Where I Was From (2003)

I had a hard time connecting with Joan Didion's treatment of California history. It's one of her occasional nonfiction works (Miami is another) that strikes me as distractingly fussy about its language and, in general terms, ultimately too atomized, a typical attempt to cobble together disparate magazine pieces but this time one that rarely works as anything close to an organic, cohesive work imagined from the ground up. Certainly she is on to a very big theme here, an attempt to engage with the root of our culture's continuing pull toward nostalgia and its never-ending recall of everything as better "back in the day." She makes a very convincing argument that that's the case with California culture approximately since English-speaking European settlers claimed it for themselves. Now we tend to think of the two or three decades following World War II (until approximately Proposition 13 in 1978) as California's golden age—certainly I do. But many of the California natives living through it at the time were just as unhappy with the developments they were seeing, preferring to recall rather an era some 20 or 30 years earlier as the better times, even as residents between the wars pined for an older time themselves. And so on and so forth across the history of the state. I found isolated sections of Where I Was From quite interesting. Didion makes a good case that much of California's wealth traces directly to policies of the federal government that have afforded it a good deal of largesse—corporate welfare, to put it plainly, often aimed at the defense industry. Her look at the Spur Posse scandal of Lakewood High School in the early '90s seems to me particularly suited to her sensibilities, both in terms of the alleged crimes (various male students keeping a competitive record of their sexual conquests organized by a scoring system, with points awarded) and even more for its keen-eyed look at the context, the Lakewood suburb itself. She's very good on the ins and outs of the history of Lakewood, which, with Levittown, New York, was one of the earliest postwar suburbs, a vast gridwork of mass-produced single-family dwellings with a mall at the center of it, the entire development erected all at once virtually overnight in the early '50s. And she also gets into some of the intricacies of water distribution in California, particularly southern California, which are fascinating—and she is perfectly lucid about it. In many ways, I think I might have liked this more if it was simply presented as a collection of essays (reworked or otherwise) rather than something larger in scope and more ambitious.

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