All Fours (Miranda July)
It makes sense once you’ve read Miranda July’s extremely earthy, often funny, very upsetting 2024 novel about a multi-hyphenate artist much like Miranda July experiencing midlife tumult, flailing wildly to remake her life as she struggles with perimenopause, that a perfect metaphor for the entire narrative is a scene in which a rising 27-year-old singer, who’s in conversation with our unnamed protagonist, determinedly takes her “dainty finger” and works it deep inside her nostril, indiscreetly conducting some maintenance. The excavation occurs at a brunch in honor of a new single by the chanteuse, a protege of the artist’s music producer husband. Even though the spouses are barely keeping the peace as it’s become clear their marriage is metamorphosing in some indeterminate but enormous way, the artist is still focused enough to be stunned by the singer’s lack of inhibition. “I’d never seen a grown woman openly pick her nose,” she says.
It’s an apt moment because this novel is about the incredibly messy and often embarrassing process of burrowing into forbidden places and digging out fresh space when life becomes claustrophobic. I mean burrowing in and digging out, both literally and figuratively. During the four years the story covers, the nameless artist will put her dainty fingers in any number of orifices, her own and those belonging to others, during all manner of sexual experimentation. There will be several probing gynecological appointments, and our hero will have to work the scissors gingerly when the family dog has its poop dammed up by matted hair covering its anus. The novel has been called “gross” by some critics and readers for its graphic descriptions of sexual practices and scatological situations, but it is one of the most intense and authentic artistic renderings of emotional turmoil I’ve ever read.
The artist lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Harris, and seven-year-old (non-gendered) child, Sam. Harris is a solid person, though maybe he isn’t the person for her. Perhaps no one is. Even though she’s a fairly successful artist, he doesn’t appreciate her aesthetics and discourages her interior design ideas from taking root in their home. Sam is the love of her life, and it was touch and go they’d exist at all since she suffered from Fetal-maternal Hemorrhage when pregnant, which often leads to stillbirth. When the scanners beep at the supermarket checkout line, she still flashes back to the pinging machines that kept Sam alive when they were born. As she gropes for her next project, the artist awaits one promising date: a meeting with Arkanda, one of the world’s biggest pop stars. Maybe they’ll collaborate on a project? To celebrate her 45th birthday and an out-of-the-blue payday of twenty-thousand dollars from a whiskey company that wants to use a single sentence she wrote years earlier about hand jobs for an ad campaign, the artist decides to drive solo cross country to NYC and hole up at the Carlyle. She’ll visit old friends, go to galleries, see plays, and refresh herself. Something has to calm her jangled nerves.
The newly restored room is like a nice, warm amniotic sac where she can be born anew.
The dangerously depressed artist never gets very far, at least geographically. At the outset of the trip, she stops in the L.A. suburb of Monrovia, meets a young married man named Davey, a fledgling dancer who works for Hertz (unsubtle but accurate wordplay). She never drives another mile, beginning an erotic but non-coital love affair with him that completely consumes her and becomes the springboard that allows her to remake her life. In regard to the aforementioned burrowing in and digging out: The artist’s most ambitious attempt to clear space is spending her unexpected windfall on an odd impulse to empty a Monrovia motel room she doesn’t own and lavishly remodel it. The property owner is initially perplexed but realizes these are upgrades he can’t afford. This expensive, sorta art project is an attempt by the artist to separate herself from her stultifying family life, but it’s also something more. As she does web searches of graphs depicting the steep hormonal decline of women her age, she sees a grave in her future when she desires a birth canal. The newly restored room is like a nice, warm amniotic sac where she can be born anew. “I had made a goddamn womb,” she realizes of her motel renovation in the aftermath. A womb of one’s own.
While the artist maintains the ruse of the road trip with her husband and child when speaking to them by phone, she’s begun an ongoing unconsummated affair in her decked-out room just twenty minutes from home. There’s dancing and touching and some urine and tampon stuff, but her would-be paramour remains (mostly) loyal to his vows. In one chaotic, uncomfortably funny scene, the artist meets Davey’s aggressively frank mother who takes TMI to the limit. (It wasn’t noted earlier in the review, but the interior designer the artist hired to help her remake the motel room is Davey’s wife. The dynamics are complicated!) Our nameless protagonist would like to endlessly wallow in this bardo, maintaining her marriage at a distance but also not having to sacrifice her delightful new romance. The center cannot hold, of course. When the quasi-affair ends, the artist becomes even more obsessed with the younger man and will do anything to rekindle the romance. It’s utterly humiliating, and the sexual hook-ups she subsequently has with a string of women are also mostly mortifying. She’s spiraling, and you wonder if she’ll survive the excruciating walkabout, but it’s the high price of becoming whole.
