South and West (2017)

It's tempting to get excited and jump up and down and want to compare Joan Didion's latest, some notebook writing from the '70s, with something like VU and Another View, the lost Velvet Underground albums that emerged in the mid-'80s. That might be overstating, but the key is that this is way good stuff, from arguably the peak of her writing powers, and with those powers on display. It's two separate sets of notes for pieces Didion never wrote, one from 1970 as she traveled the South, the other from 1976 in California, revolving around Patty Hearst. The first part, on the South, is much the bulk of the book and the best part too. The California stuff is more like a reprisal of her 2003 meditation on California, Where I Was From. But Joan Didion (and John Gregory Dunne) traveling the South in 1970 is priceless. All the book's blurbers want it to be a prescient look into America's future, which no one in 1970 expected. But all the cant and rhetoric of reflexive patriotism and instant dismissal of progressive ideas on moral grounds already lived in the South of 1970. It's probably more fair to say it never stopped living there in the first place. If anything, it was more raw back then. School integration is not just a fresh topic, but still ongoing. And the wearisome oppression of the South by political correctness is well underway. Natives, such as the white owner of a radio station in Meridian, Mississippi, that features black music, speak warily of racial issues, apparently trying to tone down the racism, apparently without knowing how to, leading to some tendency for an aggrieved defensive tone. At the same time it's also comically apparent that Didion's arrogance and "coastal elitism" (scare quotes) are just as much in play in these encounters, even through the screen of her own writing. Joan Didion is a bit of a name-dropper and usually haughty about food. She also reviews the swimming pools at the motels they stay in, a telltale preoccupation. It's possible that, in the editing, some of the Blue v. Red contrasts that define all American politics today and have reached such a toxic new crescendo with the rise of Donald Trump may have been sharpened for the sake of our era. Of course, these notebook passages are as crystalline as all Didion prose. She went to the South in 1970 looking for antecedents to the culture of the West, where so many Southerners moved after the Civil War. She contrasts the sense of the burden of history in the South with the attempt to erase history in the West. As usual, the greatest pleasures are in Didion's sharp, acerbic eye and ear for details. This book is too short, and somewhat uneven, but so were those lost Velvet Underground albums.

In case it's not at the library.

Blue Nights (2011)

I like both Blue Nights and The Year of Magical Thinking nearly as much as my favorite by Joan Didion, The White Album. It is very hard on every level, what she is doing, has done. Hard to live through it most of all. The whole story is so harrowing as to be almost too personal, too specific in all its necessary detail. First the sudden death of her husband and then the illness and subsequent death of her adopted daughter. See how quickly it becomes overloaded and tender. Is it necessary that I characterize her deceased daughter as "adopted"? It is so interesting that these things happen to Joan Didion—terrible, awful, shattering events. But interesting nonetheless. The White Album is a masterpiece of anxiety and dread which somehow feels insulated from a certain perspective, as she always maintains her cool and poise in her authorial voice, no matter what the breakdowns and gnawing cerebral fears described. Blue Nights is not so different, though the vector tends naturally more toward the internal. Joan Didion is as ruthlessly clinical in her approach to her daughter Quintana Roo, as she is to everything, going through her papers and quoting from them, attempting to understand across the great chasm between parent and child, emotional problems, potential mental health issues, and lots of good old generation gap, which happens in every family ad infinitum. Tolstoy's dictum about families always missed the fact that all families are complex combinations of the happy and unhappy, or perhaps it didn't. It is also interesting how unexposed in the end is Quintana Roo—I have little sense of her as a person, who she was, what she was about. This is partly by design I'm sure—Didion is that good—but also parents and children inevitably miss great swaths of one another's lives, often through willful intentionality but also as a function of how much time they must spend on the planet with and without the other. Quintana Roo was not even 40 when she died. So much is compressed into the strange and powerful last line of this book: "Yet there is no day in her life on which I do not see her."

In case it's not at the library.

