I don’t think this challenge needs much explanation. It’s a pretty widely accepted fact that Joan Didion is great. But for a brief explanation, I occasionally enjoy the rush of completing an author’s collective work and familiarizing myself with their rhythm and prose. In the past I’ve done this only with Haruki Murakami (which resulted in two research papers). I basically chose Didion as my next victim because I saw this gorgeous photo of her on Pinterest last month and wanted to know what she was all about.
Anyways, this will be a three part post that discusses 5 books each. Kind of long and niche but hopefully you will match my freak today. So here’s part one!
Run River
3.75✪
I seriously enjoyed this one. It’s her debut novel, opens with a gunshot heard by Lily Knight McClellan. She appears to understand immediately what happened before she goes to the river and sees her husband Everett McClellan with her lover’s, Ryder Channing’s, dead body. Lily cooly coaches Everett through their possible options (say it was self-defense, send the body down the river…) before the novel leaps back in time to follow their entire relationship. The rest of the narrative primarily focuses on Lily but includes short perspectives of Everett and his younger sister Martha.
Lily’s narrative is sad and frustrating. The reader follows her slow unraveling as she passively but unwillingly gets roped into marrying the first man she sleeps with (Everett). I really loved how Didion only subtly dipped to her interiority. She gave a great sense of Lily’s passivity to her lack of agency.
I found the beginning disorienting and I was frequently tripping over the prose. But after the jarring opening sequence I was quickly enthralled. Here’s a passage I liked that discusses the sort of passivity I mentioned— This is just after Lily hears of her father’s sudden death:
“Oh Christ,” Lily whispered. “He’ll never have the marmalade.” She had gotten up at dawn to make pear marmalade for her father before the heat came up. The marmalade was a kind he especially liked, from a recipe of his mother’s, and she had planned it as a surprise. She had gone to the ranch the day before to get the pears from Gomez. “The marmalade would have shown him,” she whispered. “Shown him what?” Edith Knight asked, but Lily did not answer because she had put her knuckles against her teeth to keep from screaming and had slipped down beside the sink to the linoleum floor.
[...] Later the doctor gave Everett enough pills to keep her quiet for two days and Edith Knight said she had never, never in her entire life, seen anybody react the way that child reacted to a death in the family… (81).
There is a lot of discourse in the reviews I’ve read about Run River being a sort of “novel for the sake of a novel;” a contrived academic exercise. This perspective is understandable but perhaps reductive. The novel quite enjoyable for its writing, setting, and societal commentary. Each character that Didion follows seems like they should fit perfectly into the California background: Lily the old Governor’s daughter, Everett the boy next door, Martha the intelligent younger sister. But each of them struggle to fit and ultimately suffer from the rigid structures they’re squeezed into.
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
4.25✪
A compelling collection of Didion’s essays and one of her most well-known books.
I wasn’t so fond of the California essays from the first half of the collection, but I really liked her personals and the Seven Places of the Mind. Her writing on Hawaii, New York, and Alcatraz were especially well done and intriguing. She has a great way of giving the reader an acute sense of setting that I am jealous of.
I honestly found the titular essay to be a bit dated. The premise is to compare Yeats’ poem about the end of the world to the hippie culture in San Francisco. The culture she writes on is certainly very strange and often troubling, but I was unconvinced of the gravity. I doubt that teenagers haven’t done stranger things in the past.
Here are some thoughtful passages from my favorite essay in the collection, “On Keeping a Notebook”:
“Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one’s self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends” (379)
“We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one of them, a seventeen-year-old, presents little threat, although it would be of some interest to me to know again hat it feels like to sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and-orange-juice and listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford and their echoes sing “How High the Moon” on the car radio” (379).
Salvador
3.25✪
Salvador is a very short book Didion wrote about American interference with the civil war in El Salvador. It is mostly comprised of three extended essays she wrote for the New York Review of Books. She actually spent two weeks in El Salvador, which she describes as “terrifying.” I had to do a bit of background research in order to understand what was going on, but this was a very interesting book.
Firstly, Joan Didion grasps on to small details. She shows the reader the importance of minute, even mundane facts of life there:
“Roberto D’Aubuisson is a chain smoker, as were many of the people I met in El Salvador, perhaps because it is a country in which the possibility of achieving a death related to smoking remains remote” (30).
The description of “achieving a death” is also pleasing and subversive. It’s a humorous way to talk about something quite dark. Similarly:
“...that the dining room had discontinued its breakfast buffet, a fact often remarked upon: no breakfast buffet meant no action, little bang-bang, a period of editorial indifference in which stories were filed and held, and film rarely made the network news” (49).