After all the suffering and embarrassment and fleeting moments of ecstasy, two significant, later scenes don’t track with the rest of the often-bruising novel, each feeling too easy, almost like wish fulfillment. The beat switch is jarring. I reread the passages leading up to these sequences because I thought maybe I missed a subtle segment in which the artist had passed into some dream state, but, no, they’re real. These plot developments would have worked better if they were staged more ambivalently, if we didn’t know if they were genuine, but it’s difficult to blame July if she wanted to comfort her protagonist after her many bouts of torment. At some point, you have to stop digging and start healing.•
When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s (John Ganz)
Where were you when you learned that President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton had become suspects in the murder of the First Lady’s lover, deputy White House counsel Vince Foster, who possessed damaging information about the Whitewater scandal? You may recall the perplexing but prescient moment. Of course, there was no wrongdoing, no suspects. Foster wasn’t having an affair with Hillary Clinton, and no one murdered him. He was a depressive who committed suicide by self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1993 in a park in Fairfax, Virginia. Still, it was politically expedient for some interested parties to bend reality. Leading the charge was Rush Limbaugh, who used his electric bully pulpit to link the Clintons to the “murder.”
You can ignore small lies and contend the medium-sized ones, but if you’re a public person, it’s not easy defending yourself from the most sensational of slanders. Giant fabrications are often the most convincing because how could anyone possibly say something so outrageous if it wasn’t true? The vertiginous Foster moment was an echo of the end of the Eisenhower era, when John Birch Society conspiracist Robert Welch charged, in 1960, that the war hero President, a moderate Republican, was a traitor to the country, an agent of a covert communist conspiracy. Ike didn’t know what to make of the claptrap and ignored it until he couldn’t any longer. Of course, America of that era had a centralized media and lacked a hopelessly polarized governing body, so the fires were extinguished. By the time the Foster furor occurred, the World Wide Web had been born and media companies had been unshackled from much of its societal responsibility by the successive Carter and Reagan Administrations. It wasn’t yet possible for bizarre theories to instantly go viral in the widest way, but it was the beginning of something cruel and unusual.
The Vince Foster madness isn’t referenced in When the Clock Broke, John Ganz’s excellent 2024 exploration of American politics in the early 1990s, a brief window of time that may seem comparatively sane to what exists now but was a dress rehearsal for America’s current potential descent into fascism. The author, though, parades other kooks, crooks, manipulators, and “respectable businessmen” who played a key role in forming the media and political world we inhabit in this election year. The author impressively explores how Pat Buchanan, David Duke, Ross Perot, Randy Weaver, Daryl Gates, John Gotti, Rudy Giuliani, an army of shock jocks, and some lesser-known theorists helped pave our contemporary highway to hell.
“All is changed utterly, a terrible beauty is born.”
America had finally won the Cold War by the outset of the 1990s, ostensibly a moment of great victory, but the bill for Reaganomics had come due. Cities and farms alike were in rough shape as the decade of financial deregulation, junk bonds, and profligate borrowing came crashing down during the George H.W. Bush Administration. In the recession and joblessness, right-wing opportunists saw a moment to push forward nativism and tear apart the social safety net. Just three years after the Berlin Wall was torn down, Pat Buchanan was urging America to build a wall along the southern border during his upstart 1992 bid for the GOP nomination against the sitting Republican President. That was the year that strangeness writ large entered the modern mainstream of U.S. national politics, with paranoid populist billionaire H. Ross Perot and KKK debutante David Duke also mounting attention-getting outsider campaigns, receiving free airtime on the many new cable stations desperate for content. (The demon baby Fox News wasn’t to be birthed until 1996, so it was putative responsible channels that floated their notoriety.) Bill Clinton’s sax playing on Arsenio Hall’s talk show was greeted with askance looks, but that was nothing compared to what was occurring on the trail that year.
