In the middle of a dark season, I flew to Las Vegas to participate in a book festival. It was a Saturday in late October, and I was on the 7 a.m. flight out of LAX. The plane was full of Philadelphia Eagles fans, en route to see their team play the Raiders at the arena a Las Vegas writer of my acquaintance has taken to calling the Boondoggle Dome. The actual name is Allegiant Stadium: I saw it, looking like an enormous Kodak Instamatic Flashcube after all the bulbs had burned out, as my taxi pressed north on I-15. Across the freeway stood the Mandalay Bay, where four years earlier, in the autumn of 2017, the deadliest mass shooting in United States history had occurred. At the beginning of 2017, I’d spent four months in Las Vegas on a fellowship, and this was the freeway exit I had used. Tropicana east to Maryland, then a few blocks north to the subdivision where I’d rented a small unit in a triplex on Elizabeth Avenue, around the corner from the Crown & Anchor British Pub. I remembered watching coverage of the shooting from my home in Los Angeles and feeling something not unlike proximity. How many times had I been right there? All the same, I understood that this was just a story I was telling, that I was no closer to the tragedy than anyone else. I hadn’t been present, and if I knew the ground, the territory, so did every tourist who had ever visited the Strip. The Mandalay was gold with smoked glass; it had a saltwater aquarium and a pool with a wave machine. Were I looking for a metaphor, this might add up to one, although if Las Vegas had taught me anything, it was that metaphor could never be enough.
When I use the phrase “dark season,” I’m borrowing from John Gregory Dunne, who employed it in the subtitle of his 1974 book, Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season, which has long been out of print. Prior to Vegas, Dunne had been a journalist at Time and a freelance columnist and screenwriter. He had published two books: Delano (1967), an account of Cesar Chavez and the California grape strike, and The Studio (1969), for which 20th Century Fox had given him a year of unrestricted access, to its eventual chagrin. Each involved its own sort of immersion, which was also the case with Vegas, albeit on somewhat different terms.
For , Dunne, assisted by his wife, Joan Didion, did.) With , he functioned as with a heightened fly-on-the-wall point of view. It’s a strategy we associate with New Journalism, although that’s something of a misnomer for what Dunne was doing. Perhaps more so than Didion, who distrusted narrative as much as she recognized its necessity, Dunne was a storyteller; just look at his novels (1977), (1982), and (1987). , however, refuses to be so straightforward. Here more than in any of his other books—including (1989), which comes billed as a set of “autobiographical examinations”—Dunne turns the lens inward, not on the facts of his existence so much as on the feeling, his sense of distance and disentanglement.
