Author Evan Wright takes a darkly comic view of U.S.
Published 10:12 pm Thursday, April 9, 2009
“Hella Nation” ($25.95), by Evan Wright
In the first chapter of Evan Wright’s “Hella Nation,” American troops stationed in Afghanistan are easily conned by an Afghan translator into believing the former-Taliban stronghold of Kandahar — with its “medieval bazaars and dirt roads clogged with donkeys and chickens” — has a McDonald’s. One soldier, pining for someone to make a chow run, shouts out, “Get me Supersize everything.”
“Hella Nation” — a collection of 12 previously published magazine articles written for Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and LA Weekly among others — is filled with details like this, painting a comically macabre portrait of American life with a clear and sober eye.
Wright made his name with his first book, 2004’s “Generation Kill,” chronicling his time with the United States Marine Corps as an embedded reporter for Rolling Stone. That book has been adapted into an HBO miniseries, complete with a character standing in for the author. Not bad for someone who got his start reviewing adult movies for Hustler magazine.
“Hella Nation” is essentially the story of his unlikely road to success.
Most of this information is in the introduction, but the stories that follow serve to flesh out his character and fill us in on his career path.
Wright traces his success back to the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Miller v. California that provided magazines such as Hustler a loophole that allowed them to avoid obscenity charges, provided they publish at least one article a month that aspired to serious value. This requirement gave Wright his chance to shine after publisher Larry Flynt — who believed white supremacists were behind the 1978 shooting that left him paralyzed — gave him a break from reviewing porn movies and assigned him an article about the Aryan Nations. The article is included in the book.
His work has taken him from desert war zones to forest canopies in the company of eco-anarchists and into homes of HIV positive porn starlets, and has been likened to the gonzo journalism of Hunter S. Thompson.
It’s a comparison Wright rejects.
He claims his reporting differs from Thompson’s in that it is more about the subject than it is about the reporter. But that’s a difficult argument to make when Wright’s stories find him in such odd positions as wistfully regretting not holding the hand of crying porn star Jasmin St. Claire as she prepares to blow flames out of her rectum or driving around with anarchists preparing to vandalize symbols of corporate America.
Wright may have even created his own genre of reporting — “Hella Journalism” — which rather than viewing the world through a cascade of drugs and alcohol, applies the prism of a 12-step program to a society that has thoroughly assimilated Thompson’s excess.