The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)

Even for someone without the formidable writing skills of Joan Didion there's a story of significant dimensions to be told here: A few days after Didion's daughter lapses into a coma for reasons not entirely clear, her husband of nearly 40 years, the writer John Gregory Dunne, suddenly suffers and dies from a cardiac event in their home, which Didion witnesses just as she's about to serve dinner. Her daughter's health remains precarious over the year that follows. Because of Didion's and Dunne's reputation, or even fame, there's an odd blending here of facile gossipy fascination and genuinely gripping story of human pathos. As we have seen, Didion has spent much of her career trafficking in highly personalized anxiety and dread, and here she is, out of a long life of evident privilege, suddenly confronted with samples of some her worst nightmares—some of the worst nightmares of anyone. I found my sympathies thus not entirely unmixed, though more often than not feeling for her, and achingly so. One doctor very early, shortly after the death of her husband—I mean literally in the few hours following—refers to her as "a pretty cool customer," which rings true in every way imaginable. Yet her life's nonfiction work, even as it maintains the pose, makes apparent that she is actually anything but. Acting as if she is "a pretty cool customer" is simply what she knows to do. Typically enough, for example, she reports, and with a good deal of lucidity, on how she is unable to throw away Dunne's shoes because he will need them when he comes back, even as she more than readily acknowledges how well she knows he is not coming back. Even at the end of the book, when she is writing a year and more out from the events, she notes in passing that she still has the shoes. Things like that make this finely observed work, to a remarkable degree. Sudden death, even long-expected death, does have a way of throwing one into such mindsets. The denial of reality is very clear in such moments. One may continue to function entirely as someone who has accepted reality, yet the denial rages on inside, consciously or not. Didion, thrown willy-nilly into the greatest extremities of her life, reports back with exactly the kind of poise and eye for the telling detail and sharply etched prose that we have come to expect from her in even the most dispassionate areas. It makes me suspect what a lifeline her work must be for her, and I find myself respecting her for it all the more.

In case it's not at the library.

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)

Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11 (2003)

As a product, this is a rather strange book—more of a pamphlet, really, hardly bigger in dimensions than a mass market paperback and with a total of 44 pages, plus Frank Rich's preface. It contains a single piece by Joan Didion that ran originally in the "New York Review of Books," where the articles can go long, but generally not book-length. Of course, with 9/11 and its aftermath top of mind once again with the recent news of the death of Osama bin Laden, it's not hard to see how one gets to formulating a book like this. It was such an alarming and depressing time (not that it's gotten particularly better, but at least the overbearing urgency for making colossal mistakes seems to have diminished somewhat), and, indeed, this essay was a heartening meditation in that time, when so few seemed able to see so clear what was happening. "[Americans] recognized even then," she writes, "with flames still visible in lower Manhattan, that 'bipartisanship' and 'national unity' had come to mean acquiescence to the [George W. Bush] administration's preexisting agenda—for example the imperative for further tax cuts, the necessity for Arctic drilling, the systematic elimination of regulatory and union protections, even the funding for the missile shield." I'm not entirely convinced a majority of Americans actually did recognize that, but certainly from our vantage today the bad faith and incompetence of Bush and Cheney can be seen more than ever in stark relief. It was plainly visible then too, as this little book argues and provides evidence for by its very existence, but I lean toward believing it wasn't a message anyone seemed interested in hearing—even from what I observed among the decadent left in its enclaves on the coasts. Ultimately that might make this tract interesting more as historical artifact. Try to imagine, as you read, that her points of view were considered dangerously radical, naïve, hidebound, and foolish. In actuality (or "meanwhile back here on planet Earth"), it overflows with a common sense, rendered with Didion's typical acerbic tartness, that was all too sadly in short supply then. We are still paying for the mistakes of that time—literally, still paying, for example for the radical, naïve, hidebound, and foolish Iraq War adventure. Which still has its defenders. And so, if only for that reason, this remains essential, even as it likely also remains an exercise of preaching to a choir.

In case it's not at the library.

Political Fictions (2001)

