Holidays in Hell

The comedy in Holidays in Hell is not decoration. It's the instrument. O'Rourke had learned at the National Lampoon that a joke is a compression device: it can carry an argument, a judgment, and a fact in fewer words than an essay, and it lands before the reader's defenses go up. Applied to famine, ideology, and gunfire, this produces a voice that is constantly doing two things at once — entertaining you and indicting something.

The technique has range. Sometimes the target is a government, sometimes a guerrilla movement, sometimes the international press corps he traveled among, sometimes the reader's own comfortable assumptions. He is especially hard on the sanctimony of political tourists who visit oppression to have their views confirmed. And he turns the weapon inward: the recurring figure of the book is O'Rourke himself, overfed, hungover, out of his depth, wondering what a man like him is doing in a place like this. Self-mockery is what keeps the swagger from curdling into cruelty.

O'Rourke's governing suspicion was that every place he visited came pre-equipped with an authorized narrative, and that the narrative was almost always wrong in the same direction — too tidy, too heroic, too convenient for whoever was selling it. Against this he set the traveler's eye: the small, checkable, physical detail that no press officer bothered to spin because it seemed too trivial to matter. The queue at the shop. The state of the roads. What the money would actually buy. Who ate well and who didn't.

In the Communist bloc, the argument writes itself through the plumbing. He doesn't need to lecture on the failures of central planning; he describes the hotels, the transport, the food, the gray exhaustion of daily transactions, and the case is made by inventory. This is where his politics and his reporting fuse: he had concluded that ideology should be judged by its groceries, by whether the system it produced could keep the lights on and the shelves stocked, and he tested that conviction on the ground rather than in the abstract.

It's tempting to file O'Rourke under provocation — a funny man saying rude things about serious places. But the recklessness had a loyalty underneath it, and naming that loyalty is what makes Holidays in Hell more than a collection of good lines. What he defended, consistently, was the ordinary. Not the ideology, not the flag, not the cause, but the unremarkable business of people trying to live decent, well-supplied, un-terrorized lives — and his contempt was reserved for anything that got in the way of that, whichever direction it came from.

This is why the book reads as conservative in temperament even where it's rude about the powerful. O'Rourke had a settled distrust of grand designs, the plans that promise to remake human life and require, first, that a lot of it be broken. He'd seen the results in enough places to treat every utopian pitch as an invoice waiting to arrive. Against the grand design he set the small verifiable good: functioning shops, safe streets, food you'd willingly eat, freedom boring enough that nobody had to write dispatches about it.

Holidays in Hell ends where it began: with a man who chose to spend his holidays somewhere no reasonable person would, and came back with the news that the world's worst places are worst not because of some exotic evil but because ordinary life has been made impossible there. The datelines have aged — Beirut's war ended, the Berlin Wall fell the year after the book came out, apartheid unwound — but the method survives the events it recorded. Look at the groceries, not the manifesto. Distrust the story that wants your assent too easily.