John Gregory Dunne's Vegas begins: "In the summer of my nervous breakdown, I went to live in Las Vegas, Clark County, Nevada."

It is a miracle he survived. Las Vegas itself is a kind of nervous breakdown, a huge, tawdry pathological distortion of what we are pleased to call The American Dream….

Dunne approached the place as a voyeur in search of catharsis. Thirty-seven years old and death-obsessed, burdened with an existence that, like a bad job of tie-dyeing, wouldn't come out right no matter what he did, he set himself up in an apartment near the Strip and proceeded to eat himself silly on junk food. One knows the scene so well, in literature and in life, and in literature as in life it more often fails than succeeds: the self-pity of the incipiently middle-aged, the nocturnal rambles and ceaseless brooding, the desperate, solipsistic search for some...