Absolution Through Voyeurism

Max Callimanopulos reviews the new edition of John Gregory Dunne’s classic “Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season.”

By Max CallimanopulosJuly 22, 2025

• Memoir & Essay

IN 1973, John Gregory Dunne left his wife and child for Las Vegas. He spent a summer there, living in a grotty motel and prowling casinos; he talked to card sharks and comics, prostitutes and private eyes, executives and bail bondsmen, lowlifes and high rollers alike, collecting their histories. He wrote a book about it afterward. All right, you might think, nothing so unusual in that. Dunne was a writer, and the sad sleaze and deranged excess of Vegas have had a magnetic effect on writers since Bugsy Siegel threw open the doors to the Flamingo in 1946 and the city became a chintzy Gomorrah in the high desert. An incomplete list of those who have filed dispatches from Las Vegas makes for a neat who’s who of 20th-century literary journalists: A. J. Liebling and Michael Herr, Martin Amis and Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion and, of course, Hunter S. Thompson. But Dunne’s book, Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season (1974), is better—funnier, sadder, more appealingly vile—than these other attempts by his contemporaries to pin Sin City to the page.

By the time he got to Vegas, Dunne had already written a history of 20th Century Fox (1969’s The Studio) and the California grape-pickers’ strike (1967’s Delano). He would go on to write about his Irish American upbringing and his years as a screenwriter in Hollywood (his credits include the 1971 screenplay for The Panic in Needle Park and the 1976 Barbra Streisand version of A Star Is Born, both co-written with his wife, Joan Didion). But Dunne found his perfect subject in Las Vegas, a place that reflected all the themes of his life and granted him, in the middle of his Dantean “dark season,” the opportunity to take full stock of himself—to find, as he puts it, “absolution through voyeurism.”

Vegas opens in Los Angeles, where Dunne is mired in a very American variety of midlife malaise. His marriage has gone frosty. “[L]iving with her,” he says of Didion, “was like living with one piranha fish.” Now entering middle age, he has only recently realized that one day he will die: “I began to wonder if my death would merit a ‘Milestone’ in Time.” Never mind that Dunne is by this point a successful writer with two books, a couple screenplays, and a few hundred bylines to his name. On a routine trip to the doctor’s office, he is diagnosed with “soft shoulders.” “If ever there seemed a perfect metaphor for my life that season, that was it,” he writes, with the smug vindication of the patient who has, at last, been offered a name for their condition.

Scared of his wife and paralyzed by the fact of his mortality, Dunne resorts to alarming measures in an attempt to relieve his angst. He drives up to San Francisco, hundreds of miles from Los Angeles, for a loaf of bread. He buys a jackknife. He masturbates while watching Julia Child, focusing “with fertile imagination on all six feet two inches of the chef in her television kitchen.” This is pitiable stuff, but Dunne knows that his “fertile imagination,” when not reconnoitering unusual onanistic terrain, will provide him an escape from the doldrums of late-thirties ennui. As he makes clear:

There is a therapeutic aspect to reporting that few like to admit. What is a reporter except a kind of house detective, scavenging through the bureau drawers of men’s lives, searching for the minor vice, the half-forgotten lapse that is stored away like a dirty pair of drawers. Reporting anesthetizes one’s own problems. There is always someone in deeper emotional drift, or even grift, than you.

There we have Dunne’s voice—dry, intelligent, candid, slightly guilty, probing—as well as his modus operandi. All he needs is “that perfect place where one could look for salvation without commitment.” Voilà! This affable sad sack is going to Las Vegas, to write his way out of his crisis.

If every memoir, to paraphrase Vivian Gornick, has a situation and a story—the situation is the context, the story the emotional experience that occupies the writer—then the situation of Dunne’s roman à clef is obviously Vegas of the mid-1970s, an “idiot Disneyland” fallen on hard times. The book’s story is harder to isolate. Like any new arrival, Dunne takes a little while to orient himself. Once ensconced in suitably decrepit lodgings, he takes to the telephone “like an electronic Mr. Lonelyhearts,” flipping through the Yellow Pages and dialing whoever seems like they might have a story. He talks to a graphologist, a craps dealer, and a condom salesman, but three characters particularly snag his interest. There’s Artha, a prostitute possessed of a “feral instinct for survival”; Buster Mano, a private eye suffering from a blocked colon (once comfortable, “Buster abandoned all side about his constipation and farted openly and frequently”); and Jackie Kasey, a washed-up comic, “the $10,000-a-week never-was and never-will-be.”

