The Rum Diary: A Novel
Hunter S. Thompson
Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 1998
204 pgs.
Dan’s Rating: 3/5
This novel has the shadow of legend behind it in that it’s something of a “lost novel,” having been written while Thompson was a 22-year-old writer in early 1960s Puerto Rico but not published until 1998, after actor Johnny Depp discovered it among Thompson’s papers. Thompson had archived the manuscript after seven rejections from publishers and then became too swept up in the politics of the ‘60s to further pursue its publication. The story was also adapted for a movie starring Johnny Depp, released in 2011.
As something by way of disclosure, Thompson was a major influence on my writing and so there might be a little natural bias towards his work. I’ve always enjoyed his cutting language and stories that hover somewhere between an American Dream quest and an Altamont-style erosion of the hippie ideal, writing that exposes the grit below the surface sheen.
The novel’s protagonist is Paul Kemp, a freelancing journalist from New York who travels to Puerto Rico to work on The Daily News, a newspaper hemorrhaging money. Once there, he finds a deteriorating situation, with a stable of American journalists on the verge of career and/or life transitions, who spend most of their time drinking rum, hustling for cash, and fomenting plans to flee the island once the paper folds. Kemp befriends a couple of them (Yeamon and Sala), forming a somewhat unified front against the anxiously addled editor, Lotterman, who reminded me of the “Da Editor” trope…rough around the edges, authoritarian, and with a used car salesman’s method of playing fast and loose with details of the paper’s financial health. Scenes written at the newspaper’s office often read like dispatches from riot zones, with mobs of locals surrounding the building voicing their displeasure at whatever “human interest” story offended them and staff members with one foot out of the door, binge-drinking around writing assignments.
A love triangle develops between Kemp, Yeamon, and Chenault, a woman Yeamon met before coming to the island and who arrives on the same plane as Kemp. Kemp witnesses a drunken, rocky relationship between the two and frequently notes his envy as the love birds frolic in paradisiacal scenes on beaches and bar patios. With Yeamon and Chenault, there is a strong whiff of the young rich meandering until their traveler’s checks dry up and they decide where else they can decamp to find further trouble.
The first half of the story burns slowly before Thompson exposes the seedy underbelly of the local culture, once Kemp, Yeamon, and Sala are arrested after running out on a bar tab, and then coming to a disappointing head at a St. Thomas Festival party where both Yeamon and Kemp are forced to abandon Chenault – who is blacked-out drunk – to a group of local ruffians at a party. When a naked Chenault is swept up by the crowd, she is kidnapped, with Kemp and Yeamon leaving the party beaten and threatened with worse. Unable to find any police until the next morning, Kemp returns to the home with an uncooperative officer to find that Chenault is no longer there, with the officer wondering aloud why Yeamon is letting a woman “run you ‘round in circles like this anyhow.”
Although Chenault’s sexual abuse is not described, it is inferred when she turns up at Kemp’s apartment days later, traumatized. There they take up a casual relationship until Chenault leaves the island for her parents’ home in Connecticut.
More disturbing is Kemp’s and Yeamon’s behavior once they realize they are at a dead end in finding Chenault. After dropping off Chenault’s personal belongings with the police, they disparage her as “crazy” and a “whore,” Yeamon telling Kemp the story of how they met in New York and how he’d meant for her just to be another conquest. The story then unravels after that when the characters move on to other opportunities, some of them not without a fight.
The Rum Diary is not Fear & Loathing in San Juan but there are plenty of elements of both lurking throughout the story. Kemp keeps a cool distance from the reader, only letting us know just enough to keep things interesting. But even then, that’s not quite enough. Thompson’s command of the language is already present, but in embryonic form, and without the hazy chaotic drug scenes found in his later work. With Thompson, there always seems to be a finish line he tries to stumble across before time runs out. There are also somewhat amusing passages about men just turning thirty reflecting on their lives like old men, how life rolls you downhill after you turn 30 and then mortality becomes something to fear from that point forward. These boys haven’t seen anything yet.
Overall, I thought this book was average. There was nothing in the language or the story that I found very compelling and scene after scene of debauchery tended to wear me down, with Chenault’s assault the only scene giving me pauses. I got the feeling that Thompson was trying to write a somewhat mundane experience into an interesting story and although it does manage to get off the ground in that respect, it pales in comparison to the work we know best from him, the stories about sports and politics that Thompson made larger than life thanks to his developed imagination and combination of fact and fiction. Here, those skills have yet to mature, making the story lacking in keeping the reader engaged. Most of the characters, including Kemp, are rather insufferable and by the end of the story, I didn’t really care what happened to any of them. And the privilege spills out as Kemp describes most of the locals in a derogatory manner, usually as thieves or petty criminals who reach through windows to steal anything within reach as they pass in front of homes. Everyone is drunk and either passive aggressive or openly belligerent, and the only resolution is leaving that environment to head back to the States, South America, or Mexico, chasing the next dollar. But after reading, I couldn’t help but think that the novel was written by a journalist who was trying to be a novelist. And that’s exactly the reality.