Didion shows that something so simple as a hotel breakfast buffet reflects the incredible power of American media. She is just so incredibly observant!! It’s a joy to be let into her mind like this.
I enjoyed her sparse writing about the experience of being in El Salvador:
“As I wanted to cross back over the Boulevard de los Heroes to the Camino Real I noticed soldiers herding a young civilian into a van, their guns at the boy’s back, and I walked straight ahead, not wanting to see anything at all” (36).
I would have really loved more of this. Her forced passivity is chilling. But the scarcity of her experiential writing keeps the reader from getting a great sense of the country as a real environment. I think the only other details that really stood out to me for the environment was her focus on their shifting vocabulary, such as “la solución” and “disappear.” “La solución” is a word she accidentally misuses with locals, not knowing it has gained heavy political connotations with the dictator. She also learns that “disappear” in El Salvador acts as both a passive and active verb: The family disappeared after the death of their son / The guerillas disappeared their son.
To my personal dismay, there are few interviews: one is Victor Barriere, who is “a grandson of the late General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, the dictator of El Salvador between 1931 and 1944 and the author of what Salvadorans still call la matanza, the massacre, or ‘killing,’ those weeks in 1932 when the government killed uncountable thousands of citizens, a lesson” (53). Obviously this is a fascinating subject, but an incredibly biased one that will have been more reflective of America’s perspective towards El Salvador. Didion writes about after the interview: “...after I dropped them there it occurred to me that this was the first time in my life that I had been in the presence of obvious ‘material’ and felt no professional exhilaration at all, only personal dread” (56). She obviously speaks of him critically, but he gets the most extensive coverage of any individual.
The only El Salvadoran we receive a bit from is one of her and her husband’s workers in Los Angeles, who gave them instructions on wat they must and must not do when they go to El Salvador:
“We must stay off the street whenever possible. We must never ride in buses or taxis, never leave the capital, never imagine that our passports would protect us. We must not even consider the hotel a safe place: people were killed in hotels” (77).
The primary information we receive is that “any situation can turn to terror” (105). The experiences she describe sound incredibly terrifying, but without more interviews, it was hard to get a sense of the fact that this terror is an everyday condition for residents of El Salvador.
The Last Thing He Wanted
2.25✪
I realized five pages into this book that I was not smart enough to read it. Five pages from the end I was still trying to pretend I understood Iran-contra.
So unfortunately I don’t know if I can make a proper review of this book. But I’ll write on what I can.
The Last Thing He Wanted is Didion’s last novel by choice. The story is about a woman named Elena who quits her job as a reporter for the 1984 Presidential election in order to take care of her father with dementia. The last thing her father wanted was for her to complete a deal where he would receive $1 million in order to basically organize Iran-contra.
The narrator is interesting: they are unnamed, sarcastic, and basically Didion’s own voice. They’re a writer who knew Elena previously who is working on a biography about Treat Morrison, who is some kind of high-level man from the state department who is also in Costa Rica. My grasp on this novel is not great, but I do see myself returning to it at some point in the future when I am smarter. I’m very interested in the US’ interferences with Latin America, and I’m sure this piece of fiction has a lot to say about it. But I don’t know if there is anything in here that isn’t covered in her other books that talk extensively of US and Latin America.
Anyways, here’s a passage I noted as liking. Elena’s daughter is assigned to write an essay about “the event that changed her life the most.” She’s unsure what to write about and settles on the death of her best friend in elementary school, but she confides in her mother that she didn’t feel necessarily changed by this event:
“I recall explaining that “change” was merely the convention at hand: I said that while it was true that the telling of a life tended to falsify it, gave it a form it did not intrinsically possess, this was just a fact of writing things down, something we all accepted.
I realized as I was saying this that I no longer did.”
The Year of Magical Thinking
4.75✪
I don’t think anyone needs me to tell you to read this. The Year of Magical Thinking is a modern classic and for very good reason.
I don’t know very much about grief but she writes about it in such an unusual, gripping way. One detail I particularly remember was how she tracked the increasing vocabulary of medical jargon as a passage of time for her daughter’s sickness.
I had a TA this spring that said this book got him through the death of his fiance. Her writing is seriously powerful, like a physical manifestation of grief.
Anyways, just read it.
I’ve been enjoying this project so far, even if her nonfiction is often slightly out of reach for me. I always enjoy getting a good sense of a good author’s mind. I love that Joan Didion is trending so much right now. I think reading her seriously levels up your mind and thoughtfulness. ✪