Thompson is a master of using dialogue to pace his stories and to involve the reader with the action. The character of his narrator is established early in the book in humorously fractured exchanges with his attorney and with hapless bystanders. Another technique lending immediacy to the narrative is the use of tape transcription — pure dialogue — that reads much like a film script.

Interior monologues also reveal much about the narrator. Since these often take the form of drug delusions or hallucinations, the narrator ostensibly explores a raw consciousness, one driven to the brink of total breakdown, not only by the drugs but by the awful reality of the American dream. As an epigraph to his book, Thompson uses a quotation from Samuel Johnson: "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man." It is this pain, exacerbated by...