It's taken me a month to get through [Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas], and Thompson's slickly unpleasant sentences still stick in the gullet. Does the road of subjective reporting, of fact-into-fiction, necessarily lead to the New Journalism, to that Death Gulch presided over by the grinning skulls of Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson? In its present phase, the New Journalism is an instrument of vulgar imaginative totalitarianism, and it commands the kind of attention one might give to the psychology of the mass rally or the implications of military uniform. Like these, the style itself endows its wearers with real power…. (p. 97)
[Thompson] has it every way round: he writes fiction without honour, fact without responsibility. I don't believe in those notes on cocktail napkins, any more than I believe in the Raymond Chandler toughery of his conversations with the Samoan acidhead he calls 'my attorney'. But then I don't positively disbelieve them, either. Thompson is a professionally unreliable witness; you feel you are listening to an impossible skein of truth mixed up with falsehood, and he implores you to quit bothering about which is which.
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