By Jonathan Yardley

Wednesday, October 21, 1998; Page D02

THE RUM DIARY

By Hunter S. Thompson

Simon & Schuster. 204 pp. $24

Written more than three decades ago, this slender but quite engaging novel is Hunter Thompson's 11th book and his only work of fiction. Usually literary apprentice work or juvenilia should be allowed to rest in the file cabinets to which its authors entrust it, but this is not always so; there is reason to be grateful that last summer's release of a film adaptation of Thompson's most celebrated work, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," has inspired him to let "The Rum Diary" see the light of day.

One reason is that, although the novel pretty much falls to pieces in its second half, its first half is genuinely likable and appealing. Memoir masquerading as fiction, it gives us Thompson, a k a Paul Kemp, as a young journalist practicing his trade at a disreputable English-language newspaper in Puerto Rico around 1960. There's a lot of hell-raising and drinking in the book, hence its title, and thus it anticipates the King of Gonzo that Thompson was to make of himself a few years later, but there's also a charming innocence about it.

This is a useful reminder that beneath the self-destructive and wrathful self-image Thompson has fabricated for himself lies another self, a man not immune to sentiment and nostalgia, a professional journalist who holds his business and himself to exacting standards even as he tries to reshape the business and himself in more provocative, less conventional forms. If there is any anger or scorn in this book, it is directed at business interests that exploit and destroy natural beauty and journalists who sell out to them. In his later work, Thompson has turned his gifts for invective and malediction on these and other offenders; here the mood is wistful and sad, and surprisingly affecting.

Paul Kemp arrives in San Juan to work for the Daily News, run by an ex-communist named Reed Lotterman and staffed by "the whole gamut from genuine talents and honest men, to degenerates and hopeless losers who could barely write a postcard." Kemp himself is "a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hellraiser" who "was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but . . . felt somehow that my instincts were right," who had "a vagrant optimism that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top."

Kemp has done time in Europe and New York, has wearied of the journalistic life there and has come to San Juan seeking whatever it decides to offer him. What he finds is summed up in a paragraph that gives a hint of Thompson prose to come but also is, in and of itself, vivid and evocative:

"There was a strange and unreal air about the whole world I'd come into. It was amusing and vaguely depressing at the same time. Here I was, living in a luxury hotel, racing around a half-Latin city in a toy car that looked like a cockroach and sounded like a jet fighter, sneaking down alleys and humping on the beach, scavenging for food in shark-infested waters, hounded by mobs yelling in a foreign tongue -- and the whole thing was taking place in quaint old Spanish Puerto Rico, where everybody spent American dollars and drove American cars and sat around roulette wheels pretending they were in Casablanca. One part of the city looked like Tampa and the other part looked like a medieval asylum. Everybody I met acted as if they had just come back from a crucial screen test."

Thompson's eye for the ludicrous and incongruous obviously was already developed at this early stage in his career, and so too was his acidulous pen: "What passed for society was a loud, giddy whirl of thieves and pretentious hustlers, a dull sideshow full of quacks and philistines with gimp mentalities." The images that Thompson later would refine in Las Vegas and on the campaign trail had already taken shape in his mind. Yet his eyes were clear enough to see the beauties of a tiny island called Vieques and to know that, doing hack work for a developer, he "was being paid $25 a day to ruin the only place I'd seen in ten years where I felt a sense of peace."

In later years, as Thompson refined and embellished his prose, as he invented and quickly personified the gonzo style, it became harder and harder to remember that at the core of this hard-drinking, hard-talking, hard-living man is a moralist, a Puritan, even an innocent. The best thing about "The Rum Diary" is that it gives us this side of him without apology, even, I suspect, with a kind of pride. For this reason it is a lovely book and a useful contribution to a body of work that's likely to gain substance and weight with the passing of time.

By Jonathan Yardley, whose Internet address is yardleyj@clark.net.