Vegas

A Memoir of a Dark Season

By: John Gregory Dunne, Stephanie Danler - foreword

Narrated by: Griffin Dunne

"In the summer of my nervous breakdown, I went to live in Las Vegas, Clark County, Nevada." So begins John Gregory Dunne's neglected classic of first-person writing, a mordant, deadpan, grotesque tale that blurs the line between autobiography and fiction, confession and reportage.

Panicked by his own mortality, despondent over his many failings as a writer and a man, Dunne leaves his wife and their three-year old child for the solitude of a crummy apartment off the Vegas Strip. There he plans to write an account of the city as he finds it; the book he ends up writing is "a fiction which recalls time both real and imagined." The remarkable central characters are Artha, a student at cosmetology college by day, a sex worker by night; Buster Mano, a private detective whose specialty is tracking down errant husbands; and Jackie Kasey, a lounge comic who opens for Elvis at $10,000 a night and wonders why he is still only a "semi-name." Pimps, bail bondsmen, parking-lot moguls, used-car tycoons, ex-jockeys, and women who look as if they had "spent a lifetime meeting guys in Vegas or Miami Beach or Louisville for the Derby": these are the people who wander through the lives of Artha, Buster, and Jackie—and, for a dark season, the life of the narrator.

Contains mature themes.

©1974 John Gregory Dunne; Foreword copyright 2025 by Stephanie Danler (P)2025 Tantor Media

narrator quality

John Gregory Dunne's depiction a few of the lives of the not so famous in Las Vegas in the 70's is an entertaining tale of the underbelly of the city. I'm uncertain how the degression into his Catholicism in the midst of this telling fits in, but it too becomes interesting.
I would give this book a higher rating but the narrator, Griffin Dunne, is probably the worst I have heard on Audible. He regularly sounds like he is reading the text for the first time, pausing in the middle of sentences to read ahead a bit. He mispronounces basic words. All the characters male or female speak in the same ill defined accent. In addition, there are occasional short gaps in the reading where one has to move ahead 30 or 60 seconds to pick up the storyline again. From his last name I presume he is a relative of the now deceased author. I hope he does not intend to make a career as a narrator.

Was this edited?

I’m only a few chapters in but it seems like this audiobook wasn’t edited? Or if it was, it was done very sloppily. I’m enjoying the story and Dunne’s narration itself but there are multiple points where lines are read again and numerous times where the narrator says “2” or “3” despite having moved beyond those chapters, which is confusing. Maybe it’s a sort of unconventional styling in the writing or something but the condition if the rest of the recording makes me doubt that.