Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)

I come to praise Joan Didion, not to bury her, and while this first of her collections of essays is widely praised and honored, and I remember admiring it quite a bit too a couple of times through—like back in the '70s and/or '80s—a more recent visit seemed to me somewhat disappointing. The much-vaunted pellucid clarity of her language, to start, now seems to have almost curdled over the years into finicky, brittle fisticuffs with long sentences and piled-on clauses, dependent and otherwise, willy-nilly seeking commas and semicolons for allies. (Not that I have anything to say about precision language, of course.) Worse, for me, her treatment of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury in the late summer of 1967 now reads as an unpleasant mix of petulant get-off-my-lawn carping, faux drama, and a willful obtuseness about what was in front of her eyes. I note without comment the deeply felt paean to John Wayne: "... although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I wait to hear." On the other hand, she hits the sweet spot of my latter-day infatuation, true crime foible, as well as anyone, with trademark cool style and an eye for the telling detail. Yet it seemed to me this time that even the crimes she chooses to focus on, noir plots where the hopelessly amateur slayings in the suburbs of Los Angeles are entirely for the insurance, feel a bit creaky with age, and predictable. The middle section, "Personals," which tartly delivers her dense, thoughtful, and acerbic views on morality, stands up best for me now. Time was that, when pressed, Didion is the author I would name as my one favorite, even then offering the caveat that that was strictly for her nonfiction; I have never got much from her novels. And I'm hardly going to give up on her yet. I have thoroughly enjoyed all of her collections of essays—maybe I was in a bad mood when I read through Slouching again recently. But I think I have to say that this may not be the place for those new to her to start.

In case it's not at the library. (Everyman's)