The first half of the story burns slowly before Thompson exposes the seedy underbelly of the local culture, once Kemp, Yeamon, and Sala are arrested after running out on a bar tab, and then coming to a disappointing head at a St. With Yeamon and Chenault, there is a strong whiff of the young rich meandering until their traveler’s checks dry up and they decide where else they can decamp to find further trouble. Kemp witnesses a drunken, rocky relationship between the two and frequently notes his envy as the love birds frolic in paradisiacal scenes on beaches and bar patios. Scenes written at the newspaper’s office often read like dispatches from riot zones, with mobs of locals surrounding the building voicing their displeasure at whatever “human interest” story offended them and staff members with one foot out of the door, binge-drinking around writing assignments.Ī love triangle develops between Kemp, Yeamon, and Chenault, a woman Yeamon met before coming to the island and who arrives on the same plane as Kemp. Kemp befriends a couple of them (Yeamon and Sala), forming a somewhat unified front against the anxiously addled editor, Lotterman, who reminded me of the “Da Editor” trope…rough around the edges, authoritarian, and with a used car salesman’s method of playing fast and loose with details of the paper’s financial health. Once there, he finds a deteriorating situation, with a stable of American journalists on the verge of career and/or life transitions, who spend most of their time drinking rum, hustling for cash, and fomenting plans to flee the island once the paper folds. The novel’s protagonist is Paul Kemp, a freelancing journalist from New York who travels to Puerto Rico to work on The Daily News, a newspaper hemorrhaging money. I’ve always enjoyed his cutting language and stories that hover somewhere between an American Dream quest and an Altamont-style erosion of the hippie ideal, writing that exposes the grit below the surface sheen. The story was also adapted for a movie starring Johnny Depp, released in 2011.Īs something by way of disclosure, Thompson was a major influence on my writing and so there might be a little natural bias towards his work. Thompson had archived the manuscript after seven rejections from publishers and then became too swept up in the politics of the ‘60s to further pursue its publication.
This novel has the shadow of legend behind it in that it’s something of a “lost novel,” having been written while Thompson was a 22-year-old writer in early 1960s Puerto Rico but not published until 1998, after actor Johnny Depp discovered it among Thompson’s papers.
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