Didion continues her trails of doom
Book’s observations of American psyches may have greater resonance in 2017, writes
The excitement was virtually palpable among Joan Didion fans on hearing she had a book coming out this year. But as the subtitle of South and West suggests, this isn’t so much a book as a notebook. And the material is not new, but two abandoned pieces of journalism decades old.
Fortunately for us, as Nathaniel Rich points out in his foreword, Didion is such a terrific writer that these previously unpublished notes ‘‘surpass in elegance and clarity the finished prose of most other writers’’. With that in mind, and given that Didion is now 82, we’ll take what we can get.
In recent years she has become better known for the two grief memoirs that followed the deaths of her husband and daughter (The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights), but from Slouching Towards Bethlehem to Where I was From, America has arguably always been Didion’s subject, and the subject on which she produces her best work.
Didion’s observations of the American South and West psyches may well have a greater resonance in 2017 than if they had been published when they were first written.
South, the longer of the two pieces, describes a four-week driving trip she took through Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, in 1979.
Although Didion says there was ‘‘no reportorial imperative’’ for the trip, from the outset her radar gravitates towards the South’s decadence and degeneration: ‘‘In New Orleans in June the air is heavy with sex and death … death by decay, over ripeness …. Bananas would rot and harbour tarantulas …. Children would take fever and die.’’
Didion was not especially happy touring the South and avoided travelling to any city with an airport big enough to have allowed her to fly out of it. A sense of uneasiness and dread infuses all her descriptions of the South – from the hotel pools and reptile zoos to the women who seem to ‘‘live their lives on several contradictory levels’’.
West recalls an aborted assignment for Rolling Stone magazine after Jann Wenner asked her to cover the 1976 trial of publishing heiress Patty Hearst, facing robbery charges after becoming radicalised by the guerrilla group that had kidnapped her. Didion agreed to cover the trial in San Francisco because, as a California native, she thought it ‘‘might have some meaning’’ for her. But we soon learn ‘‘that didn’t turn out to be true’’, and the piece becomes a lyrical meditation on her privileged upbringing in Sacramento, ‘‘the peculiar vacuum’’ in which she now realises she was raised.
In a famous attack on Didion in 1979, Barbara Grizzutti Harrison reduced her style to a mere ‘‘bag of tricks’’, saying ‘‘the only happy ending’’ for Didion is ‘‘an unhappy one’’.
South and West contains her signature trails of doom (the dead babies, the tarantulas) and snobbery (the Fieldcrest towels, the Waterford crystal), but ‘‘bag of tricks’’ or no, it also confirms that Didion’s notes really are better than the complete work of most other writers.