THE AGONIES OF CONCEIT

Hunter S. Thompson may be founder and proprietor of Gonzo Journalism, but the title doesn't do him justice. Since Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), his only real subject has been himself, depicted as a paragon of excess and edginess. It may be more appropriate to think of the man as a saint, patron of everything that the surgeon general and your mother issue solemn warnings against, apostle of bellicose self-indulgence, defying and rebuking our age of government-mandated prudence to the point of martyrdom, or at least occasional legal embarrassment, in his walled, well-armed compound near Aspen, Colo. ...Saint or not, Thompson has just published a book that consists entirely of relics. BETTER THAN SEX: CONFESSIONS OF A political JUNKIE (Random House, $23) reads as if he had emptied the contents of several files and wastebaskets into a large envelope addressed to his indulgent publisher and let it go at that. It's made up of faxes, memos, letters, and slapdash commentary aimed in the general direction of the 1992 presidential campaign, interspersed with lame, free-associative satirical flights without which no wastebasket would be complete. Fumes of some kind, if not incense, seem to be required for full appreciation. ...The theme running through this debris is, roughly, the Temptation of St. Hunter by Politics-not the politics of issues and ideology but the politics of machination and intrigue, the kind that true political junkies assure him can be ''better than sex,'' at least if you win. Littered through all of this randomness are a few shrewd political conjectures and a couple of characteristically bizarre anecdotes in which Thompson stalks the elusive Bill Clinton and the impish James Carville. The rest is an attempt to demonstrate Thompson's Law: ''There is no such thing as paranoia in a presidential campaign. Anything you fear and suspect will almost always turn out to be true, and the fix is always in, somewhere.'' There are two interesting things about this observation. One is that everything that Thompson suspected about George Bush and James Baker seems to have turned out to be false. The other is that it could have been uttered by Richard Nixon, whose conspiracy-mongering paranoia and scheming overkill have much in common with Thompson's throwaway prose in this book. No wonder the scathing obituary of Nixon that takes up the last few pages winds up as a shadowboxing stalemate. D ..