Once gonzo, Hunter S. now just gone

Scott Dickensheets

Friday, Jan. 24, 2003 | 9:07 a.m.

Author: Hunter S. Thompson.

Pages: 320.

Publisher: Simon & Schuster.

Price: $25.

Hunter Thompson is a goner. Blame the drugs, the booze, the notoriety -- he abuses all three -- but it's clear that the grandfather of gonzo journalism is emptying out. For a barometer check, turn to the first four pages of his new volume, "Kingdom of Fear" (Simon & Schuster, $25). That's the foreward by Timothy Ferris. It's the best sustained writing in the book.

"Kingdom of Fear" is billed as a memoir, although it's more a grab bag of recollections, old writings and supplemental typing retasked into a loose self-portrait. Emphasis on loose. The book has all the structure of a bag of water.

There was a time when Thompson's habit of wandering on tangents away from his subject -- as he frequently did in his heated political journalism -- was entertaining and fresh. He's come to the point now, though, at which his writing is almost all digression and no subject.

Typical is a section early in "Kingdom of Fear," in which the big fella recounts his drive to a small town near his home in the mountains of Colorado.

He was supposedly dispatched by the local sheriff to examine the town's fire-evacuation needs (huh?). We're with him as he drives up the mountain, as he nears the town, as his girlfriend tries to hide the open bottle of Chivas Regal because cop lights are flashing ahead ... but he doesn't get there.

The anecdote simply trails off into the obvious question: Wasn't there an editor on this project? The next thing you know, Thompson is going on about a mysterious woman and a hot tub, and before you settle into that tale, he's on to a story about his childhood. You need a flow chart to track the proceedings.

A lot of the book is like that, Thompson quick-cutting between time periods and spackling the narrative cracks with musings on politics and paranoia.

Compounding the sloppy storytelling, Thompson's writing has lost much of its elastic snap. His style used to be powered by the twin engines of a big heart and a 10-gallon spleen, the generosity of the former adding dimension to the rage and invective of the latter. And he had a nervy ability to fictionalize his journalism, but could fiddle with the knobs of real and unreal skillfully enough that you didn't always know what he was making up. It highlighted the untrustworthy nature of facts and made for hotter copy.

Now -- as in "Kingdom's" tales of a mountain lion jumping into his car or rescuing a girl from wild dogs in L.A. -- the stories are so outlandish, yet told so rotely, that they don't rise off the page. His style has become as predictable and emptily familiar as a brand name -- it's practically self-caricaturing. Stock phrases such as "Ho ho" recur like a nervous tic, usually when a line of thought has petered out, and he wants to change the subject. The prose arrives like a cask of spent fuel rods, still glowing with a little of the old energy, just not enough to mutate anything the way it did in the crazy old days.

Thompson's decline is usually attributed to a brainpan perforated by substance abuse; the talent just leaked away. But could it also be laziness and easy money? Someday, when literary investigators probe the wreckage of his later career for the black box that'll explain what went wrong, it may turn out that he veered off course when he gave into his mythology as a larger-than-life outlaw writer. Jesse James with an IBM Selectric and a .357 Magnum. Legends don't have to work so hard to get paid.

This is where a generous reviewer says, "And yet ..."

And yet ...

That's not to say there aren't some solid passages in "Kingdom of Fear," including a story about being interviewed by hostile FBI agents at age 9, after he'd overturned a mailbox in front of a bus. Refusing to be cowed by the feds, he learned Valuable Life Lessons. "One of them was knowing the difference between Morality and Wisdom. Morality is temporary, Wisdom is permanent ... Ho ho. Take that one to bed with you tonight."

A later chapter, "Song of the Sausage Creature" -- in which he tests drives a monster Ducati superbike -- works up a little of the old swing, too. Dedicated fans will be able to truffle-hunt a zingy line every few pages, and they'll probably be happy with that. But for the rest, it's a long slog, and there's probably a good game on.

Ho ho.09