Quintana & Friends is John Gregory Dunne's first book since his bestselling True Confessions. Long regarded as one of our finest reporters, he is noted for his ironic wit and his keen ability to capture the nuances of any scene or situation he covers. This is his first collection of the nonfiction pieces he has written over the past fifteen years, and it is a brilliant book. Underlying its four sections ("Software," "Hardware," "Tinsel" and "Continental Drift") is a single thread: the confrontation between a transplanted Easterner's sensibilities and the culture of the contemporary West. Dunne finds his subjects in a tiny desert community on the edge of Death Valley, in a missile silo in Montana, in a town on San Francisco Bay with memories of being leveled during a World War II munitions explosion. He inhales the aroma of a small-time fight club; he experiences the doldrums of a road trip with a big-league baseball team; he visits a private detective who specializes in lost cat capers and spends the day with a stunt man who falls on his head for a living. Throughout the section called "Hardware," he offers an insightful and compassionate view of certain volatile issues of the sixties. In the wonderfully sardonic essays in "Tinsel," he is able, as observer and more importantly as participant, to reflect cooly on Hollywood and the film business from the inside out. And in the two memorable title piece, he explores the nature of a guarded friendship between two men and what it means to him to be the father of an adopted daughter. The thirty-three essays in Quintana & Friends appeared (sometimes in slightly different form) in such publications as the old Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, the Atlantic Monthly and New York. Taken together, they represent John Gregory Dunne at his best—which is to say, a remarkably perceptive and highly entertaining look at American life.
Author
John Gregory Dunne was an American novelist, screenwriter and literary critic. He was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and was a younger brother of author Dominick Dunne. He suffered from a severe stutter and took up writing to express himself. Eventually he learned to speak normally by observing others. He graduated from Princeton University in 1954 and worked as a journalist for Time magazine. He married novelist Joan Didion on 30 January 1964, and they became collaborators on a series of screenplays, including Panic in Needle Park (1971), A Star Is Born (1976) and True Confessions (1981), an adaptation of his own novel. He is the author of two non-fiction books about Hollywood, The Studio and Monster. As a literary critic and essayist, he was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. His essays were collected in two books, Quintana & Friends and Crooning. He wrote several novels, among them True Confessions, based loosely on the Black Dahlia murder, and Dutch Shea, Jr. He was the writer and narrator of the 1990 PBS documentary L.A. is It with John Gregory Dunne, in which he guided viewers through the cultural landscape of Los Angeles. He died in Manhattan of a heart attack, in December 2003. His final novel, Nothing Lost, which was in galleys at the time of his death, was published in 2004. He was father to Quintana Roo Dunne, who died in 2005 after a series of illnesses, and uncle to actors Griffin Dunne (who co-starred in An American Werewolf in London) and Dominique Dunne (who co-starred in Poltergeist). His wife, Joan Didion, published The Year of Magical Thinking in October 2005 to great critical acclaim, a memoir of the year following his death, during which their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, was seriously ill. It won the National Book Award.