As Ganz ably demonstrates, Trump is politically a weird amalgam of all three of these insurgent candidates. Like Buchanan, he’s protectionist and prejudiced. Similar to the crank Perot, who was all the rage on nascent electronic bulletin boards, he is Internet-friendly and prejudiced. Like Duke, he is prejudiced and prejudiced. The erstwhile grand wizard’s campaign petered out early. Perot, however, went the distance and was a major factor in the general election (despite quitting and reentering the race). And Buchanan seriously wounded the patrician standard-bearer in the primary before bowing out. (Bush was polling so dismally that he invited the influential Limbaugh to the White House for a month during the election, dutifully carrying the cigar-chomping Coughlinite’s luggage to the Lincoln Bedroom.) Speaking of himself in the third person while delivering his concession speech, Buchanan made light of an AIDS activist being violently body-slammed by one of his campaign workers before assessing what his campaign had wrought: “Pat Buchanan couldn’t do it, but as W.B. Yeats wrote, ‘All is changed utterly, a terrible beauty is born.’” That his hate-filled Republican convention speech ran long and pushed former President Ronald Reagan from prime time was a perfect symbol of the change the party was undergoing. The neocons would rule for a couple more decades, but the paleocons would win the long game. The party made its final descent in 2015 with Trump’s headed-down, way-down escalator ride in his eponymous Manhattan building.
Ganz’s title phrase emanates from a speech Libertarian economist Murray Rothbard delivered in 1992 in support of the Buchanan candidacy: “With Pat Buchanan as our leader, we shall break the clock of social democracy.” The far-right fringe had never forgiven FDR for his country-saving New Deal, which allowed the nation to survive the worst of the Great Depression and permanently put citizens on a healthier path. The New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society infuriated these anti-government figures who were nostalgic for a “hardier” country that knew much shorter lifespans. Rothbard explicitly called for a “repeal the twentieth century,” to return to the pioneering spirit of the previous century. Maybe you’d use your ingenuity to invent a better repeating rifle or sewing machine or perhaps a bear would eat your head, but at least you’d be living in an epoch that permitted slavery. The other theorist most mentioned in these pages is the late Washington Times columnist Samuel Francis, who was a true believer rather than merely an opportunist on the subject of racism. “For Francis,” Ganz writes, “the political cachet of racial politics was enticing, even indispensable.” Francis loved Buchanan’s protectionism and destructive policies, but he was ultimately disappointed that the former Nixon cabinet member was too much a part of the Beltway. Francis and Rothbard operated on much smaller stages than the political figures they wrote about, but the pair of pundits were leading as much as analyzing the moment.
“Don’t make the mistake of thinking David Duke is a unique phenomenon confined to Louisiana rednecks and yahoos. He’s not.”
Ganz has his thesis about the early 1990s, but he isn’t so besotted by it that he ignores the micro-era’s debts to history. When he profiles the out-of-control LAPD, which perpetrated the horrific 1991 Rodney King beating and many other lawless acts, the author explains how the corrupt, vicious department came to be that way, detailing how the infamous 1950-1966 police chief, William H. Parker, the Old West grandson of a Deadwood lawman, fashioned his fiefdom and begat Darryl Gates. It’s some of his best research and most eloquent writing, accented with wonderful details. Parker was so emotionless that Gene Roddenberry, who worked for the LAPD Public Information Division for a spell, used him as a model for the bloodless Vulcan character Mr. Spock. Some of the writer’s arguments tying larger-than-life '90s figures to the current moment are more convincing than others. John Gotti’s beaming, headline-ready criminality does speak to Trump’s mindset, as the QVC quisling wants to run America the way Gotti ran Queens. But Ganz seems to be suggesting that Gotti being celebrated by the press and public thirty years ago was a new wrinkle, a fresh perversion for the country, which isn’t the case. Americans have long loved their antihero outlaws, even before Pretty Boy Floyd picked up his pistols.
