TLS Brief Review of Savage Journey

Grateful for the short, sweet review by Matt Sturrock in the Times Literary Supplement. This one is so short I've included it below.

Does Hunter S. Thompson still deserve his elevated place in American letters? It is difficult to think of a popular author who, were he still alive, would be more vulnerable to censure. He was, after all, a man whose language often erupted into racist or homophobic abuse. Forget about micro-aggressions: even a placid Thompson might make a “jocular threat of physical violence,” while in more agitated moments, he might fire a gun at friends or associates. The publisher Ian Ballantine recalls visiting Thompson at home in the mid-1960s to haggle over paperback rights, and watching him interrupt negotiations to beat his first wife, Sandy, in another room.

It is lurid stuff, part of what was once the Gonzo writer’s danger-exuding persona, but to Peter Richardson, it is also a distraction. His study’s stated aim is “to take Thompson seriously as a writer.” What interests him most is the formation of a talent, and to that end he is quick to identify the qualities Thompson so esteemed in his literary antecedents, such as Henry Miller’s iconoclasm, or the fierceness of H. L. Mencken’s invective. (Jack Kerouac is derided as “a mystic boob.”) Tracing a course from Thompson’s childhood as a literate delinquent to his halting early career, to defining publications such as Hell’s Angels and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Richardson shows how his subject came to work “the crease between fiction and journalism.” What becomes evident is how much of Thompson’s success was owed to his persevering editors, who cobbled their star’s written fragments into a readable whole, and how quickly his success peaked. His output was already slowing by the mid-1970s. Richardson attributes the decline to two causes: Thompson’s switch from Dexedrine to cocaine as his drug of choice, and the resignation of Richard Nixon, both nemesis and muse.

As a study of writerly evolution, Savage Journey provides sober and well-documented analysis--a necessary counterbalance to Thompson’s sometimes histrionic self-assessments. Richardson remains admirably ambivalent about his subject, troubled by facets of the man himself, but enthralled by the “virtuosity” of “the most distinctive American voice in the second half of the twentieth century.” It is an honest and mature evaluation, a recognition that the turbulent energy that allowed Thompson to transform the genres he worked in also made him a confounding and unpleasant human being.