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In Ghostlier Demarcations Keener Sounds

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The traditional essayist is a sense-maker and an imposer of order, and in order to make sense and impose order traditional essayists assume an authorial command over their material (which is often their own lives, and/or their own historical period). But the really good essayists do not present themselves as authority figures who have the power to make sense of themselves and/or of the historical period they are living through. The good ones know that ages do not have names and that people remain mysterious, even to themselves.

Though there have been other essayist that share Didion's disdain for simplistic narrative, she really does not belong to any tradition of American essayists. But she's not a champion of the avant-garde either (not in the way Sontag was). I would say that her temperament is conservative (she wants things to make sense, to cohere) but never governed by or determined by any ideological preconceptions of how things should be or how we would like them to be. Her narrative style acknowledges and accomodates complexity and combats simplicity as well as undermines our desire to fully comprehend. Her work presents a challenge to what we know as well as our ways of knowing. Therefore reading Didion is unsettling, discomfitting. The essays succeed precisely because she does not try to name the thing that she writes about with nice clarifying titles or topic sentences, rather she presents her own competing impressions and competing ideas about the unnamable something that has her interest. What has her interest in THE WHITE ALBUM are the 1960's and early 70's and here she is very good at conveying her own singular impressions of that particularly chaotic time, or, more accurately, her own motions of thought and cognitive insecurities during that moment in time when no event or person encountered seemed to be operating according to rational or knowable laws. She is in many ways our poet of the irrational. Instead of presenting her observations in neat linear patterns that follow a single structuring logos, she presents them as the myriad fragmented interventions that they are. She leaves the sense-making, the imposition of order, to others.

A world-class essayist

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4.5 stars
I read this when it first came out; it opened my 13-year old eyes to many things. One that has stayed with me is that Didion isn't constantly writing as a woman. She writes as a person and a thinker. She has a distinctly female viewpoint, but doesn't hit the reader over the head with it like a weapon. She lulls and then challenges you with her intelligence and perspective, and by the end you just naturally think, of course women are as smart as men. Maybe smarter.
My Dad loved Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and read every word they wrote as soon as it was published. I was damn lucky to grow up in a house full of great books by great thinkers.
This is a fine companion to Slouching Towards Bethlehem; if you don't know Didion's writing, it's time to get familiar with her. She's quality.

Romantic ethic

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From 1966 to 1971 the author felt she had lost her script. It was hard to surprise her, hard to get her attention. At San Francisco State, in a campus uproar, the third president of the institution was referred to as Hitler Hayakawa. All narrative is sentimental. Connections are equally meaningful or senseless. Five years after James Albert Pike pronounced Grace Episcopal Cathedral finished, he left the Episcopal Church. He drove into the Jordanian wilderness with his new wife to experience Jesus's life and died. His wife lived.

The West starts where the average rainfall drops below twenty inches. The lack of water consumes consciousness. The state bought the Gallatin Mansion in 1908 for its governor. Under Reagan a new mansion was built. Jerry Brown refused to occupy it. The Getty stirs social discomfort. It embarasses people. It is old fashioned, didactic. It does not release the inner child in a museum-goer.

Joan Didion describes the experience of reading Doris Lessing as the hound of heaven commandeering the attic. Lessing is portrayed as a writer undergoing a profound and continuing cultural trauma. Georgia O'Keefe claimed attention for what she had done. At the Royal Hawaiian the essayist observes that great hotels have always been social ideas. The Royal Hawaiian opened fourteen years before the Pearl Harbor debacle. Women dressed in printed silks and lined cashmere cardigans inhabit the place. Joan Didion thinks of Honolulu as belonging to James Jones.

At Berkeley in the fifties, Didion's alma mater, no one was surprised by anything. The author feels she came into the world with a romantic ethic, believing that salvation lay in extreme and doomed commitments.

She Always Has an Eye, and an Ear

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Joan Didion always seems to look out at you from her book jackets in a straightforward, level-headed way, yet her readers will know she has a somewhat cockeyed view of life. Very Californian, as she quotes Bernard De Voto,"'The West begins, where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches." But hardly sunny, she's dark,dark: she has made the literature of nervous breakdown her own. We saw it in "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," "Play It As It Lays," and "A Book of Common Prayer;" also in "The White Album," essays first collected and published in 1979. She eyes the 1960s, and California, quite closely; she sketches the 1960's so well, in fact, she might almost have imaginatively invented them. It's all here, the Manson family, the Black Panthers, the historic doings at the University of California, Berkeley.

She says"...there were odd things going on around town. There were rumors. There were stories. Everything was unmentionable, but nothing was unimaginable. This mystical flirtation with the idea of 'sin'-- this sense that it was possible to go 'too far,' and that many people were doing it-- was very much with us in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969. A demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community. The jitters were setting in. I recall a time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full. On August 9,1969, I was sitting in the shallow end of my sister-in-law's swimming pool in Beverly Hills when she received a telephone call from a friend who had just heard about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanski's house on Cielo Drive. The phone rang many times during the next hour. These early reports were garbled and contradictory. One caller would say hoods, the next would say chains. There were twenty dead, no, twelve, ten, eighteen. Black masses were imagined, and bad trips blamed. I remember all of the day's misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised."

She continues," Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled."

What an eye she has, what an ear, and what luck, too, right place at right time. And lucky us; she's given us so many reports from the front, wherever it may be, and of whatever it may consist. She continues to, still. I recently saw her speak at the Los Angeles Times Book Fair, on the UCLA campus, shortly after the death of her beloved husband, which she conveyed in such burning prose in "The Year of Magical Thinking," her highly-recommended book on the subject. She was all there: her emotions, but also, her eye, and ear.

Brutal, honest, and real

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Didion's genius, in the book and a half of hers that I've read, is to waste not a single word on her evisceration of the culture she saw around her. But "evisceration" isn't the right word, and her essays thus far haven't really been about the culture around her. She sees a United States that is unintentionally ironic at every turn, and that has fallen apart in ways that ultimately crawl under all of our skins and drive us insane. The idealism of the Sixties turned into the madness of the late Sixties, and Didion was right there to watch the results unfold. She stands back and documents it with a few quick flicks of the paintbrush: just enough of an outline to make you understand the horror of what she sees, and then she moves on. The essays are structured, I think intentionally, with the quick cuts of modern movies. The images together don't make sense -- didn't in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and certainly don't in The White Album. The title essay in the latter is about a period in her life (probably right around the time she was writing Bethlehem) when the stories that we use to explain our world stopped making sense, and her life crumbled as a result. Her prose perfectly captures what I take to be the tone of her mind.

She's too smart to accept easy answers. Every time someone makes an argument -- even implicitly -- Didion is there with the knife to hack away the dross. I bet conversations with her are spectacular: challenging, thought-provoking, and energizing.