Books, Arts & Manners: Right Books

Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Terry Southern, Joan Didion, Truman Capote, Hunter Thompson . . . P. J. O’Rourke? “New journalism” is a style popular among budding journalists because it allows the writer and his opinions to be part of whatever story he happens to be reporting. The danger is obvious: Will the author’s sensibility become the whole subject of the report? Miss Didion, one feels, would find Hawaii arid and sinister. The worst excesses of this approach can be seen in the later Hunter Thompson, a psycho-babble cynicism lacking direction or credibility which inundates the reality it claims to report. At its best (early Thompson, O’Rourke) it is sharp, bold, entertaining, and even true in that it accurately depicts the intrusion of the author into a foreign situation and his reactions to it.

In Mr. O’Rourke’s earlier book Holidays in Hell, he played the part of the U.S. tourist in the Peter Arno cartoon asking a scandalized Moslem in prayer: “Eh, Mac, is this the way to Mecca?” In Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government (Atlantic Monthly Press, 233 pp., $19.95), he bursts into the Beltway with the same cheerful appallingness. The tone is set early: “The government is huge, stupid, greedy, and makes nosy, officious, and dangerous intrusions into the smallest corners of life . . .” But Mr. O’Rourke reminds us throughout that as long as we the people are munching prime pork, we had just better keep a sense of humor about things.

AR

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Allen Randolph

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Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Terry Southern, Joan Didion, Truman Capote, Hunter Thompson . . . P. J. O’Rourke? “New journalism” is a style popular among budding journalists because it allows the writer and his opinions to be part of whatever story he happens to be reporting. The danger is obvious: Will the author’s sensibility become the whole subject of the report? Miss Didion, one feels, would find Hawaii arid and sinister. The worst excesses of this approach can be seen in the later Hunter Thompson, a psycho-babble cynicism lacking direction or credibility which inundates the reality it claims to report. At its best (early Thompson, O’Rourke) it is sharp, bold, entertaining, and even true in that it accurately depicts the intrusion of the author into a foreign situation and his reactions to it.

In Mr. O’Rourke’s earlier book Holidays in Hell, he played the part of the U.S. tourist in the Peter Arno cartoon asking a scandalized Moslem in prayer: “Eh, Mac, is this the way to Mecca?” In Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government (Atlantic Monthly Press, 233 pp., $19.95), he bursts into the Beltway with the same cheerful appallingness. The tone is set early: “The government is huge, stupid, greedy, and makes nosy, officious, and dangerous intrusions into the smallest corners of life . . .” But Mr. O’Rourke reminds us throughout that as long as we the people are munching prime pork, we had just better keep a sense of humor about things.