At the time of David Duke’s 1989 election to the Louisiana House of Representatives, the always-observant novelist Walker Percy suggested that the U.S. was in a new political era yet to be named. “If I had anything to say to people outside the state,” said Percy, “I’d tell 'em, ‘Don’t make the mistake of thinking David Duke is a unique phenomenon confined to Louisiana rednecks and yahoos. He’s not. He’s not just appealing to the old Klan constituency, he’s appealing to the white middle class. And don’t think that he or somebody like him won’t appeal to the white middle class of Chicago or Queens.” As Ganz notes repeatedly, the increasingly unfettered media played a ginormous role in broadening that appeal. Ted Koppel, Phil Donahue, and Larry King all provided generous airtime to Duke, fully knowing they were platforming a monster. On one 1989 episode of Primetime Live co-hosted by Diane Sawyer and Sam Donaldson, Duke was permitted to share his theories about the “differences” in IQ between the races before a national audience. The second guest that night, who spouted bitter nationalist rhetoric while holding forth about America’s financial competition with Japan, was New York businessman Donald Trump.•
Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World (Donald Antrim)
Liberty is an important thing, but it’s not everything. Freedom unmoored from all personal responsibility often leads to disaster. That much is apparent in Donald Antrim’s chapter-less, high-concept 1993 debut novel, a discombobulating, vicious post-Reagan Administration satire that plays even better thirty years later. It explores the internecine wars—literally wars—of a formerly pleasant suburban American coastal town overwhelmed by Libertarian and Second Amendment excesses. Things have gone south, way south, in the unnamed community. Funding public schools, libraries, and a police force has become impossible with the abolition of taxes. Neglected septic and sewer systems have caused water to rise in basements and sinks to clog. Overturned laws have made it permissible for homeowners to dig moats around their properties and fill them with water moccasins, glass, and animal traps. Two local clans are acting out a violent family feud in a public park, sometimes burying land mines, as their neighbors begin to pick sides and form coalitions. Citizens have armed themselves with assault weapons, grenades, and even surface-to-air missiles. At dusk, sounds of birds chirping mix with the bang-banging of high-caliber semiautomatic rifle fire. Most shocking is that the former mayor has, in his dotage, been drawn and quartered after lobbing Stinger missiles into the Botanical Garden, killing a number of his former constituents. It’s a complete shitstorm.
Perhaps a hero in their midst can come to the rescue and set things right? Youngish schoolteacher Pete Robinson sees himself as that person: a crusader, a visionary, a savior, even. “I want a better world,” he declares. He believes it’s his moment to shine and utilize his education. It’s probably not ideal, however, that his academic specialty is Middle Ages torture, and that he was the consultant to the ringleaders who tore to pieces former mayor Jim Kunkel. The town elders sought his counsel after attending his speech at a Rotary luncheon at the Holiday Inn, “The Barbarity of the Past: How Ancient Fears Form the Organizing Principles and Moral Values of Modern Life.” The talk was a big hit and got some people thinking. Kunkel was also an attendee and drunkenly lambasted his neighbors during the meal portion of the event. “We’re all murderers here,” he rudely informs the townsfolk, without elaboration, but it appears to be a barb directed at his neighbors’ slide into militarism and vigilantism. He’s hushed for the moment but soon sends a louder message with the “Stinger incident.”
In retrospect, Robinson realizes he probably was wrong to advise his neighbors on how they could use Dodges, Toyotas, and fishing lines to tear Kunkel asunder. For one thing, it was morally not super cool to rip the limbs from a guy. For another, Robinson believes Kunkel was right to send missiles crashing into the Garden reflecting pool. His was a necessary, if inelegant, message, as the town had devolved to a dangerous degree, and someone needed to act. “Jim was warning us,” he says. “Sending us a message.” Robinson decides to pick up the baton and become mayor, but first, he’ll establish a primary school in his home since he and Meredith, his wife and the town beauty, were teachers in the recently shuttered public school. The motto will be “Diversity! Tolerance!” The exclamation points almost make it sound like a threat. He believes it his duty to nurture the young people, even if he is known as an unorthodox teacher, one given to lecturing third graders about various Inquisition torture contraptions—thumbscrews and such—and Clausewitz’s war theory.
He’s even started eating mouthfuls of grass, his teeth turning green from the chlorophyll. It’s all so atavistic.
Complicating matters further is how Robinson has begun to devolve into a more primitive state. He and Meredith have started fucking in the mud near the moat they’re building, the one filled they’re filling with sharpened bamboo spikes. The couple takes a New Age trance therapy course which promises to reveal to them their animal spirits; she regresses in a half-conscious state into an ancient fish, a coelacanth, and Robinson realizes he’s a bison. He’s concerned that this makes them a mismatch, a point driven home when he nearly drowns trying to connect with Meredith in the ocean while in an altered state. It’s something like a counter-evolution. When Robinson retreats to a wooded area to bury Kunkel’s dismembered foot—he promised the dying man that he would “scatter [his] body, and declare those places holy”—he winds up covered with putrid remains, blood, dirt, and jagged cuts, reemerging into the community as a mess. A small child encounters Robinson and calls him a monster. She’s not wrong. He’s even started eating mouthfuls of grass, his teeth turning green from the chlorophyll. It’s all so atavistic.
