The great Gonzo miscue
Gonzo Girl isn’t the rollicking ride to hell depicted by the book jacket, the one paved with tequila, guns and the cocaine favoured by the real-life writer on whom it’s based, Hunter S. Thompson.
The title pays tribute to his gonzo journalism and imitates his boffo brand. Trouble is, it’s not all that funny. Cheryl Della Pietra is a fine writer. She’s just got the wrong focus.
After graduating from university, Della Pietra worked as an assistant for Thompson in Woody Creek, Colo., “for several months in 1992,” according to the author’s blurb. She recasts that experience in Gonzo Girl as Alley Russo’s first-person account of life with Walker Reade. He’s as misogynistic as Thompson himself with, naturally, flashes of cinematic compassion.
This novel, one suspects, is not the one Della Pietra could have written had she kept the focus on her own roots and Italian-American family. The warmest, wittiest and most authentic scenes come when protagonist Alley visits her family of plumbers in Pennsylvania.
Alley’s brother John Dante is convinced she thinks he’s an idiot. He tells her he’s read the author’s latest book, Liar’s Dice. He insists: “I went to college, too, you know.”
Now these are funny characters. Alley works as an assistant to writer Walker Reade at his Colorado ranchcum-drug den.
Claudia predates Alley’s arrival as a Reade assistant. She explains to Alley how the world works now that he’s missing too many brain cells to write anything good.
“And look. If you weren’t rewriting him to a B-, it would be someone else along the line,” she tells Alley.
“That’s how these things work, kiddo. A lot of mouths get fed by the Walker Reade brand — book publishers, agents, magazine editors, movie studios, audio book producers. Christ, the man single-handedly keeps Tilley hats and the Woody Creek Tavern in business.”
Alley is as opportunistic as the next grasping writer. She uses Reade to pump her debut novel which he pronounces “not all that awful.” He’s clear-eyed about his own work.
“It doesn’t have to be good, or even pretty good, anymore. It just has to get out there.” Claudia observes that Alley shouldn’t expect so much of Reade.
“So what if the past ten years have been a steady decline? What the hell do you expect?” she asks. Then the clincher. “I mean, he’s not living it anymore. There’s no road trip anymore.”
The book is a potential bestseller. Whether Della Pietra always intended to write about Thompson or it came from the New York magazine world where she later worked, one can see wheels turning. After all, the late Hunter S. was an icon of cool.
But a hostile boy’s club is not Della Pietra’s natural turf. She neither capitalizes on coked-up humour in a believable way, nor explores the pathos of talent gone stale.
Still, her observations about the pop culture world of Thompson’s time are astute.
In his prime, Thompson debunked political myths with great flair. He changed the course of political writing beginning in the late ’60s. On the dark side, he encouraged later generations of journalists to cling to firstperson narrative when grossly unwarranted.
I looked forward to reading her take on Thompson, but the moment I finished the book I realized the folly of unrealistic expectations. The real test for Della Pietra comes with her next book; but for raw talent, even this miscue may be worth a read. Linda Diebel is a Toronto journalist and non-fiction writer.