalist novels has emerged. Some critics have dubbed this genre "faction," reflecting the combination of fiction and fact. Although novelists have always used facts to give credibility to their stories, and...