Joan Didion's turn to the public sphere, after years of specializing in a kind of insular brooding clockwork essay built out of private obsessions (perfected in The White Album), hardly means we lose the best of her—she's still as precise as ever, as impatient, as outraged, as brittle, as unwilling to suffer nonsense. The only difference in this collection is that she's looking harder than ever at the fools who run the country, the prevaricating slippery politicians from all across the spectrum and the feckless media (the television figures make the biggest buffoons, but nobody gets off scot-free) that enable them. Even with one essay here about the 1988 political season, "Insider Baseball," already published in her last collection of nonfiction, After Henry, there's still plenty here to send you away thrilled and depressed by the realities she uncovers. We're so used to things being the way they are that we often lose sight of just how distorted they actually are. Not Didion, thank God. The gong she keeps banging here is the simple one of our disaffected electorate, never roused even at its most enthusiastic to turn out in numbers much higher than 50%-55% of eligible voters. What could it mean if they did? She asks virtually every reporter, every wise man of politics, every inside player that she meets about this simple fact and none of them have any good answers for it. It's not in their interest to have them, for one thing, an unpleasant fact about which Didion continually tries to raise a commotion, in her quiet iron-willed way. She examines Newt Gingrich and the Republican revolution of the '90s. Then she sets her sights on Bill Clinton and the Monica Lewinsky scandal. "No one who ever passed through an American public high school could have watched William Jefferson Clinton running for office in 1992 and failed to recognize the familiar predatory sexuality of the provincial adolescent," she starts her piece, written in 1998, going on to point to Jesse Jackson's quote that Clinton is "nothing but an appetite." And she's basically on his side, as horrified as so many of us were by the Republican overreach of that scandal (certainly a clarifying moment for me). But that's much of the appeal here. Ten years after this book was published things are only worse. Between the covers of it Joan Didion is as clear-sighted as she can be, looking at something as nearly filthy as it can be. The results are unremittingly fascinating, and disheartening, and thrilling.

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

After Henry (1992)

With this collection of essays Joan Didion rounds back into form—or, that is, the form by her I most appreciate, personal essays on quirky topics, dispassionately observed and delivered with a hard glitter—very nearly rivaling her best, The White Album. Her interest in U.S. politics starts to come into focus with a few pieces on Washington, D.C., including "Insider Baseball" (which also appears in her next collection, Political Fictions), an interest arriving at just about the time, in the twilight of the Reagan ascendancy, when the right-wing tipped over into fantasist realpolitik and infected the rest of us with all their lunatic bellowing, which we go along with, to our everlasting shame, if they would just shut up once in awhile. Didion refuses to have any of it and seemed to know even then that they never would shut up. She can be positively acid in the details she focuses on, examining the disinclination of American news media to actually report much of significance, noting in 1988 for example that, "American reporters 'like' covering a presidential campaign (it gets them out on the road, it has balloons, it has music[...]), which is one reason why there has developed among those who do it so arresting an enthusiasm for overlooking the contradictions inherent in reporting that which occurs only in order to be reported." Most of the essays focus on California life, looking at Patty Hearst, nuclear reactors in a region affected by earthquakes, southern California property values (and the strange culture it enables), Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, murder and mayhem in the picture industry, the fire seasons, and the history and evident purposes of the "Los Angeles Times" (which she argues convincingly for being a uniquely great national paper). Then a final stop in New York, "Sentimental Journeys," a decidedly unsentimental consideration of the Central Park Jogger case (well before it was known that those convicted and imprisoned for it did not do it, which she seems to sense). Her range of subjects, her evident fascination with all of them, and the clearness of vision and scrupulous attention she brings to her language and facts make practically everything here not only utterly engrossing and enlightening but worth visiting and revisiting. She's that good.

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

Miami (1987)

With this, Joan Didion sets herself to addressing the fever swamp that is southern Florida, taking her snapshots and making her portrait in the mid-'80s, at about the time when Michael Mann was putting a glossy sheen on it with his hit TV series, "Miami Vice," and Brian De Palma was making a lurid cartoon you couldn't look away from of the underworld gangster life fueled by cocaine. Didion is not particularly beguiled by their preoccupations, however—though certainly she takes a good look at the effects of the drug trade—preferring instead to examine the larger Cuban cultural and political forces that have effectively controlled the city for decades, tracing its origins back to even before the Cuban revolution of the late '50s. She makes a workmanlike case for its centrality not only in local Florida politics but nationally as well, as one thing has led seemingly inexorably to the next: the run-up to the revolution in the '50s, the inept Bay of Pigs response in the early '60s, various mysteries emerging from the aftermath of the JFK assassination, the Watergate burglary, the Mariel boatlift of 1980 and the huge impact that it had, Reagan's attempts to use this political football to his advantage, and more. It's all delivered with Didion's usual terse, complex language and air of paranoid brooding and with her typical fastidiousness in nailing down factual details. It's not a topic that interests me a great deal, so for me it was a bit of a grind—I am starting to notice that Didion's thickets of language are most effective for me when they address a topic I am willing to immerse myself in as deeply as she always immerses herself. So take that as a caveat. Even so, her ability to profile the political tensions and various lacunae and blind spots of the players in Miami is so precise as to be indelible, and unquestionably persuasive, contrasting the styles of the Southern whites who felt the place was theirs at the time (and likely do still) with the Cubans who have effectively turned it into a kind of offshore base of operations from which to attack Cuba. Those, like me, wondering why more than half a century of Castro has still not produced anything like normalized relations between the United States and Cuba will find any number of clues here.

