He comes between a wild colleague and the equally unbuttoned young Connecticut girl he has brought out to visit him, and the end is a youth's easy-won nostalgia for a silly, drunken time. He gets involved in a drunken fight with the police, is thrown in jail, bailed out and goes in for a little shame-faced PR writing. He observes the island, as the invasion of American tourists and values is just beginning to change its lazy, sun-struck character. An introduction sets the scene, and the novel that follows is almost equally documentary in tone: young Kemp comes aboard at the News, gets to know its perpetually embattled proprietor and some of his feckless staff. It is very much a young man's book, clearly based on Thompson's own situation and some of the people-mostly drunks and layabouts-who gravitated to a loosely supervised journalistic stint in the tropics. When the celebrated iconoclast was a feisty kid working for an English-language newspaper in San Juan 40 years ago, he wrote, and then put aside, a novel, which is here resurrected.
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