Robinson’s mother-in-law realizes something is seriously amiss and admonishes him, saying, “I believe evil has found a home in your heart, Pete.” Even his wife, who has her own issues, acknowledges she’s begun to fear him. Maybe Meredith stumbled upon Kunkel’s numerous body parts in their freezer, where Robinson is storing them until they can be interred? Or perhaps she’s creeped out by the miniature torture chamber he built in the basement? Honestly, it could be lots of stuff. The scale model is in the same basement where Robinson opens his one-room schoolhouse and where his descent into utter disgrace reaches completion.
Antrim and George Saunders began at the same time publishing similarly disquieting tales about America in steep decline. Both writers are funny and upsetting, but there’s a major difference in their approach. No matter how bleak a Saunders story, there’s always an invisible presence—Saunders’ presence—watching over the proceedings, a warm moralist urging his characters to find their better angels, rooting for things to pan out. In Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, Antrim is agnostic, as sinister as he is funny. He wasn’t only writing about what we were at the time but what we might become, his exaggerations no longer seeming so exaggerated. When the book was initially released, it received a mixed review from Richard Eder of the Los Angeles Times who believed the novel lacked an opposing force to all the evil on display. “To go any real distance with a fable of communal corruption,” Eder wrote, “something good or at least innocent needs to be lost.” The criticism is baffling because the goodness lost in Antrim’s short novel is never in doubt. In a rush to wholly unfettered liberty, it’s liberty itself that’s been sacrificed.•
Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season (John Gregory Dunne)
Writer John Dunne’s hair is thin, his sperm count low, and a doctor has informed him that he’s “weak in the shoulders.” The latter is a vague but accurate diagnosis. The world’s weighing on Dunne, as he appears to be experiencing a midlife crisis at 37, even if the numbers don’t add up. He frequently leaves his wife and adopted daughter behind in Los Angeles while impetuously taking long solo drives up and down the coast, destination unknown. Passing a billboard one day pimping Las Vegas’ gaudy charms, he impulsively decamps to the neon city for a purgatorial summer, believing that “through the travails of others, I might come to grips with myself.” The despairing writer acknowledges that consorting with people worse off than him may make him feel better about himself. “Reporting anesthetizes one’s own problems,” he tells us. His is a vampiric motivation.
It’s more accurate to refer to the main character in this 1974 novel as “John Dunne.” He is and isn’t the author of Vegas, John Gregory Dunne, the journalist, screenwriter, and husband of Joan Didion. You can likewise wrap quotation marks around the “Memoir” of the subtitle since the book is a pastiche of fact and fiction. It’s an excavation of the gloom in America’s casino capital, inspired by Nathanael West’s expert vivisections of Hollywood and New York City, with Dunne explicitly acknowledging the influence. “I felt like an electronic Miss Lonelyhearts,” he says, though Dunne is more reporter than absurdist. His lightly fictionalized character, who has no interest in bedding showgirls, bringing down the house, or interviewing the reclusive Howard Hughes, sets himself up in a shabby apartment complex featuring AC and a hot plate—a married man living like a divorced dad in a louche locale in the desert.
His goal is to wallow in the underbelly of a city that had not yet gone into the business of selling status, hadn’t become a retail and dining mecca, nor a popular landing spot for aspirational consumers interested in the latest spa treatment. At the beginning of the 1970s, Vegas possessed a small-town mentality and operated as an interdependent milieu in which every croupier, defense lawyer, bail bondsman, parking-lot attendant, gynecologist, and cocktail waitress had a side hustle, peddling amphetamines or flesh or whatever. It’s a city of strivers sustained by outsize dreams, the pursuit of which escorts them nonstop to disappointment, hope being a cruel thing when the odds are so stacked. No deep probing is required to find a sad, jolting undercurrent in what Dunne describes as an “idiot Disneyland of architectural parabolas, overloaded utility poles, celestial hamburger stands, and gimcrackery fairy palaces.” Delusional and struggling characters abound. One prospective landlady unhooks her prosthetic leg in front of Dunne and inquires if doing so gets him hot as it did her ex. He was just hoping for an efficiency apartment. There’s the guy who’s proud to tell you he’s counted to one million several times by writing one thousand numbers on paper three times a day using a pencil gifted to him (so he claims) by Sammy Davis Jr. The arithmomaniac’s girlfriend is a “practicing graphologist” whose former career as a showgirl went south after a mastectomy.