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

Salvador (1983)

Though this comes in at just a little over a hundred pages—less than that in the Everyman's edition—it still stands as one of Joan Didion's best nonfiction works. Taking on the task for the "New York Review of Books" of examining Reagan administration efforts in El Salvador in the early '80s, she uncovers a whole lot of ick when she turns over the rock of that particular foreign policy. Reporting from the ground (she was there during the early summer of 1982), she is uniquely suited and in particularly good position to cover the dread and horrors and various hallucinatory stresses produced by a war zone, even if it's the kind of simmering, just barely restrained war zone she encounters in that small Latin American country, about the size of Massachusetts, which suddenly loomed so large for U.S. right-wingers at the time. I should say rather especially if those are the conditions. Didion bravely tries to pick apart what the conflict is about, even as dozens of people are dying gruesome deaths every day all around her, their bodies turning up mutilated on the sides of roads and piled in mountain cul de sacs, eventually brought to overworked morgues for the frustrating and ultimately impossible work of identification and disposal. It's not safe anywhere after dark and in many places it's never safe at all, but she does what she can. She listens carefully to the public statements, interviews all the principals who will sit for her, and attempts to fit it all into the authoritative histories she has lugged along with her. But as with Vietnam—and it's no coincidence that the best companion book for this is surely Michael Herr's Dispatches—there's little sense to be made of it. It starts from the fever swamps of right-wing abstracted thought, proceeds through various shadings of the greed of war profiteers and the otherwise generally power mad, and concludes with the some of the most powerless people on the planet systematically slaughtered willy-nilly to further the aims of ... something. In the argot (down the road), "Mistakes were made." Didion, of course, who famously has no patience for such lunacy, in this case has little time for it either. She's too busy trying to keep herself alive and maintain relative sanity, and the hell with poise, as she shuttles about this menacing jungle, continually trying to find ways to make the pieces fit together. They don't, and she penetrates to that brilliantly. In the end perhaps the best she can do is headnote it with a lengthy passage from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. When that short novel stands in as your moral compass, you know there's going to be trouble.

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

The White Album (1979)

Named for the Beatles album that does not actually bear the name, about which it is anyway entirely silent, this may well be Joan Didion's single best book. In many ways it plays like the album, or certainly side 4, an ostensible collection of essays that of themselves stand only arbitrarily as discrete units, often composed rather of fragments only tangentially related to anything but a brooding sense of "the '60s," a concept forever maddeningly just out of reach. The title piece, for example, which opens the book, runs on for some 40 pages, touching on southern California life, rental homes, mental illness, serial killers and the ubiquitous dread of a knock on the door, the old Hollywood, the Doors, Huey Newton's health plan, strategies for gaining access to Eldridge Cleaver, traveling tips, Ezra Pound, campus unrest at San Francisco State College, "Wichita Lineman," Linda Kasabian, synchronicity writ intimate, and the afterlife according to the manager of a motel in Pendleton, Oregon, a Mormon. Elsewhere, Didion attempts to establish the distance she's incapable of in regard to her homeland, California, about which she remains endlessly fascinated in spite of herself. She examines women and the women's movement through the lenses, implicitly, of Doris Lessing and Georgia O'Keefe (the latter reminding of Didion's sincere regard and esteem for John Wayne both as an icon and as a human being). She travels to Hawaii, Colombia (foreshadowing some of her best '80s work), and the Hoover Dam. She attempts to explain the movie industry, authoritatively, from the inside. She apologetically breaks down the marketing physics of shopping malls. She takes to her bed with migraine headaches. If this is not her best book it's certainly the beginning of a string of them that continues to impress, and an excellent starting point for anyone interested in her. The cryptic, elliptical style is first perfected here, the compression and almost poetic precision of her elegant language, the constant nagging sense of dread balanced by continual attempts at irony that are understood always as insufficient and vain even in the act of making them, and the eternal yearning to make some kind of sense, any kind of sense, of this baffling kaleidoscope of American culture—inside of and beyond "the '60s," which haunt her.

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

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)