The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
Hunter S. Thompson occupies a sweet, neglected corner in our hearts. It's a corner best visited infrequently, midway between nostalgia (e.g., baseball's "hot corner") and intolerable pretense (e.g., Miles Davis' 70s funk album "Down on the Corner"), lest we suffer the sting of youthful folly on our somewhat weathered cheeks. (It's the same corner in which Jim Morrison, Neal Peart, and Trent Reznor reside.) Most of us drawn to Hunter S. in our formative years did so by both tropism -- the drugs, chaos and insanity he portrayed called our ultraist's tune -- and awe -- he was a damn good, thoughtful writer with keen eyes and ears and a rebellious streak you could ride a 1952 Vincent Black Shadow through. But we dwelt on the former over the latter.

As sure as I'm sitting here in my half-height cubicle I can still remember what kind of pot I was smoking the first time someone said to me, "Dude, you have to read 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.'" Later on, during the 1992 election season, I burned through 1972's "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail," seething with post-adolescent indignation for what I believed to be my own era's lack of equivalent social upheaval. I recall with disgust some of the conversations I had with equally self-rightous clods.

Although smart and compelling and witty and angry and dirty and fearless as a 16-year-old with a juvie card, keys to dad's Buick Le Sabre, and a case of Cutty Sark, Thompson was not the voice of my generation. But oh how I wanted him to be.

Paul Theroux reviews Thompson's "Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century" in The Guardian UK