It isn’t that the comedian is going nowhere but that he’s already arrived. You might have some empathy for him if he wasn’t so unpleasant.
These are minor characters, but three stars emerge. Artha is a prostitute who cruises craps tables looking for a winner and attends a beautician school. She’s kept incredibly detailed records of each of her customers: “1203 tricks with 1,076 different Johns. Ninety-seven tricks had been unable to get an erection, 214 came before penetration. She had engaged in anal intercourse eighty-eight times and fellatio 863 times.” Private detective Buster Mano, an erstwhile crooked cop with a colon blockage, has gone into the police-adjacent business for himself, frequently retrieving errant husbands who decide not to fly back home to their wives after a convention. He enjoys the power he asserts over others but fears that his aggressive flatulence will jeopardize stakeouts and delicate phone conversations. Stand-up comic Jackie Kasey is a sub-Hackett hack who makes decent money working lounges and occasionally opening for big stars but realizes he’s a “semi-name,” not a known commodity outside Vegas, not a headliner like Tom Jones or Frank Gorshin. It’s not that the comedian is going nowhere but that he’s already arrived. You might have some empathy for him if he wasn’t so unpleasant.
Ironically, the comic is the leading man in a book about his pursuit of a stardom unlikely to materialize. Dunne tails Kasey as he very unsuccessfully tries to launch "Brother JayJay," an evangelist character who delivers putative punchlines in a distinct elocution. But the material is just as low-end—racist, sexist, and misogynistic—as his usual material. The less said the better about his routine about a gay football player whose favorite aspect of the sport is the showers after the game. The new act won’t be landing him on a couch next to Johnny, Dick or Merv. Kasey desperately wants to evolve as all great artists do, though he possesses no greatness. He’s worse than mediocre—he stinks.
Kasey speaks patronizingly of the “little people” he must be kind to if he hopes to succeed in Vegas. “You gotta get the little people behind you,” he tells Dunne. “The waitresses and the bartenders. They talk about you, the little people. They tell customers to come to the show. You can’t make it in Vegas without the little people.” If the comic is correct in assessing the transactional nature of the community, he’s simultaneously overestimating his height by a couple of feet. Of course, he’s not the only one focused on those he perceives as residing in a lower station than him. Dunne has come to Vegas expressly to profile the same people. The author professes fellowship for the subjects featured in his book, but his fraternity knows its limits. “Talking to her was like opening a door into an unlighted basement,” he writes of Artha. This isn’t Charles Bukowski scavenging for poetry in the junkyard he inhabits; Dunne is slumming and can go home to a better life whenever he wants. He quotes his wife speaking to this aspect of his nature. “She claimed that I vandalized other people’s lives instead of coming to grips with my own.” She’s not wrong.
“It was as if the end was at hand and there was only one priest to hear all the confessions.”
There is one giant difference between Jackie Kasey and John Dunne: talent. The latter is a wonderful writer with top-rate observational skills, bringing a penchant for psychology and eschatology to his reportage. His description of the pre-sunrise Las Vegas when the night is finally winding down reveals a level of understanding that a carpetbagger shouldn’t be able to muster: “I was constantly amazed in the months that I was in Vegas by the encounter-group atmosphere prevailing in the bars and coffee shops of the casinos during the hour or two before dawn. Here in the anteroom of this purgatory was a constituency of the emotionally dispossessed. It was as if the end was at hand and there was only one priest to hear all the confessions.”
In another passage in which Dunne summons all the Nathanael West within him, he writes of the indignities forever waiting nervously on the margins of fame. In the scene, when all the big-name casino entertainers are no-shows at Celebrity Cancer Night at the Flamingo, Jackie Kasey reluctantly shares the stage with a circus elephant named Tanya. His jokes bomb as children in the audience pelt him with peanuts, so he performs an impromptu version of “Bye Bye Blackbird” and strategically dances around the stage to keep a healthy distance from the pachyderm. This time he fears more than his dreams will be crushed.•