cover image LOADED: A Misadventure on the Marijuana Trail

LOADED: A Misadventure on the Marijuana Trail

Robert Sabbag, . . Little, Brown, $24.95 (352pp) ISBN 978-0-316-76511-4

When Sabbag's Snowblind: A Brief Career in the Cocaine Trade came out in 1998, cultural icons like Hunter S. Thompson, Robert Stone, Norman Mailer and Nora Ephron hailed it as a classic study of America's drug obsession; their endorsements helped it achieve both cult status and commercial success. Sabbag's latest, despite its strong narrative drive and flashy, occasionally psychedelic writing style, probably won't elicit the same response. For one thing, Sabbag's hero this time is no Zachary Swann, Snowblind's larger-than-life coke dealer: Allen Long is a would-be filmmaker, a child of middle-class respectability from Richmond, Va., who "was born the year Harry S. Truman was elected to the American presidency, and was first arrested for marijuana possession the year Bob Dylan released Blonde on Blonde." For another, marijuana trafficking lacks the inherent drama of the cocaine trade. But most of all, there's the problem of historic distance, which Sabbag's writing fails to overcome. "The book presents a story from out of a time and place fogged in not only by the passage of years, but by an atmospheric shift in the political and cultural spirit of a generation," Sabbag writes in his acknowledgments. Add to that unfortunate lines such as "Like that of almost any man whose Christian name is a definite article, [dealer] El Coyote's image was simply that—nobody really bought it," and readers are left with what feels like a message in a bottle from a place they left behind long ago. (Jan.)

Forecast:With press junkets planned for the author and Long and a first serial excerpt going to Rolling Stone, this chronicle of crime and ingenuity should generate early hype. It's hard to imagine another round of blessings from the hip elite, though, for this rather disappointing follow-up to Sabbag's earlier success.