Having found his subjects, Dunne, limpet-like, latches on. For most of Vegas, we’re treated to an over-the-shoulder look at Artha’s, Buster’s, and Jackie’s lives. At first pass, it feels slightly pointless, a novel-length exercise in New Yorker–style profiles of three oddballs, Dunne indulgently giving free rein to his “gift for voyeurism.” What do these characters mean to him? How, we wonder, might they lead Dunne out of his dark season?

They don’t, really—each of them is certainly worse off than he is, and none pay much attention to him, even as he takes a steam bath with Jackie or follows Artha on her nightly rounds. What they offer Dunne is that uncertain idea of “salvation without commitment.” By now, the canny reader may have detected a rather Catholic bent to Dunne’s writing. Although long-lapsed, Dunne is still preoccupied with issues of salvation and absolution, and Vegas’s spiritually arid sprawl prompts him to reconsider the Catholicism of his childhood, “the one salient fact of [his] life.”

Vegas deepens and broadens in the chapters describing the young author’s education in a series of grubby-sounding boarding schools. Like many of us who spent our childhoods trudging sleepily to Thursday morning masses, Dunne regards his Catholic school years as an explanatory text, the mold that made the man. We see him, sexually inexperienced, hopelessly horny, “a virgin until four days before [his] twenty-first birthday,” and suddenly his interest in Artha, who “looked like one of those parochial-school girls [he] used to try to pick up when [he] was in [his] teens,” makes a lot more sense. We glimpse him at Princeton, where he was awarded “‘Summa Cum Luncheon,’ a Princeton Latinate euphemism for ‘out to lunch,’” and understand that Dunne, in spite of his real-life success, sees himself as a lifelong underperformer, someone for whom the iron was simply never hot. His kinship with Jackie Kasey, who grates on every page (“‘Speaking of Italians, they had birth control long before the pill.’ A beat. ‘They called it garlic.’”), becomes an exercise in self-loathing when viewed in light of Dunne’s forgettable college career. “Watching a comic flailing against an indifferent audience seemed a refraction of my own depression,” Dunne notes.

Regardless of his depression, Dunne recognizes that Artha and Jackie are fantastic characters. He feels bad about this. “I tried not to think how ultimately I would use him,” he writes, watching Jackie fire off another groaner. Despite some self-conscious hand-wringing over the ethics of his journalistic method, Dunne knows that the tension between journalist and subject will inevitably become grist for his mill. “We’re both in the Peeping Tom racket,” Buster Mano, the constipated private eye, remarks to him. “[H]e knew it made me uncomfortable,” Dunne writes, sounding surly. One suspects, however, that his discomfort with Buster—a detective whose caseload is entirely composed of missing husbands—may have more to do with Dunne being a missing husband himself.

Dunne gets to spend a summer exorcising himself in the company of crash-outs and has-beens, but what of his family? At the time the experiences that make up Vegas were being lived, Didion and Dunne were contemplating divorce, but to those looking for juicy insights into their marriage, be forewarned: the former surfaces only sparingly. Didion’s cameos, however, may titillate her devotees. As the summer wears on, Dunne begins to call her more frequently.

“When are you coming home?” she said.

It looked like the technical discussions were also going to get bogged down. “As soon as I get my life in order.”

“Why not try living it?” she said. “For a change.”

You can practically hear the phone lines freezing over. Piranha-like or not, Didion has a point. Dunne knows it too. The city of his book is neither glamorous nor sexy; on the contrary, it’s a lonely place, isolated and isolating. Martin Amis, in town for a poker tournament, gleefully declared that if he were to use one adjective to describe Las Vegas, it would be “un-Islamic.” I’ve got another, to describe the feeling that reading Vegas leaves you with: “unwashed.” One gets the impression that the book was written speedily, each chapter the result of a bleary night out or a morning’s strange encounter.

The process was likely an exhausting one. As V. S. Pritchett once said of memoirs: “It’s all in the art. You get no credit for living.” Dunne didn’t find salvation there, but he poked around in the bureau drawers of enough strangers’ lives to feel better about his own—which, in Las Vegas, might be the closest thing to grace you’ll get.