The Rum Diary

November 2, 1998
When the celebrated iconoclast was a feisty kid working for an English-language newspaper in San Juan 40 years ago, he wrote, and then put aside, a novel, which is here resurrected. It is very much a young man's book, clearly based on Thompson's own situation and some of the people--mostly drunks and layabouts--who gravitated to a loosely supervised journalistic stint in the tropics. An introduction sets the scene, and the novel that follows is almost equally documentary in tone: young Kemp comes aboard at the News, gets to know its perpetually embattled proprietor and some of his feckless staff. He observes the island, as the invasion of American tourists and values is just beginning to change its lazy, sun-struck character. He gets involved in a drunken fight with the police, is thrown in jail, bailed out and goes in for a little shame-faced PR writing. He comes between a wild colleague and the equally unbuttoned young Connecticut girl he has brought out to visit him, and the end is a youth's easy-won nostalgia for a silly, drunken time. As he always has done, Thompson lays on the drinking and general hell-raising very thick (the amount of rum consumed would dry up a distillery) and indulges flashes of bad temper toward commercialism while always showing a willingness to do whatever it takes to make a buck. His style is less hallucinatory and exclamatory than it later became, but the groundwork is there. The best parts of the book are its occasional, almost grudging, acknowledgments of natural beauty; the people in it are no more than props. Author tour.

The inspiration for the Duke character in "Doonesbury," Hunter Thompson invented "gonzo journalism," the subjective, macho, grandiloquent and self-serving writing that is as much fiction as fact. This early novel is as much fact as fiction, a first-person account of a young gringo reporter's hard living in San Juan, Puerto Rico, during the 1950's. Campbell Scott captures the authorial voice in the first sentence, crisply delivering the swaggering narrative and neatly fleshing out the characters. Thompson's inspiration may have been Hemingway, but Scott gives us a touch of Mickey Spillane as well. Y.R. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine