Reading Joan Didion (The Pop Lit Book Club)

READING J OAN D IDION

Recent Titles in The Pop Lit Book Club Reading Barbara Kingsolver Lynn Marie Houston and Jennifer Warren Reading Amy Tan Lan Dong Reading Cormac McCarthy Willard P. Greenwood Reading Khaled Hosseini Rebecca Stuhr Reading Toni Morrison Rachel Lister

READING JOAN DIDION Lynn Marie Houston and William V. Lombardi

The Pop Lit Book Club

GREENWOOD PRESS An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC

Santa Barbara, California  Denver, Colorado  Oxford, England

Copyright 2009 by Lynn Marie Houston and William V. Lombardi All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Houston, Lynn Marie. Reading Joan Didion / Lynn Marie Houston and William V. Lombardi. p. cm. — (The Pop Lit Book Club) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-313-36403-7 (hard copy : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-31336404-4 (ebook) 1. Didion, Joan—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Women and literature—United States—History—20th century. 3. Women and literature—United States—History—21st century. I. Lombardi, William V. II. Title. PS3554.I33Z69 2009 2009019894 8130 .54—dc22 13

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This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook. Visit www.abc-clio.com for details. ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America

CONTENTS

Preface

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Chapter 1

Joan Didion: A Writer’s Life

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Chapter 2

Joan Didion and the Genre

Chapter 3

Run River (1963)

Chapter 4

Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)

Chapter 5

Play It As It Lays (1970)

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Chapter 6

The White Album (1979)

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Chapter 7

Where I Was From (2003)

Chapter 8

The Year of Magical Thinking (2006)

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Chapter 9

Today’s Issues in Joan Didion’s Work

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Chapter 10 Pop Culture in Joan Didion’s Work Chapter 11 Joan Didion on the Internet

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Chapter 12 Joan Didion and the Media

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Chapter 13 What Do I Read Next? Resources Index

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PREFACE

Joan Didion’s work can be deceptively complex. While she has perfected a signature style that often involves a rather sparse sentence structure, her words pack verbal punches. Unpacking those ‘‘verbal punches,’’ the emotional weight they carry, and the historical and cultural artifacts that they reference was a harder task than either of us imagined. We learned that although a writer like Didion pares down her verbiage, this does not mean that her writing lacks sophistication; in fact, ‘‘less is more’’ when it comes to Didion’s writing style. Despite the challenges that her work presented, we both are glad to have had this opportunity to lay out for readers of all backgrounds the trajectory of Didion’s career and her contributions to American literature. What thrills us the most is being able to educate those readers who may be too easily swayed by Didion’s critics. Many of the criticisms leveled against her work reveal a failure to understand that her writing documents national identity by conjuring up bold outlines of sentiments that are only selectively colored in. Because she does not finish ‘‘coloring in’’ some of these images, her writing is deemed lacking. However, Didion’s style relies on the reader to bring something to her work. Her focus is the twentieth-century ennui that results from our disenchantment with grand narratives; she purposefully structures the masterful lacunae in her writing. To truly see the contribution Didion makes through her literature, one must have an appreciation for what is not there; one must see the beauty in what is left unsaid. Her style captures the disappointment of those who have reluctantly relinquished their desire for control over a disordered universe. Her work repeatedly suggests the darker sides of the social and economic revolutions of twentieth-century America by showing the negative consequences that ensue from the decline of the family unit, from vii

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an increase in the importance attributed to material excess, and from the maintenance of a naive religious view inherited from the Puritans that is hopeful about salvation and the good intentions of our national agenda yet fraught with guilt over, and too accepting of, moral decay. Few book-length guides to Didion’s work are available, and none yet take into account her 2005 award-winning nonfiction work The Year of Magical Thinking. We include an analysis of that work. Also, because the bulk of reader’s guides on Joan Didion’s work appeared in the 1980s, they are missing Didion’s 2003 autobiographical work Where I Was From. These previous reference works are rather outdated given the amount of work she has continued to produce and the amount of scholarship on her work that has appeared since then, especially materials that have appeared on the Internet. We hope that we have achieved a certain historical perspective in our summaries and analyses that will help readers understand Didion’s legacy and her place in American arts and letters. We begin with a short biographical essay about the major events in Didion’s life. Then, we outline the major genres and literary movements into which her writing falls. Next, we move on to summarize and analyze some of the most important of her major works. After that, we discuss how her work is relevant to contemporary issues in society, as well as the role popular culture plays in her work. We subsequently explore the information that is available about Didion on the Internet, along with her presence in the media. Finally, we provide a reading list of other works and authors that readers might like if they enjoyed Didion, along with a compilation of various resources available for further information. We thank Joan Didion (or J. Diddy as she is called by some blogging fans) for her work and for accomplishing, with a relentless bravado, the hard task she has given herself as a writer: baring her soul in the struggle to make sense of experience and history with the aim of rendering life meaningful to herself and to her readers. We also thank all of the reading groups, teachers, and scholars who bring her work to the attention of a greater reading audience and place her work in dialogue with the rest of American literature. On a personal note, we thank our contacts at Greenwood Press, our colleagues in the English department of California State University, Chico, and our friends and family members for their support. Will’s note: I thank my wife Jenny and son Hawk for their constant support of my studies and their inspiration and encouragement during the research of this book. Their love is always precious to my heart and I cherish them both beyond words. I also thank my co-author, professor,

Preface

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and graduate advisor, Dr. Lynn Houston, for introducing me to so many professional opportunities, not the least of which is this book. As a guide, her insight is thoughtful and provocative; as a mentor, her generosity is profound. Lynn’s note: For their love and support, I thank my parents, my brother, and Mark Adam Hammond. I express gratitude to my coauthor, Will, for his dedication to this project. He not only was tenacious in bringing the project to completion, but I also could count on him for work of the highest quality. His natural talents as a gifted literary scholar and writer have been further honed by the eagerness with which he has pursued his education. In the four years that I have worked with Will, I have seen him take his passion for the landscape of the Golden State and develop it into a specialty in the literature of California and the Western frontier. I especially enjoyed working with Will on this project because mentoring such a capable student became like a dance in which I forgot who was leading and who was following, and I was able to just lose myself in the music of Didion’s prose. I wish for him the same delightful experience in the future when he will mentor his own students as he further develops into the brilliant and dynamic teacher he is already well on his way to becoming.

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1 JOAN DIDION: A WRITER’S LIFE

Joan Didion was born on December 5, 1934, in Sacramento, California. During her childhood, her family lived in many different U.S. cities because her father held an administrative position in the U.S. Army and was required to travel. After finishing high school, she graduated from the University of California–Berkeley, with a degree in English, having taken a creative writing course from Mark Schorer, which represents some of the only formal training in writing that Didion received. Having inadvertently missed a required course in Milton she spent a summer writing papers on Milton and traveling weekly to Berkeley’s campus to deliver a lecture on his work. Although Didion had been writing since she was a young girl (she wrote her first short story at the age of five), her first published short story appeared in a student literary magazine named the Occident in 1956. It was awarded Vogue’s ‘‘Prix de Paris,’’ which entitled Didion to work as an assistant for Vogue magazine. For the next ten years, she lived in New York and wrote for various magazines, including Vogue, Mademoiselle, and The National Review, until she married fellow writer John Gregory Dunne in 1964 and they moved back to California. In the year prior to her marriage, her first novel, Run River, was published to much critical acclaim. Didion would continue to write for various publications, including Vogue (where in the late 1960s she had her own movie column), the Saturday Evening Post (which included a co-authored column with her husband, also in the late 1960s), Holiday, the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s

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Bazaar, Denver Quarterly, the American Scholar, Life, the New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, Esquire (which involved a co-authored column with her husband in the mid to late 1970s), and Michigan Quarterly Review. In 1966, she and her husband adopted a daughter who they named Quintana Roo, after a Mexican state on the Yucatan peninsula. Two years later, her collection of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem was published. In 1968, the Los Angeles Times named her ‘‘Woman of the Year.’’ In 1970, her bestselling novel Play It As It Lays was published and nominated for a National Book Award. It is listed on Time magazine’s list of 100 best books in the English language. Didion and her husband John Gregory Dunne often collaborated not only on columns and on editing each other’s work, but also on co-writing screenplays. They co-authored screenplays for Panic in Needle Park (1971), the movie that launched Al Pacino; the film adaption of Didion’s novel Play It As It Lays (1972); A Star Is Born (1976), starring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson; True Confessions (1981), which was based on Dunne’s novel of the same name; and Up Close and Personal (1996). Despite suffering from debilitating migraines and a sun sensitivity that requires her to wear large sunglasses when outdoors, Didion’s output has been prodigious. From 1977 to 1979, she produced a book a year: A Book of Common Prayer (1977), Telling Stories (1978), and The White Album (1979). From 1983 to 1987, she produced three books in five years: Salvador (1983), Democracy (1984), and Miami (1987). She has lectured at numerous universities, including her alma mater, the University of California–Berkeley, in 1975. During the mid-1980s, Didion and her husband moved back to New York City. She discusses the move and her relationship to New York City in her collection of essays entitled After Henry (1992). In 1996, her novel The Last Thing He Wanted was published and, in 2001, she tapped into her experiences in journalism to produce Political Fictions, which analyzed the news coverage of the presidential elections from 1980–1992. In 2003, she published a collection of essays about California culture entitled Where I Was From. In the same year, Didion’s daughter Quintana was hospitalized with a grave illness. Coming home one night from visiting her, Didion’s husband John suffered a heart attack and died. She wrote The Year of Magical Thinking to explore her suffering and grief after his death. Just as she finished that book in 2005, her daughter Quintana also passed away. The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award in 2005. Didion also adapted it into a play for Broadway starring Vanessa Redgrave and directed by

Joan Didion: A Writer’s Life

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It is popular among readers of Joan Didion’s work to associate Didion herself with her female characters. However, she has often commented in interviews that the women characters she develops in her writing are only tangentially connected to her own life. Certain works that draw heavily from her own life are the exception, such as Where I Was From and The Year of Magical Thinking. Joyce Carol Oates has this to say about Didion’s female characters: Joan Didion has never been easy on her heroines. Suicide always threatens them. In Run River the heroine drowns herself; in Play It As It Lays the heroine shares a bed with a man who happens to be committing suicide—after a breakdown she manages to survive, barely, minimally. In A Book of Common Prayer Charlotte Douglas suffers not only the loss of her daughter (whom she never sees again after the airplane hijacking), but the loss of her former husband (with whom she has desperately eloped, or reeloped) and the loss of an infant born prematurely, after an unwise pregnancy. (Oates, 139).

David Hare. In 2006, a collection of her first seven nonfiction works was published under the title We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live. In that same year, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Foundation. As of 2009, she was working on the screenplay for an HBO film about the life of Washington Post journalist and publisher Katharine Graham.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS How do Didion’s works accurately reflect the common advice given to writers to ‘‘write what you know’’? • Does Didion’s involvement with Hollywood movie culture lend credibility to her stories that are set in Hollywood or involve characters in the film industry? • How might it be limiting to talk about Didion’s characters only in terms of her life? •

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2 JOAN DIDION AND THE GENRE

Didion has been successful over her career in the genres of fiction and nonfiction. Her best-known fiction works are the novels Run River and Play It As It Lays, and among her more influential essay collections are Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album. Where I Was From and The Year of Magical Thinking can be categorized in the genre of the memoir and have received considerable attention in the early twenty-first century. She and her husband also wrote many successful screenplays. During the 1980s, a significant amount of Didion’s literary output was focused on the issues of Central America in fiction (A Book of Common Prayer) and nonfiction (Salvador), but first and foremost she is considered a California author. Her works with international settings can be read as further explorations into Didion’s understanding of frontier ideologies, and indeed, this is when she is at her best. Her cultural commentary has garnered her as much disdain by critics for what they construe as her elitism and conservatism as it has garnered her acclaim by fans for her sharp eye, intelligence, and clever turns of phrase. Beyond that, Didion escapes categorizing, but following are brief discussions of the three literary movements with which Didion can be most closely associated.

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Didion’s writing reveals that she comprehended the zeitgeist of the 1960s and 1970s so well because she was an outsider among outsiders. This is also what makes it so hard to group her with her contemporaries in New Journalism. In her essay ‘‘On the Morning after the Sixties’’ from The White Album, she writes about the significance of being a child of one’s time, and she expresses that she did not come of age in a revolutionary time, but just before it, in the 1950s. Didion makes continuous reference to Allen Ginsberg, who was also a child of the 1950s, in Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Arguably, figures like Ginsberg underscore the notion that revolution is where people find it, making him an interesting foil to what is often perceived as Didion’s conservatism. In Didion’s writing, Ginsberg appears not as her subject, but indirectly, on a poster in a Haight-Ashbury apartment, for example, or invoked as a young student’s model for nonviolence at Joan Baez’s institute. To those involved, Ginsberg seems infinitely relevant to the revolution Didion reports on, even while she herself does not. At one point in ‘‘Slouching’’ she is made to understand that she is too old to ‘‘get it,’’ while Ginsberg, nearly ten years older than her, is lionized. For her own part, Didion reveals a subtle, unacknowledged curiosity in him, which might also be her way of situating herself as a journalist: part of the story, but not a part of the story. This makes her point of view unique to New Journalism. Interestingly, Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Jack Kerouac were living together in Berkeley near the university the same year Didion graduated from the University of California–Berkeley. Although her character Lily Knight brings a radical Jewish boyfriend home to Sacramento from Berkeley in Run River, ironically, Didion does not seem to have been as aware of the portents of the flood of change that burst on California and the country, as many like Ginsberg had been.

THE NEW JOURNALISM Didion has long been associated with the New Journalism movement spawned during the cultural upheaval of the 1960s. Writers like Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, and Jimmy Breslin, along with Didion, defined the genre. These writers were the people who explained the disorder they saw in the world at the same time they were living it, making

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their personal experiences emblematic of their generation. New Journalism asserted itself almost as a new documentary form, and in Didion’s case her style is ‘‘the camera eye,’’ with her lens constantly zooming into the minutest details, and then panning out to expose the vast panorama of her cultural landscape, exposing the intricate web of influence exerted on her subjects. Her essays are montages or mosaics representing her not-quite-completed thoughts, or her personal confusion and sense of loss. Other New Journalists portrayed themselves as active participants in the action they depicted, and in Didion’s reportage she is no less visible in her work than these other New Journalists; however, she is far more representative of the core culture as an outsider. Her sense of loss is too great to fall wholesale into the arms of the new society being born. New Journalists recognized the inability of traditional journalism to capture the spirit and the social disarray of the 1960s and early 1970s. Furthermore, traditional journalism seemed to represent the institutional authority regularly and popularly being called into question at that time. New Journalists chose the disenfranchised—what Didion called the inhabitants of the ‘‘invisible city’’ in ‘‘Notes Toward a Dreampolitick’’ in The White Album—as their subjects. In that sense, the New Journalists were intentionally programmatic and deliberately iconoclastic because their sympathies were largely with the minor character in society. The articles these authors produced approach ethnographies in form and content; they have a foundational relationship to realism, often by way of thinly veiled memoir, making them equal parts art and fiction. Ultimately, New Journalism is the manifestation of a cultural phenomenon. Whereas traditional literature and journalism forms were ill-suited to the spirit of the age, these writers were attempting to find its rightful voice. The upshot is a hybrid form of journalism with literary merit.

WOMEN’S WRITING Didion has a conflicted relationship with the feminist movement. While her work fits most definitions of ‘‘women’s writing’’ because it examines problems that women experience in their daily lives, she is critical of the feminist movement in some of her essays. Didion’s work may present strong women characters as role models, or even present the ways in which women are discriminated against in a patriarchal system, but she is not wholly reconciled to applying the term feminist to her own political viewpoints. Play It As It Lays is perhaps one of her most ‘‘feminist’’ works in that it reveals an undercurrent of violence against women that risks destroying the main woman character. In this work

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Joan Didion’s novels and works of nonfiction are about people, usually women, whose lives are tangled and troubled. The books may be set in Haight-Ashbury, in Hollywood, or in an imaginary Central American republic. The women view their lives as a series of jump cuts, the variable sequence of juxtaposed images torn from personal experiences in no coherent pattern. Didion has learned the technique from movies. Didion’s novels, however, are only superficially about the women or about the trouble; on a deeper level, they are about the making of meaning, and the writer’s inability or unwillingness to do just that. For Didion is preoccupied, stylistically and thematically, with the concerns about interpretation and evaluation that Susan Sontag raises in ‘‘Against Interpretation.’’ Like Sontag, Didion wants to promote a fiction with an illusive surface without a final meaning that is imposed by narrator or author. From John Hollowell, ‘‘Against Interpretation: Narrative Strategy in A Book of Common Prayer,’’ 164.

and others, Didion crafts many of her women characters in such a way as to question society’s notions of sanity, mental illness, and emotional stability, especially as these are used to subjugate women. She explores women characters who have a fully evolved sense of self but who are nonetheless fragile, sometimes because they are lost in revolutionary times during which their moral ground has been pulled from underneath them and other times because they cling to the values of a previous era in a society that has dismissed this past.

CALIFORNIA AUTHORS Perhaps the most appropriate category in which to situate Didion’s writing is in her role as a California author. She was born and raised in Sacramento, California, in a household that was infinitely aware of its pioneer past. Her ancestors were anxious and restless overlanders who eventually had established themselves in the Sacramento Valley and who had become, very much in the Southern sense, landed gentry, seemingly separated from the machinations of the rest of the world by the geographic barrier of the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range. The substance of much of Didion’s work reflects this early immersion in California history, geography, and literature and gives it a distinctly Californian ‘‘sense of place.’’ Her referents may just as naturally and frequently be the

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journals of the Donner Party, forced to resort to cannibalism in the winter of 1846, or the works of Jack London, Robinson Jeffers, and Carey McWilliams, as they are to be the late 1960s Los Angeles music scene, the back lots of Hollywood, or the Manson murders. Didion’s primary preoccupations echo the themes of many California authors and of Western literature in general, placing her squarely within its rich tradition. In Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Where I Was From, and The White Album, for example, her purpose is to unearth the status of the American Dream, of which she claims the California Dream is the essence, and to examine it as it plays out in contemporary society. The dichotomy of savagery and civilization and California as a frontier relic whose ethos still affects the hopes and behaviors of its citizenry resonates across her work, either as subject or as the frame for a related

Didion’s preoccupation with California and its relationship to the American Dream is overt in much of her writing, be it in a story of failed marriage (‘‘Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream’’ in Slouching Towards Bethlehem), the story of a failed family (Run River), or her own story (Where I Was From). She reveals her fascination for this topic in Where I Was From by quoting at length from California-born philosopher Josiah Royce’s history, California (1886), which is subtitled ‘‘A Study of American Character.’’ Didion’s work is an attempt to extend Royce’s examination. An equally intriguing assessment of the American Dream can be found in Kevin Starr’s Americans and the California Dream (1973). Seemingly drawing his language from the final section of Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Starr says: Certainly an ideal California—a California of the mind—underwent composite definition: the elusive possibility of a new American alternative; the belief, the suggestion (or perhaps only the hope), that here on Pacific shores Americans might search out for themselves new values and ways of living. In this sense—as a concept and as an imaginative goal—California showed the beginnings of becoming the cutting edge of the American Dream. Geographically and psychologically, it was the ultimate frontier. No wonder it gripped the American imagination from the first! (Starr, 46) Both Starr and Royce are excellent companions to a reader’s understanding of Didion’s work.

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theme. Her work is directly relevant to contemporary discourses on the meaning of space and place in the West and how those spaces are inhabited. She is neither an urban author nor a rural one, and her sympathies are not so galvanizing or as direct as that of some of her peers. Hers is a sense of magic and loss predicated on her nostalgia, but these are nonetheless generative of nuanced social criticism. She challenges the American Dream and the myth-buster alike. That is her California spirit.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS Critics often object to the cultural commentary in Didion’s work. Do you find it objectionable? • How would you characterize Didion’s style? What other writers does she remind you of? • What is the New Journalism and how does Didion fit into this movement? • What is Didion’s relationship with the feminist movement? • How important is Didion’s connection to California? •

3 RUN RIVER (1963)

Run River is Joan Didion’s first novel as well as her first widely published work of any kind. Run River is essentially the story of a single moment, a single incident in the lives of Lily Knight McClellan and her husband Everett McClellan, but it is told as a generational story through a series of digressions, spanning the years 1938 to 1959, and is full of the nostalgia Didion was feeling for California at the time she wrote it. Page numbers cited from Run River are taken from the 1994 paperback edition (New York: Vintage). The novel’s setting is the Sacramento area of the Central Valley in Northern California, and this region lends the work its own particular sense of place. The lives of Didion’s characters are so deeply entrenched in the area, and their connection to the land is so deeply rooted in the struggles of their pioneer pasts, that the Sacramento River alternately torments them, soothes them, and, in many instances, takes their lives from them, just as an antagonist (or protagonist) would. The river is the site of nearly all their changes; it is the site of transcendent, as well as common and brutal, encounters. Run River is ultimately a novel of tensions left unspoken that manifest themselves in clumsy acts of violence and lust. At its most basic, it is a love story, but it should be considered as an archetypal tale of the myth of the West. Didion’s themes are change, loss, and decline. An extended examination of the themes and influences 11

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As Didion describes it in her 2003 memoir Where I Was From, her novel Run River was written when she was ‘‘a year or two out of [U.C.] Berkeley, working for Vogue in New York, and experiencing a yearning for California so raw that night after night [. . .] I sat on one of my apartment’s two chairs and set the Olivetti on the other and wrote myself a California river’’ (156–157).

of Run River is given by the author herself in the 2003 memoir Where I Was From. References to Run River can be found predominantly in Part III, Section 1, and to a lesser degree in Part III, Section 4 of Where I Was From. References to Didion’s connection to the Sacramento area and California in general can be found throughout that book, making Where I Was From an excellent companion volume to Run River for an extended discussion of the state’s culture, literature, and geography. The novel features four primary characters: Lily (Knight) McClellan: The novel focuses on circumstances surrounding Lily McClellan’s marriage to Everett, and spans her life from girlhood to the present. Everett McClellan: The son of a longstanding family in the Central Valley, Everett senses that he is the last of an era of ranching families. He and Lily have known each other all their lives but are suffering through an unhappy marriage. Martha McClellan: Everett’s younger sister Martha very much idolizes him. She has a tempestuous affair with Ryder Channing, who later becomes Lily’s lover. Martha is at once Lily’s only confidant and her primary competition Ryder Channing: Ryder is an outsider; he came to the region during World War II and has stayed behind, hoping to make a buck on real estate speculation. He and Everett become adversaries, not only because they compete for Martha and Lily’s affections but because ‘‘his kind’’ represents the end of Everett’s way of life and community influence. Additionally, there is a large cast of secondary characters in the novel, primarily the mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, and children of Lily and Everett. The McClellan neighbors Joe and Francie Templeton also figure into the plot of infidelity that motivates the primary characters of this book.

SECTION I. ‘‘AUGUST 1959’’ The structure of Run River, at first, might be difficult for some readers because its timeline is nonlinear and it is often told from the

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perspectives of different characters and also from the point of view of an omniscient narrator. This first section of the novel is brief. The action takes place in August 1959 and begins by disclosing the novel’s climactic moment. The reader enters Didion’s narrative midaction, as if Didion wants her reader to understand that this single moment in Lily and Everett McClellan’s lives is not an isolated one, not an accident, but is the result of an almost unavoidable fate. Everything in their lives has led up to this moment, whether they realize it or not. The reader is supposed to share this same sense of mental and emotional confusion with Didion’s characters. It is Didion’s project to imitate life in that regard: just because readers think they can see the causes and effects of their actions, they often are unable to understand the compelling motivations. That is why this opening section is written in floods of emotion, in bursts of memory, and in fragments of the past. The novel will not focus on its final act as much as it will be driven by these fragments, as they are slowly fitted into a comprehensible whole. By the novel’s end, readers see entire life stories, and they know why the characters feel compelled to do what they do. In Run River, Didion’s characters’ motivations are essential elements of the plot.

Chapter 1 In Chapter 1, Lily McClellan is alone in the upstairs bedroom in the main house on the McClellan ranch. She hears a gunshot fired down at their dock on the river but it does not seem to alarm her. She is very deliberate in her refusal to acknowledge it. Instead, she continues to get dressed unconsciously, knowing, but refusing to know, that her husband’s pistol is missing from its place in the drawer by their bed. The novel is narrated throughout by an omniscient narrator, but in Chapter 1 Didion also tells the story from Lily’s point of view, which on the page is represented by italics. That gives the novel a sort of double-consciousness that will be maintained over the course of the book. Whichever character the action is centered on is also able to drop his or her thoughts into the text. For instance, the change from straight narration to Lily’s italics happens within the same paragraph, shifting between the two perspectives, the told and the experienced. The broad interiority mapped by Lily’s memories, while seemingly tangential, is replete with all the underlying tension of the opening moment. The focus is foremost on the banalities of Lily’s days rather than on the shot itself; readers learn of Lily’s fears, anger, and regrets regarding her husband, her lovers, and her children. Didion’s narrative

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lens moves in and out, hovering around and closing in on the particulars of Lily’s world. Just as the reader grows accustomed to this technique, the narrative departs to a point earlier in the afternoon of the same day, showing a private scene between husband and wife, Everett and Lily McClellan, and the shared pain and infidelity that underscores their marriage.

Run River takes place in and around Didion’s hometown of Sacramento, California. She also writes extensively about her California roots in Where I Was From, and in sections of Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album. The attributes of her main character Lily Knight McClellan seem to be based in Didion’s autobiography. The traditions Lily and Martha and Everett are steeped in, and the landscapes that mean so much to them, stem directly from the stories of Didion’s pioneer ancestry and her familiarity with the founding families of the Sacramento region and their lifestyles. Didion represents the Sacramento Valley’s pioneer aristocracy and likewise gives her novel a genuine feeling of rootedness and ‘‘place’’ by deriving her characters’ last names from those associated with the area. Everett’s last name, McClellan, has no obvious antecedent in pioneer history; however, just north of Sacramento is McClellan Air Force Base, named in memory of a young aviator, that opened in 1934, only a year before Didion was born, and closed in 2001. She makes no mention of the base in Run River; instead, Martha’s and Lily’s lover Ryder Channing is stationed at Mather Air Force Base, south of the city. Considering that Channing symbolizes the ‘‘new’’ Californian of the post-World War II years, McClellan is an interesting choice for Didion to have made for the name of the last in a line of landed gentry, particularly when readers consider that the local bases were largely responsible for the industries that kept those like Channing in the area, bringing an end to their older, insular way of life. Lily’s maiden name, Knight, unlike McClellan, is the name of a prominent pioneer family in the Sacramento region. William Knight was a trader and a scout who came to California in 1841. He settled his family in 1843 at Knight’s Landing on the Sacramento River north of the city in present-day Yolo County. He went south to the gold fields of the Stanislaus River in 1849, founding Knight’s Ferry, but was gunned down on November 9 of that year.

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Chapter 2 In Chapter 2, Didion’s narrative shifts again, from Lily’s perspective to Everett’s. Didion describes the same moments following the gunshot, and because it is told from Everett’s point of view, the reader is essentially being given the other side of the same story. Again Didion shifts between an omniscient narrator and the primary character’s internal monologue. These interior digressions from Everett’s point of view divulge significant differences between his mind-set and Lily’s; whereas she is jaded, it is obvious that Everett is totally, though perhaps foolishly, committed to their lives on the ranch, even though his is a world of selfdeception. As of yet unable to grasp all of the inferences to the people and situations mentioned in this chapter, the reader nonetheless gets a glimpse of exactly what both characters are thinking at exactly the same time. In this way, through a tremendous economy of words and deliberate authorial control, Didion establishes an awareness of the driving forces in the lives of her main characters. Although primarily in an abstract sense, in so doing she also establishes for her reader the origin and meaning of the gunshot Lily hears, who the killer is, who the victim is, and the killer’s motivation. Everett has killed Lily’s lover Ryder Channing. That is the gunshot Lily heard while getting dressed and brushing her hair in her bedroom. Lily leaves the house and reaches the dock, the scene of the crime. She breaks down while Everett watches her as dispassionately as she herself had first reacted to the gunshot, like none of it was real, or mattered. Lily begins at this point to construct an excuse for Everett to make to the police but Everett refuses all of her lies. He appears to be willing to accept defeat. Everett has realized that he has achieved nothing by killing his wife’s lover, who, over the course of the novel, will come to represent a ‘‘new’’ Californian in opposition to the ‘‘old’’ order of California pioneer stock from which Everett and Lily have come. Although he has reclaimed his wife, Everett has resigned himself to his own fate: by living in the past, he has no future.

Chapter 3 As Everett lingers on the repercussions of his actions on his children, through a series of interior departures, the reader sees that he is not entirely defeated. Although he never thinks in terms of guilt or innocence, Everett cannot forego his responsibilities to his family and his land. He begins to consider Lily’s ways out even as readers see him recognize that his situation is beyond his control. Run River will follow this

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structure throughout: the story will be told by the frame narrator and, in addition, characters will share the experience of living through it. Through the shifting narrative perspectives, Didion’s reader is meant to sense the dual theme of her characters’ immediate loss and the loss of their way of life. With Ryder Channing’s death, an outmoded ‘‘code of the West’’ has been enacted by Everett, Lily, and Ryder. In the classic Western tradition, the code has been meted out with quick, violent justice. Through her technique of shifting perspectives and temporal discontinuity, Didion is able to manufacture a tension that underscores the notion that more than a failed marriage is at stake. Just what it entails, at this point, is only alluded to, but it is closely bound to the idea of the decline of an outmoded West. Specifically, Didion’s reader is made to see how, after years of marriage and however distant they may have grown from each other, a sense of solidarity or simultaneity still flows between Everett and Lily. But while they may be, in an odd way, committed to each other, because of the manner in which Didion handles the interiority of Lily’s character and initiates her readers to Everett’s ruminations, they can gauge from both perspectives just how great the emotional distance is between this central couple. Didion sets up for her reader the problems of proximity and intimacy as something complicated, compelling, and deeply embedded in human relations. On the grander thematic level, this translates to a sense of loss and the absurdity or impossibility of preserving something so elementally flawed.

SECTION II. ‘‘1938–1959’’ Chapter 4 This chapter is book-ended by the novel’s immediate present, which is 1959, but the action takes place in 1938, when Lily Knight is a young woman. Chapter 4 links the large, central portion of the novel to the scenes that open and close the work. It begins with an interior, italicized section connecting the last things Lily had been thinking during her exchange with Everett in the preceding chapter. Midsentence, her thoughts transform, however, back into the frame narrator’s omniscient voice, and the year 1938. The uncomfortable conversation she’d been having with Everett becomes an uncomfortable conversation with her father on her sixteenth birthday. Ominously, Lily’s father Walter tells her, ‘‘Just you remember that everybody gets what he asks for in

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this world’’ (34). What Lily wants most is to be Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. Chapter 4 also describes Walter Knight’s political life, and the loss of his seat in the California legislature. Didion describes the politics within the Knight family itself as Lily is growing up. Her mother Edith has migraines and refuses to acknowledge that her husband has had an ongoing twelve-year affair with Rita Blanchard, an old family friend. Readers learn the origin of Lily’s sense of entitlement as her wealthy, important father’s ‘‘little princess.’’ Through her mother’s passive-aggressive dependence on her husband, the reader also sees how Lily learns to accept marital infidelity as a way of life. Lastly, readers see Lily’s first drink, given to her by her father when she was ill to help her sleep. The pattern of infidelity, headaches, and drinking whiskey to induce sleep will be constant throughout Lily’s life. This chapter establishes Lily’s pedigree of Old California pioneer lineage and the sense of entitlement that comes with it. Chapter 4 establishes Lily’s relationship with her mother and father and the different expectations they each placed upon her. The theme of ‘‘Old’’ California and ‘‘New’’ California in opposition begins to underscore the novel. The old order is still in control of the state, but change is all around, from glimpses of Okies and other migrants, to a new style of politician with which Walter Knight must grapple. Didion shows her reader the way in which the ancestral families are inexplicably bound politically, historically, and agriculturally to the land.

Chapter 5 John McClellan, Everett McClellan’s father and the Knights’ neighbor, takes his son over to the Knight Ranch to reintroduce Everett to Lily. Although they had been childhood friends, Everett has been at Stanford for four years and Lily has been at the University of California– Berkeley for one. The action in this chapter is divided between the present, 1940, the time Everett and Lily are reintroduced, and Lily’s memories of her time at UC Berkeley. Talk between John McClellan and Walter Knight sets up the subtheme of the novel: the differences emerging between the ‘‘new’’ influences in the Valley and the old order of pioneer-ranchers. Not much happens between Lily and Everett this first afternoon with their parents on the Knight ranch, but the next morning finds Lily awake and restless when Everett calls her on the phone. She is already suffering from life at home in the Valley, yet she has done poorly at school, too: ‘‘She

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wanted to stay here and she wanted something else besides’’ (50). Lily is thinking of a boyfriend she’d brought home with her on an earlier trip during the semester, a boy from New York, an outsider, who wanted to observe her ‘‘in her native decay’’ (53). Out of boredom, she is playing like a child on the lawn in an oak tree when Everett calls her on the telephone. Everett comes for her, liberating her from her boredom, and drives her through the fields of hops into Sacramento. They take an obvious, though not altogether passionate, interest in each other. When Lily and Everett arrive home from Sacramento they have a conversation with John McClellan that is a lesson in the racism and hierarchy of the Valley for Didion’s reader. Martha McClellan also briefly enters the scene amidst glimpses of the McClellan home, which seems like a museum dedicated to California’s past. Martha is most often compared to Lily, generally more favorably, by Everett and by their parents. The chapter ends in pastoral beauty with Lily and Everett going for a swim on a secluded stretch of the Sacramento River adjacent to the McClellan property on that first afternoon. Lying together on a beach after their swim, in what seems to be a mixture of accident and fate, Lily loses her virginity to Everett. In a conversation between Walter and John regarding politics in the Central Valley and the State, Walter makes reference to the expendability of the family growers of the Sacramento Valley (50). Increasingly, Didion describes the lives of the old families and their politics and beliefs in much the same way William Faulkner does, for instance, in his treatment of the Compsons in The Sound and the Fury. This representation of California aristocracy as a failing way of life is the basis for understanding the interrelation of the fate of the Valley and the fate of the novel’s characters.

Chapter 6 Chapter 6 tells the story of Lily and Everett’s courtship and engagement, and their elopement and honeymoon in Reno, Nevada. They spent the idyllic months of June and July sleeping together at points along the Sacramento River as it flows through Walter Knight’s property, and they stroll through his orchards. Everett asks her to marry him and she says yes, but describes it as ‘‘inescapable as the ripening of the pears, as fated as the exile from Eden’’ (63), and then she does not tell anyone her news. The reader is told Lily’s decision was not a decision at all, ‘‘only an acquiescence,’’ and that she does not want to say she loves him, that she views him as the ‘‘flaw in the grain’’ (63). She continues to postpone announcing their engagement, and Lily divulges to him that she does not

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feel like she really ever wants to marry anyone. Finally, under pressure from Everett, they elope in Reno. The reader learns that Lily marries less for love than she does as a form of acquiescence to her family’s and the community’s expectations. As a young woman without real plan or direction, she variously describes her marriage to Everett as ‘‘inescapable’’ and ‘‘inevitable’’ (63). The theme of land guiding human action can be seen in the way Lily marks time before announcing her wedding: ‘‘when the hops are down’’ (64), ‘‘when the fruit is in’’ (65).

Chapter 7 This chapter tells of the beginning of Lily’s second pregnancy, with her daughter Julia, and about the first months since her son Knight’s birth. With her second pregnancy, Lily realizes how isolated she is and the predictable scenario into which she has entered. She is already haunted by the infinite banalities of her role as society matron. The reader is shown a heartbreakingly tragic moment in which Lily sits down, resigned to her fate, and tries to reach out by writing a letter to a friend outside of the Knight and McClellan family circle, only to find that she has no one she can write to. She is still very young, but she is determined to fulfill her role as the proper wife of landed Valley aristocracy. This compact chapter is largely a close-up of Lily in the doctor’s office discussing her second pregnancy. Told with Didion’s usual digressions, the single theme is Lily’s isolation from all those around her. She feels Everett is distant and she is unsatisfied with their lives as a family. Most telling, the chapter ends in the italics that, throughout the book, stand for a character’s interior monologue, generally outside of the time in which the flow of the plot takes place. Lily says: ‘‘I am not myself if my father is dead’’ (78). What this appears to mean is that with her father’s death, Lily is unhinged not only from those around her, but from herself as well. It gives the reader a solid reason for her unrest in her life with Everett and as a mother, and it foretells the action of the next chapter.

Chapter 8 Lily’s father Walter Knight dies in a car accident with his lover, Rita Blanchard. They are found by a tourist couple driving up the Valley in the middle of the night. Walter and Rita had driven off a levee road and into the Sacramento River. Edith Knight is called into the coroner’s office the next morning to identify both bodies. Edith is able to remain

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stoic throughout, including the funeral. When she drives to the McClellan place to tell Lily about Walter’s death, however, her daughter breaks down. It is in this chapter that Didion makes clear Walter Knight’s influence on his daughter. Their pioneer background is remembered again at the graveside service, and Lily recalls a conversation with her father in which he tells her, ‘‘I think nobody owns land until their dead are in it,’’ and to which she responds, ‘‘Sometimes I think this whole valley belongs to me.’’ Walter tells her, ‘‘It does, you hear me? We made it’’ (84–85). In the end, Edith is able to set up a scholarship in Rita’s name at the University of California and Lily, Everett, Martha, and Sarah McClellan, their older sister in the East, inherit the rest of Rita’s estate. After her father’s death and during her subsequent breakdown, Lily recalls having once been told that the Valley belongs to her by her father (85). Her grief for her father seems to be tied up in this notion of ownership. Somehow, with Walter’s death, she is cast adrift emotionally. Morally, his loss disturbs something in her, so that later she refuses to own or to be owned, even as she finds her land holdings extended through an unexpected inheritance from her father’s lover, Rita.

Chapter 9 Lily is in her hospital bed after giving birth to her daughter Julia. Her room has been filled with flowers brought to her by Everett from the ranch. Outside a heavy rain is falling. Lily is suffering from depression; she has mildly convinced herself (or is fantasizing) she might die after childbirth. She had recently read Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and her conversation with Everett, after she wakes up, reads deliberately like a passage from Hemingway. After this exchange, which allowed Lily to fictionalize her experience, she feels a moment of true happiness, which is only to be broken by her mother’s expression of loneliness, and Lily is reminded of her own future, her own isolated fate. Lily reflects on her mother and on a beloved cousin Mary who had become a nun at the same time Lily had entered Berkeley. Watching the nuns who run the hospital, Lily thinks to herself ‘‘they all seemed to know something [I do] not’’ (94), and she swings into grief over her conflicted self. In her mind’s eye, she invokes memories of her lovemaking with Everett and she is dissatisfied. The omniscient narrator tells readers that Lily feels she may be doomed to repeat her past mistakes if she does not learn from them. The primary theme of this chapter is isolation. Since Lily had localized her sense of loss to the death of her father, and had conceived of the proportions of her isolation in the previous chapters, these things

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are taking hold of Lily as she measures the possibilities afforded her by her environment. A brief, but pointed, reference to Everett’s sister Martha reveals her as competition, both for Everett’s affection and as a woman.

Chapter 10 After a year of waiting, Everett feels compelled to go to war. He leaves for Fort Lewis in Washington State for training camp against Lily’s wishes. They drive together to the train station in Davis and sit in their car, talking. Everett’s sister Martha, a student at the University of California–Davis, also awakened early to see him off, and gives Everett a bouquet of flowers and a journal she has compiled of their family’s overland crossing to California in 1848. Everett calls it the nicest present anyone’s ever given him. Once he is gone, Lily and Martha go to breakfast and talk about school and marriage. Over the course of their conversation it is obvious that their rivalry for Everett’s affections is intact, whether Lily sees Martha as a rival or not. As they talk, Lily realizes the truth of her relationship with Everett: first, that Martha has never thought that Lily was good enough for him, or that Lily loved him enough; and second, that among the platitudes she was expressing about love, all she really thought love entailed was a commitment, that the emotion behind it really wasn’t that special or sacred, only the commitment to each other mattered. The chapter ends with dinner in the near empty McClellan ranch house. Lily has put the children to bed, and she is alone for the first time with her closed-minded, racist father-in-law, with whom she has never shared any particular bond beyond her husband. Again, Martha’s competition with Lily and her overzealous love for her brother are underscored. The reader sees two women of the same age and background living very different lives, perhaps jealous of each other over what the other has or hasn’t got. This chapter begins Lily’s time at home alone with Everett’s father, too, on the McClellan ranch, and further outwardly manifests the isolation she feels.

Chapter 11 Everett’s absence leaves Lily alone in the McClellan home with her children and her father-in-law, with whom she has trouble communicating. They make small talk and play cards, but Lily spends the late evenings alone, thinking about her own father, her mother, and her father’s

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lover Rita Blanchard. She has fallen back into her routine of boredom, disappointment, and isolation. She also spends this time of night writing to Everett without having anything to say to him. Then, her neighbor Joe Templeton enters at this pivotal moment in the novel, through a series of coincidences that become increasingly less accidental. The reader is told about Joe’s life and about his alcoholic wife, Francie, through an exchange Lily has with her mother one afternoon. To assuage her loneliness and feelings of isolation, Lily begins an affair with Joe that surprises her with its simplicity. They meet in various out-of-the-way places: by the river in their cars, in bars their neighbors don’t frequent, and finally in an abandoned shack on the river away from the Knight and McClellan properties. Lily learns to emotionally distance herself from her betrayal. It feels much the same as the detachment she has felt from everything in her life up to this point. She cannot define, and the narrator does not define for readers, why she is sleeping with Joe, since it is not for pleasure. It is likely that, once again, she is allowing fate to force her hand, and in a strange way, allowing her at the same time to feel guiltless about the affair. The chapter comes to an end in the shack on the river. Lily is with Joe. He tells her he loves her and she adamantly reminds him that she is married. Then they make love again. This chapter begins Lily’s cycle of unfaithfulness to Everett. Her extramarital affair with Joe underscores her own coping mechanism of abstracted sex that is often without pleasure, just as it had largely been with Everett. Lily does not care to understand what motivates her to be unfaithful.

Chapter 12 The chapter opens with an exchange between China Mary, the McClellan cook, and Lily, over wartime sugar rationing. Joe Templeton calls for Lily and, hearing she does not have stamps for sugar, brings some by for her. In the meantime, Martha McClellan has come home and is sick upstairs in her room. She has been seeing an airman at Mather Field named Ryder Channing and she is infatuated with him. This is the same Ryder Channing that Everett ends up killing on the dock at the river in the opening scenes of the novel. When Joe comes over, Martha comes downstairs to chat with him, telling him all about Ryder. Martha invites him to stay, but Joe declines and leaves. She recognizes what has been going on between Lily and Joe and makes her awareness of the situation known to Lily, who has settled back down to a letter she has been writing to Everett.

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Lily secretly believes that although he had opportunities to come home on leave, Everett is purposely not doing so. Everett is stationed in Texas now. As she is harboring these thoughts, Martha says to her: ‘‘Tell him you’re sleeping around to keep us in black-market sugar’’ (118). Lily, absorbed in the daily irritations of her life, gently denies it. She is already losing interest in Joe, recognizing that they are, and always have been, only friends. She knows it is over between them because it has gotten too familiar. In the same moment she is absolutely certain of Martha as her competition for Everett’s love. Martha tells Lily later that all Everett wants from Lily is order. Martha’s boyfriend Ryder Channing comes to visit Martha late that same night and meets Lily for the first time. They take an immediate, lingering, though dispassionate interest in each other, but the last thing Lily thinks of as she gets in bed is that Ryder was ‘‘someone to whom, under different circumstances, she could have said things out loud’’ (126), intuiting that he is capable of making her feel real emotion. Beyond the brewing animosity Lily and Martha feel for each other, the primary theme that defines the book is the relationship Channing will have first with Martha, and ultimately with Lily. Lily’s waning interest in Joe Templeton appears predicated on her increasing familiarity with him. Their relationship fails for the same reason Lily and Everett’s marriage is failing.

Chapter 13 The narrative focuses on Lily’s phone calls to Everett at Fort Bliss, imploring him to come home for the holidays. She tries various methods of persuasion: first, she tells him that she needs him desperately, and then she tells him his sister Martha is hysterical and that his father is losing his mind. Everett finds Lily’s calls and letters an annoyance to his otherwise peaceful existence. The reader learns that, for Everett, Lily has ‘‘completed the picture’’ (130) of happiness he has had in his mind all this time, but that in truth he is enjoying their separation. He has realized that along with the completed picture he desires comes an overwhelming responsibility to family and land to which he did not yet want to be held accountable. Unbeknownst to Everett, the ranch is falling apart, and finally his father, John McClellan, dies of a stroke. Everett is forced to come home, knowing at the same time that he will be discharged from the army. It is the end of his freedom and the beginning of the saddest phase of all their lives. Everett returns to find the McClellan holdings in absolute disrepair

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from neglect, but he has no one to blame their decline on, except maybe himself. Ultimately, Everett’s lost freedom is forgotten as he sets about fixing the ranch. In the process, he realizes his love for the land, that he does not want anything else but to own it and to be its steward. What Lily does not understand is how much Everett likes being away from the ranch and her, and that he thrives within the military order he has found at Fort Bliss. This is Everett’s dilemma: he resents his older sister Sarah for thinking of ‘‘home’’ as somewhere other than the ranch where they grew up, but he also secretly enjoys being away from the Sacramento Valley as much as she does. Upon his return, seeing the disrepair the ranch has fallen into, he immediately realizes that without him all of it will irrevocably disappear, and it is this sense of responsibility to the past that eventually defines him.

Chapter 14 Divided into two parts, this chapter tells of Lily’s admission to Everett that she is pregnant and that she is not sure whether this child is his. Lily and Everett are in bed and he has been asleep while she has been sitting up, smoking. Everett has sensed Lily’s anxiety since he has been home. This time he realizes she has been crying. Everett refuses out of pride to ask her by whom she is pregnant. Instead he sits up the rest of the night downstairs alone, thinking of himself and Lily and Martha, as children, playing together. The second part of this chapter is Everett’s admission to himself that he already knew about Lily and Joe. He’d known since an encounter he’d had with Francie Templeton, Joe’s wife, three weeks earlier, at the Templeton place. Everett had gone to see Joe about a truck and ended up having a drink with Francie, whom he found home alone. Everett is reminded of Francie’s failed attempt at a pass at him over the course of a drunken evening before this visit. This time she is drunk on bourbon and tells him outright that her husband and his wife had an affair while he was away at basic training. Everett was confused then, could only think of going backward, to a time when they were all children, all innocent. The pacing and order of Lily and Everett’s lives together are defined by this intimate encounter between Everett and his wife and Everett and his neighbor. He will turn a blind eye, and Lily will turn further inward. Everett will not seek to avenge his honor in the arms of another woman. Everett decides that for Lily to have cheated on him with someone they knew ‘‘violated several contracts’’ (140), alluding to the fact that he is now sworn to live by some sort of moral code imposed on him by his

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ancestry and his life and livelihood on the river. He thinks increasingly in the context of his childhood. From here on out, until the final moments of the novel, his decisions are rarely personal; they ultimately will revolve around the land and its needs.

Chapter 15 Lily is noticeably absent for the first time from the novel in this chapter. Everett leaves the house early to oversee the gathering of the hops from the fields and stays away all day. He begins to think of his father, begins to notice the traditions slowly being broken around him. Everett makes a pact with himself that if the hops come down and dry safely then Lily is carrying his child. When he returns home to face Lily, he finds Martha and Ryder Channing in the house instead, and learns from Martha that Lily has gone alone to San Francisco. He knows that she has gone there to have an abortion. Everett and Martha and Ryder Channing spend the rest of the evening drinking martinis together, Everett ruminating over Lily’s decision while Channing and Martha try to have fun. Apparently Everett and Lily and Martha and Channing have been spending time together, the four of them getting familiar, taking trips together and have built up a type of rapport with one another. While they talk, Ryder Channing brings up local development schemes in the Sacramento area that he hopes to be a part of. Channing is excited about advertising; he represents everything that confuses and enrages Everett, who, drunkenly, decides to fight him. Things are falling apart for the old families in direct proportion to the rise of newcomers, speculators, like Channing. Everett goes upstairs alone, thinking of Lily, also alone, and can only feel his anger toward Channing. The themes of marital loss and deceit, by now well established, give way to the idea that just as Lily and Everett must accustom themselves to change, so, too, must Everett reconcile himself with the change in the Sacramento region going on around him. The symbol of the kiln used to dry the hops defines Everett’s helplessness in the face of frailty and peril beyond his control; likewise, the kiln underlines the deals he makes with ‘‘nature’’ to get through such times. Additionally, in acknowledging the regional changes, he points to the fact that they are all ‘‘mixed up in some way with the war, and Sarah’s not being home, and people like Ryder Channing’’ (157). Although in the next line readers are told he does not believe any of it is Ryder’s fault, the reader has the sense, knowing the novel’s ending, that somehow Everett will change his opinion on this point—that because he cannot stop the developers, and

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because he cannot change his sister Sarah’s disinterest, he only can stop one speculator from undermining his life with the women he is closest to, his sister Martha and his wife Lily.

Chapter 16 Everett is immersed in an internal monologue, disrupting the reader’s sense of time and place. Transpiring in memory, there is no sense of an exterior world, as if Everett’s entire awareness is bound solely within himself. The narrator does not give the impression that he is selfabsorbed so much as that he has become single-minded since he has returned home, that he is becoming almost entirely self-contained. While feeling low and alone over Lily’s decision to go to San Francisco to abort, he peoples his loneliness by remembering past loves in such a way that they stand as milestones in his life, less as conquests than as paradigms or signposts relating to specifically Californian topics. He thinks of the past loves in his life in terms of their relation to the state, to California as a landscape. For example, he remembers Doris for debating him about John C. Fremont; Annis is memorable because there was a photograph of Bridal Veil Falls in Yosemite in the room where they had their tryst; Naomi is memorable because she had been a young communist in Berkeley and had eloped with another young man to Reno, Nevada, just across the border. Everett’s thoughts turn to Lily again, how he had assumed for years that they would marry and that he would never lose her, as if he is unable to know her beyond the way he conceives of her. He recalls a time, after Martha had hurt Lily’s feelings, when he called her ‘‘his baby,’’ and realizes that it is perhaps the closest thing to the truth of her that he knows. Just as the reader has watched Lily fall back into herself, isolated from those around her, one now sees the same kind of personal withdrawal engraved in Everett’s personality. He sees Lily as a child and the land as essential to his understanding of who he is.

Chapter 17 Lily returns home to Sacramento on the Greyhound bus after her abortion in San Francisco. She takes pleasure in talking to the various people she sits with, and in looking out the window at the hot, dry fields, and in passing through the familiar towns. When the bus arrives at the Sacramento terminal, she calls Joe Templeton from a pay phone. He seems to be genuinely concerned for her, and sincere in his affection for her, even though he had not been able to pay for her abortion

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because he was afraid his wife Francie would find out. Joe is described as having ‘‘rather aggressive weaknesses’’ (180). Interestingly, Joe knew that Lily was going to have an abortion in San Francisco even though Everett had not. Lily and Joe talk briefly before she hangs up on him and calls Everett for a ride the rest of the way home. She sits waiting in the bus station, looking at people her age laughing and having fun while they wait for their buses, and at men not much older than her, going home to their respectable wives. She seems flooded with guilt over Everett and she feels sorry for herself at the same time. When Everett arrives, Lily passionately expresses her love for him as a type of unspoken apology, which Everett appears to accept. The last of the chapter closes on night sounds in the McClellan house, and an overheard argument between Martha and Ryder Channing, in which Martha seems to express her belief that Channing has grown interested in Lily. Chapter 17 is predominantly one of action meant to move the plot forward. Its theme, if it has one, is the thorny reconciliation of Everett and Lily, and the hint that a relationship will evolve between Lily and Ryder Channing.

Chapter 18 Lily and Martha are home alone in the evening, and Martha is speaking rhetorically and unflatteringly to her about Ryder Channing. Lily listens quietly for the most part, knitting while Martha talks. Martha brings Ryder’s character into question, as someone who is not, nor has ever been, like the people from the old Valley families. He is a schemer. She explains to Lily that Ryder is ‘‘up-ward mo-bile’’ (187), which is an utterly new idea to the families on the river, who have been, until the war, living in insulated, and mostly autonomous, fiefdoms. Martha, who has noticeably soured on Channing, explains that he does not just want to get ahead, but that he is willing to use people to do so. The present narrative breaks at this point to a scene a week earlier that explains Martha’s change of heart toward Ryder. He had gotten her a job at a local television studio, and less than two weeks into the job Martha fails to show up for work. Instead, she drove north to Yuba City to sit beside the Feather River. She came home looking haggard and received a phone call from Ryder. The two of them argued about her absence from work that day. Martha calls him a user and tells him they are through. Implicit in this exchange is that despite her best efforts to confront the changing times, Martha is unable to adapt to the realities of a life of television studios and deadlines, the ‘‘new’’ California, which is why she drove north to sit by the river in the first place, to get away

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from the ticking of the clocks. Unlike Martha, Everett’s unsuitability for modern life in the Valley is masked by his immersion in the working aspects of the ranch. Because she is a woman, and has no such outlet, she, much like Lily, is lost between the two worlds, the old and the new, and she enjoys the excitement someone like Ryder represents; however, she is unable to wholly accept the conditions of his brand of modernity. After the frame narrator explains this back story, revealing Martha’s bitterness, Didion shifts her focus onto a brief sketch in which Martha, distraught from her breakup, and Everett, unable to deal with his sister’s emotions, both refuse to go to a wedding down the river, leaving Lily to go alone. Lily drinks too much and ends up sleeping with one of the ushers at the wedding, thus ending her period of contrition after the abortion. Since the abortion, Lily has been faithful to Everett. She has devoted herself to domesticity as evidenced by her dressmaking and her disinterest in the conversation about Ryder Channing that Martha is trying to have with her. Martha’s monologue, on the other hand, develops the reader’s understanding of the type of person Channing is as well as draws attention to the widening gap between old and new California culture. Lily’s final act of the chapter and Martha’s disappearance from her job draw attention to the heightening cycle of deceit between characters and their own inabilities to reconcile themselves with their desires.

Chapter 19 Martha and Ryder have been separated for a short time when she reads in the San Francisco newspaper an announcement stating that Ryder is getting married. She looks up the woman’s picture in a University of California yearbook and realizes it is a woman that Ryder has known for some time and, in fact, is someone she had met while at a party in Piedmont. That night Martha had seen Ryder with her, singing at a piano, and had run from the house in mild, drunken hysterics, certain that he had been cheating on her. Slowly she realizes that she had been right that night and she begins, in her sadness, to reconstruct all of Ryder’s transgressions against her. Ryder calls Martha on the phone later in the day, ostensibly to break the news of his engagement, and their conversation turns from amicable to enraged. She avoids telling Lily and Everett about Ryder, but they learn of it anyway. Martha ends up alone, crying over him. Eventually, Lily and Everett discuss Channing with her, trying to console her and to find something for her to do to take her mind off of him.

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Everett and Martha spend time remembering their childhood before going to bed. Their nostalgia has become more and more apparent, more self-conscious, as the novel proceeds. Martha goes to San Francisco on a shopping spree, and she attends Ryder Channing’s wedding. Emotionally she has become insular; after sleeping with a stranger she meets at Ryder’s wedding, she compares herself to Lily. Losing Ryder represents an impasse in her life which she cannot avoid, no matter what she does. A pivotal point in the novel, this chapter details what is ultimately the last straw leading up to Martha’s final crack-up. The woman Ryder is marrying is the daughter of a developer who has gotten rich in California since World War II, and although the bride-to-be is a Berkeley graduate, she and her family represent new wealth. Obviously a marriage of opportunity for Ryder, the elements of personal decline and grief in the McClellan household are nevertheless symbolic of the erosion and failure of their agrarian way of life as well.

Chapter 20 There are high hopes for speculators in the Central Valley during the postwar building boom. Primarily because she is lonely for Channing and needs an excuse to get out of bed every day, Martha has made it her business to meet and socialize with all of the new developers and others making names for themselves in and around Sacramento. Martha is torn between her counterfeit enthusiasm and her need to resist the change occurring all around them. One evening, Martha finds herself alone in a country club bar talking to a man she knows from the river. He has gotten into land development and is doing well. As they are talking, Ryder Channing comes in from playing a round of golf and walks over to see Martha. The two of them exchange pleasantries and Ryder suggests he might come out to visit her soon. In fact, the next afternoon Ryder does stop by the McClellan place and he finds Martha home alone. Lily is elsewhere with Knight and Julie, and Everett is out in the rain, dealing with his levees along the river where high water is threatening a breach. Although Martha is conflicted about Channing in the same way she is about what is happening to the land around Sacramento, after greeting him coldly, she submits to his advances and they have sex on the floor, just inside the front door of the McClellan home. Lily comes home with the children after Ryder is gone and she invites Martha to go with them back into town for the St. Patrick’s Day parade. That afternoon in Sacramento, confused by nostalgia for her own childhood and torn by the quandaries and loneliness of her present

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circumstances, something snaps in Martha emotionally. She tries unsuccessfully to contact her sister, Sarah, in Philadelphia. Drenched by rain, she comes back to the car where Lily and the children are waiting for her; Martha has obviously suffered some kind of mental collapse and is visibly confused. Martha’s dilemma is in one sense confined to her determination to take part in the changes she sees going on around her. On the symbolic level they represent her mixed feelings about Ryder Channing’s wedding. Her indecision regarding change is indicative of the indecision felt by the other characters trapped in the folkways of old California. In Everett’s case, his relationship to the land does not allow him to change; for Lily, her obligation to husband and family only allow her the trivial violations of tradition she is guilty of. Martha’s breakdown marks the irrevocable failure of their way of life, indicating that change will be thrust upon all of them regardless of their denials.

Chapter 21 Chapter 21 begins with the burying of Martha’s body, illegally, on the levee beside the river where she drowned that night after returning with Lily and the children from the St. Patrick’s Day parade. Still in the midst of her anguish, she had gone out alone in the rising floodwaters of the river. When they had found her, they tried to revive her, but without success. The doctor and the sheriff had been called, but Everett took matters into his own hands. Once he admitted that Martha was lost, with his foreman’s help, he dug a grave and placed Martha’s body in an old wooden family trunk, with heirlooms and mementos of their pioneer family’s past, and he interred her beneath a cherry tree. Everyone decided she had known better than to swim in the river in flood. Martha’s mania had been building to this final act. Lily, back inside the house, finds Martha’s journal, and she knows it was suicide. The entire ranch is in danger from the rising water, and as the men dig Martha’s grave they make plans to evacuate if the river overcomes their levees. In the afternoon, Ryder Channing calls to speak with Martha, not knowing what has happened. Lily answers the phone and tells him Martha has died. Channing is in shock. Two hours later, Joe Templeton arrives to give Lily his condolences. Joe says he and Francie had just seen Martha the night before and that she had looked well but had eventually turned on them. Joe and Lily exchange uncomfortable small talk, and Joe tells Lily that Francie wants to divorce him. He asks Lily if she would leave Everett for him, if he and Francie went through with it. Lily refuses and sends Joe away.

Run River

The story of the overland trail to California is one of peril and fatigue. The emigrants were often overwhelmed by the beauty and danger of the wild landscape and climate they encountered. In addition, accounts from the Gold Rush and afterward relate that many of the pioneers carried small personal libraries with them, which in turn informed their conception of the land they were passing through. These personal libraries generally consisted of the Bible and certain representative Romantic and Renaissance authors. Pioneers’ experiences on the trail and the terrain it crossed, particularly the vastness of the desert and of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, derived both symbolism and precedent from these works. Most notably, the early literature of California tended to focus on natural disaster; while the specter of the snowstorm that trapped the Donner Party weighed heavily on the minds of early overlanders, the Biblical story of the flood was a yearly fact of life in the Central Valley until the early 1960s when the dams on the northern rivers were all in place. By using the flood as a defining moment in Run River, Didion has employed in her novel a deeply rooted trope in the literature of the state. Bayard Taylor writes about his encounters with the flood season in the Central Valley in El Dorado (1850), and John Muir writes his own account in The Mountains of California (1894). The flood and fatal snow stories come together in Sarah Royce’s wagon train memoir A Frontier Lady (1932), in which her party, like the Donner Party’s only a few years before, is among the last to cross the Sierra before the snows fly, only to reach Sacramento and be trapped when the rivers flood. California author Bret Harte’s short story ‘‘The Outcasts of Poker Flat’’ ends in a fatal snowstorm, but according to his biographer, Gary Scharnhorst, Harte’s first mention of Poker Flat was in an 1866 newspaper article recounting a flood that makes travel impossible, cutting the town off from the outside world. Harte’s first success, the short story ‘‘The Luck of Roaring Camp,’’ turns on a flood that drowns his characters Stumpy, Kentuck, and The Luck. An unrelenting deluge of rain and snow can be found in the letters of Dame Shirley collected as Life in the Mines (1852), and the valley in flood stands out as a formative experience in the biography of California’s first official poet laureate, Ina Coolbrith, who came to Marysville, California (north of Sacramento), with her family as a nine-year-old girl in 1851. By invoking the flood in Run River, Didion not only underscores the primitive relationship the McClellans have with the land, but also the longstanding Biblical, practical, and mystical literary history of Californians and the flood.

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When Everett comes in from working in the storm, Lily takes him upstairs and makes love to him, and she feeds him hot soup. They have bonded in some sort of confused solidarity over Martha’s death and because of the imminent danger the floodwaters pose to the ranch. Late at night Ryder Channing calls again, drunkenly, asking Lily for Martha, telling her she is lying, that Martha couldn’t be dead. As the water rises, the manmade infrastructure put in place along the Sacramento River to protect those living downstream grows in importance; that the reader is reminded of its existence highlights the importance of the land in the characters’ lives and the adversarial relationship they have with it despite their closeness to it. The river can be controlled only to a point. Just as the ground is in danger of ‘‘going under’’ the floodwaters, the lifestyle the McClellans represent is in a precarious situation, too, and Martha has been the first casualty.

Chapter 22 Three years have passed since Martha’s suicide and, alone in the house, Lily and Everett have begun feeding off of each other’s guilt and disappointment. It is as if too many betrayals have come between them. These betrayals are too much to surmount for Everett and Lily, who are now unable to be glad and at peace with one another. It might be that Martha’s dependence on them and her unpredictability had actually deflected their attention away from their own problems until now. Lily asks Everett if he wants a divorce and he says he does not; instead, they settle into a kind of attrition, where all that remains unspoken between them simmers, but they have learned how to make it bearable. During this time, it is not uncommon for Lily to take the children to her mother’s house and stay there until she reaches a point at which she begins to believe that Everett actually anchors her to sanity. The specter that haunts them most is the abortion she’d had years before. Every time Lily leaves, she returns home to Everett, determined to make him love her. At Lily’s insistence, they begin making plans to leave the ranch for short periods of time, relying on a change of scenery to knock them out of their doldrums. Finally, they go to a party in San Francisco and out of nowhere Lily sees Ryder Channing. They have not seen each other or spoken in four years. Lily finds him to be handsome, but she can sense his smile is ‘‘less a smile than a tic’’ (236). He has weathered the recent years poorly. Lily remembers that even Martha understood that Ryder was a man of disorder who could be counted on not to be counted on. By September, Ryder calls for Lily to meet him because, as he says, she is his only friend. Lily finds him alone and miserable. She first consoles

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him and then sleeps with him. His wife has left him, and another deal has fallen through. Before leaving, Lily cleans Ryder’s house, gives him money, and in her heart realizes that she is already committed to him because he needs her so desperately. Just as Martha’s contact with Ryder, agent of ‘‘new’’ California, brought about her demise, so too does Lily’s association with him foretell her doom. Already she and Everett are overcome by the memory of her abortion, and the mutual guilt and hurt they have inflicted on each other. Ryder’s presence will make Everett snap like Martha did. But his breakdown will be a much longer time coming.

Chapter 23 Time is compressed in this chapter, accelerating toward the novel’s climax. Lily and Everett can barely be civil toward each other on a trip to Salinas. They are trapped in a cycle of resentment and reconciliation. At Everett’s suggestion, Lily and the children take a tour of Europe, but Everett refuses to accompany them at the last minute. He is doing his best to spend as little time with her as he possibly can. It seems he is still keeping her to complete the picture he has in his head of what ranch life should be, while at the same time he is fully aware of how unfaithful she has been. He appears as a fixed point, unable to go forward, stuck in an uncompromising past. Flying home from Europe, Lily sits next to an unnamed Italian man who has been drinking and who makes aggressive advances toward her. She is both repulsed and excited by him, but circumstances don’t allow her to relent to his passes. Nothing has changed between Lily and Everett when she gets home, and she picks up where she left off with Ryder, who is still plotting to get rich quick. The chapter ends with a tremendous line that captures the dilemma everyone in the novel experiences but refuses to face: ‘‘If there was one thing that she and Everett and Ryder all had in common, it was that none of their decisions ever came to much; they seemed afflicted with memory’’ (246). ‘‘Afflicted with memory.’’ Whether nostalgia or sentimentality, the pain and disaffection these characters feel takes on heroic proportions in their eyes. The situations they have gotten themselves into and the obstacles inherent in them are now insurmountable. In addition, the characters involved, Lily, Everett, and Ryder, are also confronted by modernity, and none of them are equipped for it, least of all Ryder who wants to succeed the most. The refined and receding past, ‘‘old’’ California, now unavoidably shares the literal and social landscape with television sets, movie stars, strip malls, superhighways, chain stores, and subdivisions.

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Chapter 24 Lily and Ryder are sitting in a bar in Sacramento and have been for two hours. Lily has grown less impressed with Ryder but no less devoted to him and his schemes. She is feeling guilty about being gone from the ranch because Everett’s older sister Sarah has come from Philadelphia with her new husband and is stopping on her way to Hawaii. Sarah is interested in selling the ranch. Everett and Lily’s children are college aged and their son, Knight, has gotten into trouble drinking and driving. Also, he has seen his mother with Ryder Channing and has not spoken to her in almost a week. Knight blows up at his father when they are arguing over losing his driver’s license and turns on him, telling him everything he knows about his sister and his mother and saying he does not want one lousy acre of the ranch. Everett sends him off the ranch for being disloyal. Everett’s insularity, while in the face of his wife’s behavior, may in some sense be warranted, nonetheless constitutes his failure and his eventual demise. Having isolated himself from the world and from his wife, he is now shutting himself off from his children as a tragic defense mechanism that, because readers already know the final act of the novel, is futile. In this final chapter before the return to the novel’s present, 1959, where Run River begins, nothing has changed. Everett eventually relents and lets Knight come home again. The entire family, knowing the complete truth about each other, comes to a tacit reconciliation. Their mutual preservation of deceits keeps the family intact. None of this, however, keeps Lily from continuing to see Ryder Channing.

SECTION III. ‘‘AUGUST 1959’’ The novel has returned to its opening scenes; the apathy between Lily and Everett has been explained and the history of their relationship to Ryder Channing has been revealed. The reader now knows that Lily’s long-term affair with Ryder, Ryder’s affair with Martha, and the kind of new Californian Ryder represents have all combined to drive Everett over the edge, and he has committed murder. Didion gives readers glimpses of what all of the characters are doing or had been doing that day, and the reader is meant to understand the finality of this last act: Lily and Everett and their families came from pioneer stock and had reached the end of the frontier; not only is their way of life outmoded, but they realize they are, as well. The stage has been set for the novel’s last, tragic moments. The reader will remember that in his final

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moments Everett had been considering the ‘‘nameless fury’’ that has pursued him since 1938. It is the slow accumulation of deceits and the weight of their ancestry that shapes this nameless fury, which readers learn has been equally shared between husband and wife.

Chapter 25 Channing is lying dead, Lily and Everett have left the dock, and they have returned to the main house. Lily fixes Everett a drink. She is still trying to make everything ‘‘right’’ between them and still wants to make this all go away. Everett explains to her that murdering Channing was premeditated; she is still fabricating excuses. Despite Lily’s protests, Everett calls the sheriff and admits to what he has done. Readers get only one side of his conversation with the sheriff, but based on Everett’s responses, they know that the sheriff mentions something about Martha’s death, about not having been called out to the ranch in the middle of the night since then.

Chapter 26 In this final chapter of the novel, Lily is sitting alone, where Everett told her to, in the house. He has gone to get the pistol he left down on the dock. The sheriff is coming and Lily knows none of it is going to work out the way she wants it to. She hears the gun fire again and knows that Everett has killed himself. Lily rushes down to the dock and holds his dead body. She wonders what she will tell the police, who have just arrived, and she wonders what she will tell their children. Thus ended, Run River leaves its reader faced with the hard facts of its death toll, and to question each character’s motivation, level of guilt, and degree of self-absorption. The reader must decide the worth of what has been lost and whether or not there were, in fact, any sympathetic characters in the novel. In Section II of Run River, it becomes clear that this twenty-year period has not merely been a long sadness, but rather Didion’s method of teasing meaning out of the amalgamation of sadness Lily and Everett have collected. It is the story of deeply entrenched pioneer-grower families, who came West, restless, in search of redemption. In this way, Didion is pitting the old order of landed gentry on the verge of demise against a ‘‘new’’ California of modernity. Lily and Everett, as individuals, are falling apart, but they are simply the inheritors of the end of an era, their failure a metaphor for the impossibility of stopping time.

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DISCUSSION QUESTIONS  The most obvious and intriguing feature of this novel is perhaps its difficult but rewarding narrative structure. Didion employs a nonlinear sense of time, long interior views of her characters, sporadic stream-of-consciousness elements, and digressions from the voice of a more traditional frame narrator into moments of nearly first-person omniscience, all of which initially confuses and then informs her reader. Because of these narrative devices, there is a sense throughout the book that all time—past, present, and future— exists at once for her characters. Why would such a construction be important to a novel whose characters are so invested in their pasts? Does character matter in this novel more than plot? How does Run River fit into a contemporary understanding of postmodernism, defined as a literary movement that features, among other things, fragmented narrators and a nonlinear sense of time? (Consider that Toni Morrison, for example, used the same structure to write Paradise thirty-six years after Run River was written.)  Many readers unfamiliar with Didion’s body of work might mistake her for a New Yorker because of her substantial writings in the New York Review of Books and New Yorker magazine. Although she has lived in New York City since the mid-1980s, she is a native Californian and the vast majority of her literary output has in some way been informed by California and Californians. How powerful an influence was Didion’s ‘‘sense of place’’ on Run River, and in what ways does the Sacramento Valley influence the outcome of this novel?  Section II of Run River makes up the bulk of the novel and essentially tells the personal histories of Lily and Everett McClellan. It begins in Chapter 4 with a conversation between Lily and her father Walter on Lily’s sixteenth birthday that ends by Walter teaching her about entitlement. Considering Walter’s philandering and her mother’s refusal to acknowledge this behavior, how has Walter’s life influenced Lily’s views on marital fidelity?  Martha McClellan is a pivotal character in Run River. She is the one who introduces Ryder Channing to Everett and Lily, and her suicide seems to be among the final complications that undo their marriage. Consider Martha’s relationship with her brother Everett and with his wife Lily. Has she always been in competition with Lily? Does she approve of Lily? How does she view Everett? Had Everett not gotten married, could he and Martha have lived out their lives happily together on the McClellan property?  Ryder Channing, although charismatic and initially so full of enthusiasm, over time proves to be a failure. Why then does Lily remain so enthralled by him despite the problems it causes her?

4 SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM (1968)

Slouching Towards Bethlehem is considered by many to be foremost among Didion’s important works. Her earliest essays are collected into categories that form a type of cohesive, critical narrative surrounding self and society in 1960s America. Page numbers cited from Slouching Towards Bethlehem are taken from the 1990 paperback edition (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux). This collection defines her essay style: ironic, elegiac, often sad but unsentimental, and capable of amazing clarity even as it claims not to comprehend its subject. As a journalist she focuses on the smallest details, then pans out, showing her reader how her subject relates to the surrounding world. Just when she seems to have distracted even herself from the point she may or may not have been making, she turns a phrase, ending her essay in an epiphany about its subject and giving her reader an insight he or she couldn’t have been expecting. She is a self-described waif, and she explains in the book’s preface that she is so small and seemingly fragile the people she interviews forget how dangerous it is to be candid with her in her role as a journalist, and she is never afraid to exploit this fact. Didion takes the title of this collection from the William Butler Yeats poem ‘‘The Second Coming,’’ which is reprinted in its entirety at the front of the book. Yeats’s poem has proved to be of the utmost significance to modern literature. At the time it was written, specifically its line

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‘‘Things fall apart; the center cannot hold’’ spoke to the ‘‘Lost Generation’’ who had lived through World War I and who had become disillusioned by their leaders and the things they had seen in battle. Authors such as Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos, and William Carlos Williams, to name only a few, had begun writing experimental literature to represent this anxiety and the fragmentation they saw manifesting itself in their culture. Between World Wars, other authors such as British novelist and essayist George Orwell noted the poem’s significance to the breakup of the colonial system worldwide and the rise of nationalism in those places formerly or still precariously under British rule. Finally, in the decade after World War II, with the publication of Nigerian author Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart, Yeats’s poem came to represent the advent of a post-Western, postcolonial world, where the emergent voices of indigenous peoples in literature appeared to herald the end of a central international authority, and thus the ability of oppressed peoples everywhere to retell their own stories. By using Yeats’s poem as the title of her essays about the 1960s, Joan Didion brings her world into focus within this long literary tradition. Internationally, the Western center had failed to hold; this collection of Didion’s essays portrays the internal domestic division of the very center itself. Didion is reclaiming the poem, reinstating it into its original Western orientation and context, but instead of using it as an indictment of a fragmented modernity, it is meant to frame the strange juxtaposition of all those pieces. The lines from the poem, ‘‘The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity’’ reverberate throughout Didion’s book (xi). A facet of the epigraph of this book that is easily overlooked is that Didion immediately follows the Yeats poem with a second quote by Peggy Lee: ‘‘I learned courage from Buddha, Jesus, Lincoln, Einstein, and Cary Grant.’’ By putting Yeats and Peggy Lee together, Didion underscores the overriding theme of Slouching Towards Bethlehem: she deliberately combines high and low culture, the sacred and the profane, both in the book’s form and in its content. That Peggy Lee would utter Lincoln and Buddha, Jesus and Cary Grant in the same breath is to Didion somehow important to understanding the changing face of 1960s America. Likewise, by following Yeats with Peggy Lee, Didion’s commentary itself adopts this practice. Didion says the essay ‘‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem,’’ around which all the other essays in this collection revolve, represents her first attempt to deal ‘‘directly and flatly with the evidence of atomization, the proof that things fall apart’’ (xiii), and that she felt it was necessary that she ‘‘come to terms with disorder’’ (xiv). Although she comes at the counterculture of the late 1960s as an outsider, she nevertheless gets very close to its aesthetic.

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Although she may not exactly come to terms with the disorder she sees, she does leave her reader with a fair understanding of how her subjects broke. Each of the three sections contained in Slouching Towards Bethlehem in some way, directly or indirectly, deals with the destruction or end of an older ordering of things. Divided into essays confronting cultural issues (‘‘Life Styles in the Golden Land’’), personal issues (‘‘Personals’’), and a hybrid of the two (her trademark, such as those issues in ‘‘Seven Places of the Mind’’), Didion seems to offer her author self as a center, but even she appears to admit that any single self fails as its own axis. The reader cannot tell whether she has ceased to believe, is in the process of disbelieving, or still believes in a common national character that is inviolate. Instead, she suspends her reader’s belief alongside her own; Didion replaces belief with irony. In Didion’s presentation of it, America’s sense of itself retains its gravity by virtue of its mass alone. She is looking at the competing visions of what America should be. This collection was published in an era specifically invested in change and in rebuilding and revising itself, recreating a better, freer, more equitable society. She is putting all of these visions at odds, essentially revealing them as equally exclusive, no matter what their proposed aim. Her overriding reaction becomes one of intuition, of the personal response, be it based on individuality, or nostalgia, or playing by the rules, or rebellion. These solutions are all different American hats, and Didion stresses the undeniable fact that people put on the hat that feels the most comfortable. There need not be a center, but common ground is essential.

PART I. ‘‘LIFE STYLES

IN THE

GOLDEN LAND’’

The first section of essays reads like snapshots of the age: average people, movie stars, moguls, the intellectual elite, all vie in relative isolation for a piece of the California Dream, which Didion uses as symbolic of the American Dream as a whole. When placed in order these individual pieces confront the essential point of Slouching Towards Bethlehem, the seemingly impossible task of reconciling so many varying opinions and unifying and locating a single American Voice.

‘‘Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream’’ In a ‘‘ripped from the headlines’’ style, Didion tells the ‘‘true’’ story of an otherwise anonymous couple whose marriage ends in murder. It has the feel of a film synopsis, beginning with: ‘‘This is a story about love and death in the golden land and begins with the country’’ (3). For

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Didion, place, and as is most often the case in her work specifically the geography of California, defines her characters and informs their actions. She feels the California Dream is an ideology unto itself, California being a place where people come to forget their pasts, to take one last shot at redemption. She describes the region of southern California where the action in this piece unfolds as an ‘‘alien place.’’ It had been desert but has been reclaimed, first as farmland and then turned into suburbs. The setting, in other words, is to Didion as artificial as the culture and people it creates. The impossibility of an authentic life in the sprawl of the suburbs combined with an equally impossible ideal of happiness is enough motivation for murder in this story. While Didion is establishing the myth of the West, she sees her people as constantly in conflict with the dream or ideal; in this essay she persistently seems to ask the question, ‘‘how authentic are our realities?’’ This is a theme that will carry over to her later book of essays The White Album. Didion recounts a night when a woman named Lucille Miller pulls her car over to the roadside because it has caught on fire. She tells readers that Lucille ran frantically calling for help because her husband had been asleep in the car, and, trapped, was burned to death. Lucille and her husband, Gordon, like so many Californians, are from somewhere else, and they began with high hopes, establishing themselves in progressively better homes, having children, and traveling in increasingly finer societies. But, as Didion tells readers, they paid the price for their upward mobility and had ‘‘reached the familiar season of divorce’’ (9). She uses similar cynical language to catalogue the undoing and apparent reconciliation of Lucille and Gordon Miller’s strained intimacy: ‘‘conventional tensions,’’ ‘‘conventional impasse,’’ ‘‘traditional truce’’ (10), all of which suggest that Didion recognizes the failure of the dream and subsequent capitulation as a common circumstance of its pursuit. Readers are then told the details of the years and weeks leading up to the final, fiery end. Slowly the police uncover inconsistencies in Lucille’s story. Slowly they unearth infidelities and strange confederacies. The resultant murder trial captivates the public because it seems so closely linked to, so familiar, and yet so far removed from, their own lives. In her usual, almost deadpan manner, Didion comments: ‘‘Two months dragged by, and the headlines never stopped,’’ only to continue, ‘‘Two months in which the Miller trial was pushed off the Examiner’s front page only by the Academy Award nominations and Stan Laurel’s death’’ (24). Didion ends this essay with a description of Lucille Miller’s former lover Arthwell Hayton’s wedding day. Hayton had been implicated in Miller’s husband’s murder, but had been cleared of guilt in court, and is marrying his second wife. This is a deliberate attempt on Didion’s part

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to show the cycle of blind acceptance of the distinctly Californian ideal of redemption as it repeats itself, to prove that the failed dreamers are still left believing, still devoted to the ideal despite stark evidence to the contrary, that suburban salvation is particular to the state.

‘‘John Wayne: A Love Song’’ Beginning with her earliest memories of John Wayne, Didion recalls when she was a child on an air force base in Colorado Springs, Colorado, how she would watch movies with her brother in a Quonset hut there. She remembers a line from War of the Wildcats in which Wayne told his leading lady he wanted to build her a house ‘‘at a bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow’’ (30). For Didion, it touches an elemental female longing, something akin to nostalgia but more immanent. She says deep in her heart she still longs to hear someone tell her that. As she does so often, Didion pits the illusion against the real, and she leaves human desire to negotiate its way through each. She has set up her essay as a paean to a kind of manhood that does not exist, that has been almost entirely fabricated yet is utterly evocative and persistent. It is a certain kind of secure, unambiguous manliness that enables all of the other stereotypes of personhood to be true. In other words, she sees John Wayne as the embodiment of the Western myth through which all facets of the myth flow. Didion goes on location to interview Wayne and the other actors during the shooting of ‘‘The Sons of Katie Elder’’ in Mexico. He has just beaten cancer and seems less invincible, but he has not lost his durable presence. Dean Martin and others exchange playful banter between filming, but John Wayne, apparently always playing himself, remains in character, with an unwavering sense of right and wrong. Didion gets drawn into his mystique, and she begins to describe man’s country, and a woman’s place in it, and wives as civilizers. She finds herself coming under the spell of the persuasive powers at work in the myth that John Wayne embodies. So close to ground zero, she enjoys the safety of unassailable male authority. Feeling like she has come close to finding her early childhood dream, she begins to feel comfortable playing the role of the damsel as she observes these men. Yet, what Didion leaves unstated, even as she catalogues the actors’ fatigue and waning interest in the filming of the picture, is that myth creation is truly exhausting, and it has little to do with faith in the ideal itself. Instead it takes stamina, and it takes endurance, much more than it takes genuine belief. Ultimately, this essay is a ‘‘love song’’ because against her better judgment, Didion cannot forsake her girlhood dream of John Wayne, and she is unashamed to admit that it refuses to fade from her memory.

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‘‘Where the Kissing Never Stops’’ Joan Baez’s Institute for the Study of Nonviolence is the topic of this essay. In particular, it recounts a case brought before the Monterey County Board of Supervisors. Baez’s neighbors in the Salinas Valley, where the Institute is located, accused her and those attending the Institute of being ‘‘detrimental to the peace, morals, or general welfare of Monterey County’’ (42). Although this essay includes a nearly unflattering portrayal of Baez and the students of the Institute, particularly after Didion’s rather rosy portrait of John Wayne in the ‘‘Love Song’’ essay directly preceding it, Didion does not neglect to capture the almost hallucinatory absurdism of the two forces at odds. As ridiculous as the hippies’ solutions to violence in Vietnam appear, for example, equally ludicrous are the Institute’s neighbors’ fears about the hippies. Didion gives a detailed account of Baez’s history: her childhood (her father taught at Stanford, MIT, and Harvard), her almost immediate rise to fame in the folk music world (she sang at the first Newport Folk Festival and became a best-selling musician), and her entrance through her music into social activism (she sang at rallies across the South in the early 1960s). Paralleling Baez’s own stated naivete, Didion underscores the innocence, the naivete, and the problems inherent to institutionalizing or intellectualizing the counterculture, but she also reveals a kind of historicity that sanctions the movement. She accounts for its progenitors and its sacred places and its texts. She identifies the trinity of 1960s Bay Area liberalism: San Francisco, Berkeley, and Palo Alto. Of passing interest in this piece is the mention of Allen Ginsberg, the influential Beat poet and revolutionary holdover, of whom Baez’s students reflect: he is ‘‘the one, the only beautiful voice, the only one talking’’ (50). Ginsberg will continue to turn up on the periphery of many essays in this book, primarily either as a pop icon or spiritual guide of the movement if not an essential role player. By sketching Baez as a personality, and then panning back to place her and the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence into the larger culture of the times, Didion is getting at the heart of her own argument: that youth cannot be an avocation, that it is a season more than anything else, and that its ideas must evolve. She shows that ‘60s counterculture is as artificial an environment as the Western or American myth it seeks to undo. The reader is left to ask what Wayne and Baez might possibly have to say to each other outside the context of Didion’s individual articles. What she has accomplished is a clear articulation of the actual, plainly unbridgeable distance within the single American culture between these two unequal halves. The parting scene of ‘‘Where the

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Folk singer and songwriter Joan’s popular influence on the counterculture and peace movement cannot be underestimated. She opened the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence in the Carmel Valley in the early 1960s, and according to Baez’s Web site, out of this venture grew the Resource Center for Nonviolence now in Santa Cruz, California, which opened in 1976 and is dedicated to the cause of global thinking and local action. Didion visited Baez’s Institute in 1966 and found herself conflicted by what she heard and saw there. She found the Institute to be too naive, and her estimation of it is apparent in the essay ‘‘Where the Kissing Never Stops.’’ In a 2006 interview with Emma Brockes for The Guardian, when questioned about her encounter with Didion, Baez says: ‘‘I was furious with her [Didion]. I thought we were much more substantial than that.’’ Didion is often criticized for her portrayal of Baez, and John Leonard, in his introduction to the Didion collection We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live (2006), notes that she was guilty of liking ‘‘Howard Hughes and John Wayne more than Joan Baez and the flower children.’’ No further word from Didion.

Kissing Never Stops’’ bears a striking resemblance to the end of ‘‘A Love Story.’’ If Didion’s affection for John Wayne was enduring, her fondness for women of the counterculture like Baez surfaces because she understands Baez’s passion. The glowing sensation pervading the end of this and the previous essay is inspired by Didion’s acknowledgment of the enduring force of her subjects’ charisma.

‘‘Comrade Laski, C.P.U.S.A. (M.-L.)’’ A portrait of a professional revolutionary, ‘‘Comrade Laski’’ is Didion’s attempt to show yet another form of idealism meant to countermand the Western ideal. In this case, she portrays the structure of domestic communism and Michael Laski’s lonely vision of a violent overthrow of bourgeois society. Interestingly but typically, Didion gets right to the heart of the matter, finding a common ground with Laski, whom she describes as the quintessential ‘‘professional revolutionary’’ (61). Didion moves to lessen the distance between herself and Laski and, in so doing she has diminished the distance between everyman and Laski, thereby making him more familiar. If she does not make him seem

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somewhat less radical, at least he is made less incomprehensible. By humanizing him, her reader can place himself or herself into Laski’s shoes. Unfortunately for Didion’s reader, one’s compassion is poorly rewarded: first she shows the ridiculousness of Laski’s situation by giving an example of his fundraising schemes, and then she leaves readers with an image of his smallness in the grander scheme of ideology and everyday living. Readers are left with a picture of a clearly defined, articulate individual whose motives if not his methods are understandable, yet who is no better equipped to change his situation in any meaningful way, except perhaps negatively.

‘‘7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38’’ A piece about Howard Hughes, the opening segment of ‘‘7000 Romaine’’ takes the reader through Raymond Chandler country. Didion guides her reader around the area surrounding the big movie studios. She describes it as a slum and creates the impression that it is full of characters out of a Nathanael West novel. This treatment places Howard Hughes among the outsiders, as a type of character who is very different from the typical American hero, almost an antihero. Through this portrayal, Didion takes another route into the heart of the American Dream. Because Hughes is ‘‘the antithesis of all our official heroes,’’ he likewise tells readers something about who they are as a culture and what their system of beliefs is founded on (71). Didion comes at this motif from all angles. She is relentless. She invokes visions of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Titanic, and Marilyn Monroe, while cataloging all of Hughes’s business endeavors. She locates him thus in the American consciousness: he speaks to readers as a ‘‘hero’’ not because of his vast wealth, but because of everything his vast wealth enables him to do. The freedom to move and to be as strange or as private as he desires is an attribute all readers can appreciate. Didion indicates that Howard Hughes is not admirable for his power so much as he is for his ability to play by his own rules. As such, he cannot be an official hero, but readers are fascinated by him because he remains a private man.

‘‘California Dreaming’’ ‘‘California Dreaming’’ is about the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, which was, at the time of Didion’s writing, an elite think tank whose mission was to tackle the pressing issues of modernity. It was not a group of hippies funded by a single left-leaning individual

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as Baez’s Institute was, but instead was composed of a well-connected group of insiders. According to Robert M. Hutchins, the Center’s president, the group at the Center engage issues concerning ‘‘our kind’’ (73). The revolving list of active discussants is always ‘‘people we know’’ (74). They are a self-described group of ‘‘highly skilled public relations experts’’ (74), among other labels. Didion herself notes that in the presence of their rhetoric she feels as if she has gotten close to ‘‘the genuine American kitsch’’ (75). In other words, they believe in their own cultural significance, yet the reader can see that Didion is skeptical of their actual relevance. Beyond outlining their nebulous function, Didion outlines how they operate. The Center records their discussions and publishes the papers that result from their meetings, making them available to instructors at various levels across the country, which in turn establishes their practical worth. Annual support for the Center comes from private investors. As a way to ensure continued contributions, the Center invites its donors to come to the Center and play an active role in policy discussions, after a fashion allowing them to put their mouths where their money is. The large contributors often are public personalities, and this type of perceived philanthropy is good for the Center and for the donor. Didion describes a conversation between Paul Newman and Jack Lemmon, two such public donors, which sounds remarkably similar to the vacuous exchanges between hippies at Baez’s Institute. She then candidly describes the scene after this high-powered meeting she just witnessed: ‘‘Everyone goes home flattered, and the Center prevails’’ (78). In other words, Didion is skeptical of the purity of the Center just as the Center is concerning itself with keeping everything else around it pure. It is an interesting counterpart to the Baez piece because it ends with a quote about content and emotion: the wife of an important contributor to the Center says that the conversations are over her head, but that after a martini, she goes out floating on air, as if just being in such an environment is invigorating. The expression of good feelings at the end of many of these essays builds on itself. A coded message, which the reader cannot directly interpret as deliberate on Didion’s part, is present regardless: surrounded by so many powerful influences vying for devotion, one may as well subscribe to the system of beliefs that makes one feel the best in the end. That is the correct version of the American Dream to pursue, that which creates the most happiness.

‘‘Marrying Absurd’’ Nevada is the wedding capital of the West. Anyone can get a marriage license, and very little is needed to do that. Didion explains that on

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an evening in August 1965 a single justice of the peace married 171 couples because it was the last night when getting married improved your draft status. He did not marry them en masse, he said, because they are ‘‘people, not cattle. People expect more when they get married’’ (80). Drawing attention to statements like this is pure Didion, particularly after she revealed that the billboards at the edge of town advertised wedding ceremonies and that this same justice was proud because he had been able that night to get the length of the ceremony down to three minutes from five. Didion feels that Vegas is detached temporally and geographically from the rest of America, yet somehow the city seems so well suited to represent a revealing portion of American culture. Didion ends with a description of a young couple just married: the bride is too young to drink the complimentary champagne, and her father’s jokes are out of character with the reality of the situation because his daughter is already pregnant. Despite this, the new bride says with tears in her eyes, even as the chapel hostess has already begun ushering in the next couple in line, that ‘‘It was just as nice as I hoped and dreamed it would be’’ (83). Didion makes readers wonder if this is a paean to the failed concept of marriage in an age when alternative lifestyles are gaining prominence.

‘‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’’ This essay is the centerpiece of the collection, even though the entire book is devoted to exploring centerlessness. It is an investigation of the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. Didion points out that in 1967 America was not a country in open revolution, even though highminded, well-positioned people were trying to accommodate social change. What Didion notices instead, and a point she will make again in her book The White Album, is that no one felt as positive as they should have about what was going on around them, that instead everyone was ill at ease. In The White Album, this sentiment is embodied as ‘‘the paranoia of the time.’’ What follows in ‘‘Slouching’’ is a series of sketches of individuals, all loosely affiliated through living in the Haight, and revolving around a single, communal household. Didion looks for a guy named Deadeye who will be her guide to what is happening in the counterculture of the city. She meets people who are all about overcoming ‘‘don’ts’’ and Freudian hang-ups. Their preferred method for fixing these things is to take acid. Didion mentions a Grateful Dead rehearsal in Sausalito that she attends and recalls Jerry Garcia saying they played the same stage as Lawrence Welk when they were in Los Angeles.

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She also meets with runaways, who are young and whose complaints are the same as any teenager’s complaints against their parents, yet, somehow, because of the undercurrent of rebellion in San Francisco, they feel empowered to defy their parents’ authority. They feel like the time is ripe to get out of the oppressive system of the family. She tries to interview a number of officers at the San Francisco Police Department, but she cannot get them to cooperate. They are unwilling to accommodate any journalist who might produce a critique of them or the way they are handling the situation in the Haight. Didion mentions locations around the San Francisco Bay Area and the north state that will become sacred spaces to the movement: The Mother Lode region of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where the poets Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg would eventually buy property; the city of Sausalito where the Dead practiced; and the Big Sur region of California’s central coast, made famous by modernist authors Robinson Jeffers and Henry Miller, and counterculture writers Jack Kerouac and Richard Brautigan to name a few. Two of the hippies Didion interviews want to leave the city and travel. After traveling they plan on coming home and finding a place in the country to live organically. The people Didion introduces her reader to are part of a group that seems to be morally outraged by American society. Their youthful, passionate beliefs are a blend of arrogance and innocence. One of the hippies she talks to named Steve comes from Virginia and ‘‘has the idea that California is the beginning of the end’’ (98). To those making the scene in the Haight he epitomizes the uptight easterner of the time, yet his meaning is sound: according to him, when a person is back East they know that something is going to happen, even if they are not sure what that something is; in California nothing happens. Next Didion tries to talk with a community activist behind the Diggers, a group that does good things for the people of the Haight, only to find that he too seems to be working on impulse, that he is also unorganized, and that his life is equally in disarray. She is unable to find anyone with a plan. They have opinions but no commitment. The people of the Haight have dropped out. They are not looking for, nor do they require, any meaning from life. The closest thing to a plan any of them has is to go on the road, for either a short or long time, and that is it. She goes in search of Chester Anderson, a Beat Generation holdover, who prints pamphlets and hangs them up around the Haight. She interviews Chet Helms. Didion goes over to the house she has been visiting because the people there have told her when they will be taking an acid trip. All of the complications of ‘‘tripping’’ come out beforehand. They are faced with all of the small things that nag people—those things they

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are afraid will harm their experience and mess with their heads for the rest of the month after they come back down. Didion briefly mentions bits of Herb Caen’s column, and she refers to the decline of the West in 1967. Her focus often is on the drugs that fuel the counterculture. She scrutinizes the hippies’ use of acid, heroin, pot, and speed. Then Didion appraises the love stories among hippies. She considers Barbara, a hippie doing the ‘‘woman’s thing.’’ Barbara is a one-earth mama who, as Didion says, is unconscious of the fact that she is fitting herself to the mold her sisters wish to break. Didion writes ‘‘I think a lot about […] how it is possible for people to be the unconscious instruments of values they would strenuously reject on a conscious level’’ (113). She experiences sundry other anecdotal encounters surrounding drugs and hipster culture. She visits Japantown in San Francisco in an investigation of Zen Buddhism; she looks into people studying Krishna. She makes fleeting references to Allen Ginsberg, who either is seen on a poster in someone’s room or is mentioned in connection with something religious. The kids of the Haight-Ashbury consider acid to be holy. Didion cites a San Francisco psychiatrist who condemns the drug portion of the movement for taking away from the social concerns it espouses. Eventually, Didion reaches a point in this essay at which she does some serious accounting of the range of people and ideas she has encountered so far. She dwells on this moment of clarity to tie together her vast accumulation of experiences. She starts by talking about the political potential of the Haight as something less random and uncommitted than the general public has been led to believe by the popular press. She notes that what the popular press reports is largely sensationalism, but that it also comes somewhat near to the truth. Unfortunately, in her estimation, the sensationalism is only one facet of the truth. In fact, Didion believes the approach to revolution in the Haight to be ‘‘imaginatively anarchic,’’ and it is her contention that the children in the Haight have been let down (122). Didion’s prose is controlled and deliberate. When she digresses it is purposeful, and when she interjects her opinion it is for a specific effect. Didion returns to her sketches, moving from the drug-referential lifestyles to the political body in the Haight. Peter Berg works with Arthur Lisch and the Diggers. He had been in a guerilla mime troupe called San Francisco Mime Troupe and was tangentially related to the Artist’s Liberation Front. He was partly responsible for the Summer of Love in San Francisco, and he had supplied food and puppet shows during the Hunter’s Point Riots in 1966. At a Janis

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Joplin show, his mime troupe shows up in blackface and starts doing street theater. They are attempting to speak on behalf of the African American man, asking the hippies why they have given up what the black man has been denied access to. Their signs and pamphlets are too real and too scary for the hippies. The people Didion is with are freaked out by the bad vibes the mime troupe is giving off, and they have to leave the Janis show. Next, the blackface mime troupe gathers around several black people and begins heckling them. The black men being confronted respond to the troupe’s taunts that nobody stole Chuck Berry’s music, that Berry made it for everybody, for all America. This is an interesting scene in which the animosity is all one-sided. The whites are convinced there should be some sort of black outrage at this show, and they create a situation that, at least in this moment, does not exist. Instead, righteously indignant, the mimes put themselves in the position of instructing the blacks about how resentful they should feel. The ‘‘audience,’’ however, is entirely oblivious to the political implications of the mime troupe’s act. Didion asks a hippie girl what she thinks of their street theater and all she can say is, ‘‘Maybe it’s some John Birch thing’’ (127). What Didion here underlines is a perfect example of the counterculture’s existence being less about rebellion and more about ignorance. As she sees it, the movement does not understand its own motivations. Didion goes to a house where children are given acid and peyote. The children are five years old and they call it High Kindergarten. The final scene of ‘‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’’ is a return to the first Haight child she introduced, a boy named Michael, who had started a fire that morning in the house he and his mother were living in with several other men and women. He is chewing an electric cord, but only his mother notices, because the other adults in the house are focused on getting some Moroccan hash that has fallen through a floorboard after the fire.

PART II. ‘‘PERSONALS’’ ‘‘On Keeping a Notebook’’ This is a personal piece by Didion, as the section’s name implies. In this essay she writes about journals, about jotting down thoughts and about remembering things. She discloses how, when one comes back to these jottings, how random they seem and how rarely useful in a practical way they really are. Even the memory of their inception is closed to the writer, the one who lived it. She describes journal keeping as more like a compulsion. She recalls a story she had written when she was five

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years old in her first notebook. It was about a woman dying of cold in the Arctic only to wake up in the Sahara dying of heat. In retelling this story, she acknowledges that her highly developed sense of irony has in fact been the deepest seeded attribute of her writing since the beginning. As she understands them, journals have nothing to do with keeping a factual record of the experiences she has had. Instead she prefers them to contain lies that act as poetic images might, that evoke an entire afternoon by feel rather than through factual description. She calls it ‘‘how it felt to me’’ (134), or to ‘‘remember what it was to be me’’ (136). She claims that in notebooks such as hers, the ‘‘I’’ is always of the most importance because it is always the audience. In other words, she writes in a notebook only for herself, constructing meaning from fragments, not from entire days accurately recollected. The snippets she includes in her notebook remind her of the emotions she felt, of her dreams and desires. Through them, because she knows how she once had felt, she can discern why she feels the way she does now. In her final analysis, she decides that the most important function of a notebook is that it keeps its author in touch. It is obvious that Didion takes her greatest pleasures from the lessons of nostalgia.

‘‘On Self-Respect’’ ‘‘On Self-Respect’’ begins with a rumination on the moment Didion felt she lost her innocence. She says it came when she stopped believing in herself. She says the end of innocence comes when people misplace their self-respect. Indirectly, Didion divulges that she is acquainted with the positive and negative aspects of this issue. Self-respect does not keep people safe from harm, but it is a ‘‘separate peace, a private reconciliation’’ (144). Didion thinks it is easier for women to make this peace with themselves and uses Jordon Baker from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby as an example. Didion says that people with self-respect ‘‘have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things’’ (145). People with self-respect display character: ‘‘Character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which selfrespect springs’’ (145). Because previous generations had discipline instilled in them, Didion says that they had more self-respect than later generations. They were able to look beyond instant gratification in a way that people living in the twenty-first century cannot. This is the type of statement that makes her appear conservative to many readers of her generation, who, looking forward, saw themselves making positive social changes and clearing the way for progress. But Didion uses the example of frontier families, as

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she so often does, to demonstrate that pioneer discipline created character. Discipline creates character, and character engenders self-respect. She contends that, if self-respect had a motto, the motto should be ‘‘anything worth having has its price’’ (146). On a positive note, she says that self-respect does not turn one in on oneself, but instead opens one to opportunities for real love. She says that, instead of embracing self-respect, people often play roles of acquiescence. In doing so, they only become further alienated from themselves. Self-respect gives people back to themselves.

‘‘I Can’t Get That Monster Out of My Mind’’ The monster referred to in this essay is Hollywood, and the long-held belief that Hollywood stifles creativity and subsequently that no good films are being made in America. Didion remarks that Hollywood has long been seen as a ‘‘pejorative,’’ but she disagrees (150). She reminds readers that F. Scott Fitzgerald, writing Hollywood screenplays in his final years, was not washed up, but was, in fact, also writing his final masterwork, The Last Tycoon. Didion is saying that it is a choice to represent Hollywood as pejorative; there is no disease called Hollywood that kills people. As onlookers, outsiders like the guilty pleasure of it and like to think Hollywood is bad. She mentions the presence of this trope in A Star Is Born. Didion is indicting a large section of newly educated, middle-class Americans who are ill-equipped to understand how unsophisticated it is to demand of their entertainment that it be serious art. She seems to say that fears over Hollywood are unwarranted or at least are founded on the paranoia of a section of society that does not grasp the full picture of the art world. Didion likewise seems to claim that Hollywood is doing what it is supposed to do, but when it overreaches, it fails because it is not capable of recognizing its own limits. In the film industry’s defense, Didion emphasizes that compared to the number of poorly written books published each year, proportionately Hollywood’s output is at least as good. When directors are given carte blanche, they often come up short anyway. They need to know the limits of their own skill and admit that Hollywood is not robbing them of the perfect art they would otherwise create. She says directors are invariably didactic to a fault (153) and that they are selfimportant to a fault. She does not feel that European filmmakers are any better, and in what Didion felt was the age of the independent filmmaker, she notes that few were actually taking advantage of the opportunities for artistic freedom afforded by the demise of the studio system.

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‘‘On Morality’’ Didion is writing about morality from a hotel room in Death Valley, California. It is her goal to write about morality in its particulars, not in an abstract sense. She describes a scene from the night before: a woman and her husband came across a car accident. The driver was dead, but his passenger was gravely injured and was in shock. The woman drove the injured passenger 185 miles to the nearest hospital, while her husband stayed with the driver’s dead body because, according to the woman, ‘‘You can’t just leave a body on the highway. It’s immoral’’ (158). For Didion, this is an example of morality at its least abstract, what she refers to as ‘‘wagon-train morality’’ that is predicated on loyalty. It is morality in its most primitive form. The primitive desert landscape demands a morality suited for it. Didion moves through several examples of abstract morality, of moments far less clear-cut that demand something more than moral primitivism. She describes the problematic difference between morality and ‘‘conscience,’’ and the problems inherent in following one’s own conscience, which seems innocuous enough, as well as attempts at imposing the will of one’s conscience on others, which grows increasingly frightening. From Didion’s perspective, what is ‘‘right,’’ ‘‘wrong,’’ and virtuous is set in a delicate balance between one’s personal desires and society’s needs. A culture deceives itself by imposing moral imperatives on its people. With this, Didion moves into social commentary and a warning, because for her, moral imperatives lead to moral outrage and to what she refers to as ‘‘the thin whine of hysteria’’ (163). She would have society use the term with care the farther from its initial primitivism it goes.

‘‘On Going Home’’ Early in this essay, Didion states that ‘‘marriage is the classic betrayal’’ (165). What she is referring to is her husband’s inability to comprehend the world she came from and that world’s indifference to him. She has gone home to Sacramento in the Central Valley of California. For her, with her storied pioneer ancestry, Sacramento is a region that breeds a certain type of person and creates a particular type of society. Didion is entering into the long discussion of the role of ‘‘place’’ in Western literature and history. By mentioning the mementos that are incomprehensible to her husband, which are everywhere in her parent’s dusty home, she is defining the culture of her Sacramento, and for her, culture and place are synonymous. The Canton dessert plates and the

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assay scales she mentions delineate the geography in her mind, that of the Pacific Rim (Canton, China), the direct historical relationship between westward expansion, the Gold Rush, and the Sierra Nevada Mountains (assay scales). These things psychically locate Didion in the world. Place, and therefore family, is her greatest frame of reference. Where she is has a specific meaning. This essential quality that her home has the ability to impart is likewise what Didion feels is lacking in those born after World War II. Because the next generation lacks this sense of home, they will become the iconoclasts of the 1960s. Without a refined sense of ‘‘home,’’ there is no gauge for one’s actions and no sense of the value of preserving traditions. When she goes home, Didion finds herself in the self-described position of irrelevancy, remote from her past and from modernity. Nevertheless, she is not uncomfortable. Didion describes going to a dilapidated family graveyard, which briefly appears early in Section II of Run River, and in greater detail as well as a recurring theme in Where I Was From. She travels to other places and homes of significance to her in the area. Didion is visiting Sacramento to celebrate her child’s first birthday. By returning to her childhood home, and seeing the people and places that define her, Didion wishes to give her child that same sense of place, knowing in her heart that because of her lifestyle it is impossible. For an interesting supplemental reading to this essay, see Part 4 of Where I Was From for an extended example of Didion’s comprehension of home and place.

PART III. ‘‘SEVEN PLACES

OF THE

MIND’’

‘‘Notes from a Native Daughter’’ Didion tries to give her reader the true sense of California in this piece. For her it is not the sum of its parts, not merely redwood trees and coastal fogs. California for Didion is equal parts hope and loss and is therefore best understood as an imagined landscape. In her opinion the character of this landscape is exemplified by her hometown of Sacramento, for it was the magnet community of pioneers and 49ers, and it defined the state from before the Gold Rush until the years immediately following World War II. This essay is similar in theme to the previous essay ‘‘On Going Home.’’ It is defined by Didion’s sense of place and by her awareness of social change. California is to her an imagined place because much of what made it real for her has vanished under the rising tide of the suburbs. But she recalls summers swimming in the local rivers, driving

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through hops fields, and going to the State Fair. She remembers winters in school and in Sunday school, the elm leaves in the gutters downtown, and rivers filling with floodwaters. She remembers the color of the spring fields, which causes her to be reminded of the great psychic distance between the world she recalls inhabiting and the outside world, New York City. Didion thinks of California now as something unfixed in a way that places like Vermont and Chicago are fixed. It is unfixed because it is so rapidly changing, so rapidly vanishing, and must so often be imagined or remembered because of these unavoidable facts. In an attempt to discuss irrefutable truths about California, Didion describes the Central Valley and its roads and waterways and towns. She focuses on the insularity of Valley towns, exemplified by the newspapers they read. She tells certain stories about Sacramento and returns to the idea of loss and change, especially the loss of authenticity and the commercialization of ‘‘place.’’ Didion closes this essay with lines from the British Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins in ‘‘Spring and Fall, to a Young Child,’’ meant to make her reader consider that her mourning for a lost California is merely a mood common to aging in everyone’s life. The theme of change and the ideas Didion expresses as well as the places she refers to in this essay can be encountered throughout much of her body of work, including ‘‘Holy Water,’’ ‘‘In the Islands,’’ and ‘‘On the Mall’’ in The White Album, her first novel Run River, and her memoir Where I Was From.

‘‘Letter from Paradise, 21° 190 N., 157° 520 W.’’ Writing about her relationship to Hawaii, Didion describes the three Hawaiis she possesses in her mind. The first Hawaii is the one she was shown on the atlas the day Pearl Harbor was bombed. The second is the one she imagined being able to see from the beaches she played on in California. The third is the Hawaii she equates with the past and with loss. This third Hawaii is very much like the lost California she writes to in her elegy ‘‘Notes of a Native Daughter,’’ and by the end of the essay, she is describing it in the same terms she used for her beloved Sacramento. She recognizes that her third Hawaii is as insular as her imagined California was. It has been commercialized; its true meaning has been lost. Of Pearl Harbor as a tourist destination she says, ‘‘It is hard to remember what we came to remember’’ (192). The essay ‘‘In the Islands’’ in The White Album reads like a companion piece to the sentiments Didion expresses here, particularly when she takes her reader to the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. She travels over the same territory she will cover in closer detail in ‘‘In the Islands,’’ in which she

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Perhaps because I grew up in California, Hawaii figured large in my fantasies. I sat as a child on California beaches and imagined that I saw Hawaii. (Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 188) Hawaii figures heavily in California history and often enters the daydreams of California childhoods. The thought of a tropical paradise just over the horizon beyond California’s ‘‘paradise’’ is tantalizing to a child, but more so to students of literature because it seems to symbolically fulfill not only the Jeffersonian vision of Manifest Destiny as found in Walt Whitman’s ‘‘Facing West from California’s Shores,’’ but likewise an older, Columbian dream of the Orient, reenvisioned in Whitman’s ‘‘Passage to India.’’ Although ‘‘Letter from Paradise’’ focuses primarily on what Hawaii has come to mean to America since World War II and the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Didion remains fixated on its earlier Californian associations. California and Hawaii have long been linked by trade. Richard Henry Dana writes about ‘‘kanakas’’ (Sandwich Islanders) working on ships off the coast of California in his Two Years before the Mast (1840), and John Augustus Sutter of Gold Rush fame came to California via Hawaii. The San Francisco poet Charles Warren Stoddard gained moderate acclaim for his South Sea Idylls (1873), a memoir of the time he spent in the islands, and Mark Twain, whose modest reputation at the time was still most closely related to California literature, wrote Letters from Hawaii in 1866. Following in the footsteps of his mentor Stoddard, Jack London sailed to Hawaii on the Snark, and in 1907 learned how to surf, popularizing the sport back on the mainland. A fictional account of his experiences can be found in Jack London’s Stories of Hawaii. Didion wrote again about Hawaii in an essay collected in The White Album entitled ‘‘In the Islands,’’ which focuses on the repercussions of her marital problems, but expands to include Vietnam and the ghost of James Jones and his World War II novel From Here to Eternity (1952). In this instance, California and Hawaii are not connected so much by fantasy and history but by war; California is the point of embarkation for Vietnam, and Hawaii is the final resting place of many of that war’s fallen soldiers. Didion revisits Hawaii again in the essay ‘‘Pacific Distances’’ in After Henry (1992). Here, it is presented as a pivotal rhetorical component of the Pacific Rim in the ‘‘atomic age.’’

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describes her relationship to James Jones’s From Here to Eternity. Didion has a way of making readers love her places the same way she does; she makes them feel the same nostalgia she does; the sadness she often describes is a kind of unsentimental, ironic nostalgia. Didion’s history of Hawaii is that of the white oligarchs. It is that world she senses the loss of. Didion often succumbs to the romance of the colonial era. She looks at labor relations and race relations. She is dubious of the tourists. She feels as if this third Hawaii, the one she goes in search of and which is most precious to her, is one the vacationers will never see or comprehend.

‘‘Rock of Ages’’ The subject of this essay is Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay, home of the famous prison. At the time of Didion’s writing, the prison is closed and its fate is still up in the air. Didion looks at the lives of the people still on the island whose job it is to maintain and patrol it. There are two men and a woman, and their two dogs. They go to San Francisco for supplies once a week and they get the newspaper by helicopter. Didion tells the histories of some of the prison’s more infamous inmates, and she discusses the conflicting plans for what will become of the abandoned prison. She appreciates its decay, resistant to the influences of the outside world.

‘‘The Seacoast of Despair’’ In this piece, Didion travels to Newport, Rhode Island, to see the turn-of-the-century homes of the wealthy who had summered there. She is reminded of the authors Edith Wharton and Henry James who had written about the people that once lived in them. She sees the homes as paramount examples of the character of the Industrial Revolution in America. She refers to them as reminders not of ‘‘how prettily money can be spent but of how harshly money can be made’’ (211). She thinks of Newport as typifying a Western aesthetic in that regard, because of its direct relationship to the source of its wealth. For this reason she considers it to be a man’s world and the women associated with it to be ornaments. She does not find happiness in the homes of the wealthy in Newport, but instead she sees their role as ‘‘homiletic, a fantastically elaborate stage setting for an American morality play in which money and happiness are presented as antithetical’’ (212). In this sense, she sees in these wealthy families a curious, adverse, oppositional lesson in American capitalism, one that reads like her own cautionary tale to modern dreamers of the American dream.

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‘‘Guaymas, Sonora’’ ‘‘Guaymas, Sonora’’ tells the story of a trip Didion takes into Mexico. She wants to visit disorienting desert spaces, to see and experience what she calls ‘‘difficult landscapes.’’ Guaymas is situated on the mainland where the desert meets the coast of the Sea of Cortes. As Didion describes it, it is a place of mirage, a town of which British author ‘‘Graham Greene might have written’’ (215). She and her husband stay for a week, eating, and reading, fishing and getting brown. Their goal is to lose themselves, and in a way, they achieve this; however, they realize they cannot entirely escape the world they have left behind. When this becomes too apparent, they drive home to Los Angeles.

‘‘Los Angeles Notebook’’ ‘‘Los Angeles Notebook’’ is an essay in five parts. It begins with Didion’s experience of the Santa Ana winds that blow seasonally through the region. They have set people on edge since earliest memory. It is a malevolent wind and one of two primary weather features Didion isolates in Southern California. The other weather feature is a brief period of torrential rains. But the Santa Ana means wildfire in the brush fields of the Coast Range Mountains and thus engages the imagination of Southern Californians. It figures in their vision of the city on fire. Didion mentions Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust and the Watts Riots as examples. In her words, ‘‘Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe’’ (221). The second section of the essay is brief, and revolves around a late-night call-in radio show. Its themes are misinformation and burning, both of books and of witches. The second section, equally brief, centers on a scene in which Didion goes shopping in a bikini at a Ralph’s market near her home. She is followed and challenged by a large older woman throughout her time in the store. This vignette is strikingly similar to John Updike’s short story ‘‘The A&P.’’ In the fourth section, Didion is at what appears to be a film industry party in Beverly Hills with French Communist directors and an English actor. Its central focus is an uncomfortable discussion between the wife of the English actor and an American. The final section of the essay takes place in a piano bar. Didion says, ‘‘The oral history of Los Angeles is written in piano bars’’ (224). She names the songs that are played and the people listening to them. She invokes their meaningless, misunderstood conversations and comments on the vacuity of it all. And that, she makes clear, is the point.

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‘‘Goodbye to All That’’ Didion recounts her experience of leaving behind Sacramento as a young woman heading for her first job and apartment in New York City.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS  To open this collection Didion reprints the poem ‘‘The Second Coming’’ by William Butler Yeats (from which her text gets its name) and she juxtaposes it with a quotation from the popular American jazz singer Peggy Lee. Although it is not necessary to guess at an author’s intent, what meaning might Didion hope her reader could get from these two very different sources when read in conjunction with one another? Of note is that ten years earlier Nigerian author Chinua Achebe also took the title of his novel Things Fall Apart from Yeats’s poem. What might it mean that two such different works by such disparate authors would find common ground in an old poem written in 1919 by an Irish poet?  The opening portraits in Slouching are of the famous, the infamous, and the unknown. Together they paint a convincing picture of American culture in the 1960s. What facet of American culture does each essay seem to represent? In what ways does the reading of each essay inform those that follow? For instance, there are startling similarities between the John Wayne piece and the Joan Baez piece it precedes. Although Didion seems to favor Wayne over Baez, the final frames of these works bear a striking resemblance to each other. What does that say about Didion’s ultimate impression of them? Does it alter in any way her overall treatment of Baez?  Late in the essay ‘‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem,’’ after a long series of ironic accounts of the hippies she meets in the Haight, Didion takes serious political stock of the movement she sees there. She says, ‘‘Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society’s atomization could be reversed’’ (122). On what does she blame this ‘‘atomization’’? What is popular culture’s role in social change during this era?  In the essay, ‘‘On Going Home’’ Didion brings up the idea of ‘‘place.’’ In addition to her understanding of what ‘‘home’’ means to her, some of the notions she refers to are carried over from ‘‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’’: in her opinion the generation that came of age in the 1960s was, unlike her, largely rootless and from broken homes. What does

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home mean to Didion? How has it informed who she is, and by extension, how does it inform who we are as individuals? What cultural lessons does an acute awareness of home teach us?  The final section in this collection is called ‘‘Seven Places of the Mind,’’ in which Didion travels up and down California, into Mexico, and to Hawaii and Rhode Island. Her notion is that the locations she visits are in some way unreal because of the preexisting meaning they already carry for her; they are not intrinsically themselves because she has previously mediated and partially created their meaning. Why would she choose to blur the difference between literal and figurative spaces and objective and subjective experiences? For example, why does Didion distinguish between three distinct Hawaiis in ‘‘Letter from Paradise’’?

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5 PLAY IT AS IT LAYS (1970)

Joan Didion’s second novel, Play It As It Lays, tells the story of Maria Wyeth and her entourage as Maria attempts (and fails) to find meaning in her life as an aging (and therefore largely unemployed) Hollywood actress in the late 1960s. Play It As It Lays is set in and around Hollywood, Las Vegas, and some small towns in the Mojave Desert. Most of the action of the novel takes place in motel or hotel rooms, or in other rented housing. The temporariness of the places in which the characters interact contributes to the sense of disconnectedness and alienation as experienced by many of the characters. The main character is Maria (pronounced ‘‘Mar-eye-ah’’) Wyeth, age thirty-one. She has a four-year-old daughter, Kate, who suffers from an unnamed disease and lives in a medical facility. Her ex-husband, Carter Lang, is a famous movie director. Maria’s mother and father are dead by the time the narration of the story begins, but they are featured in her flashbacks. One of her father’s old friends, Benny Austin, makes a brief appearance in a Vegas casino. The rest of the novel is peopled mainly by Maria and Carter’s Hollywood agent, their mutual friends, and Maria’s lovers. An abortion doctor and his assistant, as well as an actress from Carter’s movie, also figure briefly but prominently. The status and wealth of many of the characters indicate the world of the upper-class Hollywood movie industry.

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I began Play It As It Lays just as I have begun each of my novels, with no notion of ‘‘character’’ or ‘‘plot’’ or even ‘‘incident.’’ I had only two pictures in my mind, more about which later, and a technical intention, which was to write a novel so elliptical and fast that it would be over before you noticed it, a novel so fast that it would scarcely exist on the page at all. About the pictures: the first was of white space. Empty space. This was clearly the picture that dictated the narrative intention of the book—a book in which anything that happened would happen off the page, a ‘‘white’’ book to which the reader would have to bring his or her own bad dreams—and yet this picture told me no ‘‘story,’’ suggested no situation. From Didion, ‘‘Why I Write,’’ New York Times Magazine, December 5, 1976.

The novel begins and ends in the first person, with Maria narrating her own story. As the narrator of this first chapter, Maria tells readers that she is writing this book from a mental institution where she has been placed by her ex-husband Carter, and their friend Helene. She does not yet divulge that she has been placed in the mental institution because she was with Helene’s husband BZ when he committed suicide by overdosing on prescription drugs. The second chapter is told from Helene’s perspective. The third is told by Maria’s husband Carter. The rest of the book, with the exception of some of the last chapters, is in third-person narration, one that is not omniscient or aware of everything but that remains closely tied to Maria’s consciousness. Some of the chapters are as short as a few lines. Play It As It Lays offers a gendered critique of the jet-setting Hollywood lifestyle, and Didion’s portrayal of people in the Hollywood movie business is not flattering. Maria’s life is depicted as utterly void of positive human contact. Her ex-husband Carter is emotionally, verbally, and physically abusive. Her past boyfriends are vindictive. She has no family left, and an old friend of her parents is impossible to contact. Even her relationship with her daughter fails: her daughter seems to prefer being at the medical care facility rather than being with her. Yet that relationship is the one she clings to at the end of the novel as she hopes for a future life with her. For the majority of the novel, Maria is in a deep depression and maneuvers painfully through the daily rituals of life, numbed by drugs and alcohol. When she does reach out for help, she is rejected. Didion crafts the void in Maria’s soul by making it seem that

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Maria is completely disconnected from the events of her own life. She often does this through fragments and matter-of-fact statements that lack emotional commentary. For instance, the abortion doctor appears first as a voice on the phone, and then only in fragmented statements almost disconnected from a physical body that Maria cannot see from where she is lying on the table. The central conceit of the novel is the idea of games. Through this idea, Didion elevates the superstitions and folk advice of Vegas gamblers to a life philosophy that ultimately saves Maria from the fate of suicide. The idea of ‘‘playing games’’ is also explored in the context of human relationships to make the bridge from what Maria’s father taught her about card games (about ‘‘playing the cards you’re dealt’’) to what Maria discovers about life, reinforced in her decision not to join BZ when he commits suicide. In a world of male domination and control, Maria is aware of initially being famous only as the ‘‘wife of a famous producer’’ and then being forgotten, for the most part, by the Hollywood establishment after her divorce. Didion explores society’s unstated regulations for single women that subjugate them to the patriarchy. One of the ways these regulations are imposed in the novel is through Christian morality and its notions of punishment and guilt. Being a woman on her own is only one of the multiple reasons that Maria is a target for society’s hostility and disapprobation. At one point, toward the end of the novel, Maria is afraid that she might resort to prostituting herself. There is a heavy undercurrent of violence against women in the novel. BZ hits Helene. Susannah Wood gets beat up during rough sex. Carter abuses Maria. Maria’s main appearance as an actress is in a movie where her character is raped by a gang of bikers. She is the victim of date rape by a former boyfriend. The male characters in the novel regularly order the women around and tell them what to do. The male characters tell Maria what she does and does not want and don’t listen to her when she says, ‘‘no.’’ She is called a derogatory name by at least two different male characters, one of whom is Carter, who also tells her to die. The violence is often related, although not exclusively, to issues of adultery, infidelity, and divorce. The world of Play It As It Lays reflects the worst of Hollywood culture in the sixties and seventies and it does so through visual evocations, as if its narrative form was tied to cinematic representation. Didion represents the superficiality of this life and its lack of morals, as well as the resulting alienation that someone like Maria can experience if she is not ‘‘on board.’’ She also uncovers the discrimination against women rampant in Ameican culture in the late sixties, where women’s freedom only meant that they were sexual playthings for men and lacked any real

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Didion’s inventive use of metaphor enables the reader to make sense of random information and fill in the narrative. Metaphor also reinforces Didion’s thematic preoccupation: the poverty of life in a world like Hollywood where ethical coherence has vanished, where life is led without regard to tradition or posterity. Three major metaphors inform the narrative: the craps game, the compulsive freeway driving, and the abortion. All illuminate the condition of living in post-history, yet all reveal something about the trouble with ‘‘as it was’’ both in terms of Maria’s life and the life of the nation. The craps game, for example, suggests Maria’s predicament—and by extension the California predicament—of living in a world where the past fails to connect rationally to the future, where dreams of new beginnings are played out. She inhabits a world which seems ‘‘not to apply’’ (her home in Silver Wells, Nevada, has literally vanished, replaced by a missile range). In a world where ‘‘nothing adds up,’’ one ‘‘plays it as it lays,’’ Maria concludes, rejecting her American dreaming father’s optimistic teleology that ‘‘the next roll of the dice will always be better than the one that went out last.’’ From Leonard Wilcox, ‘‘Narrative Technique and the Theme of Historical Continuity in the Novels of Joan Didion,’’ 72.

autonomy or identity beyond their sexuality. Didion also represents the beginning of a global culture in this group of traveling elite through Maria’s experience of a false sense of mobility. She drives on the freeway but doesn’t go anywhere; she moves around between houses, between the beds of different men, between Hollywood and Las Vegas, but nothing about her situation changes.

‘‘MARIA,’’ ‘‘HELENE,’’

AND

‘‘CARTER’’ CHAPTERS

The first chapter is a direct address from Maria. She tells readers why it is useless to search for reasons. She states that there are ‘‘only certain facts.’’ She has been asked to write down these ‘‘facts’’ of her life as part of her process of healing while in the mental institution following the suicide of BZ. Readers learn that her four-year-old daughter, Kate, has been placed in a medical care facility by her ex-husband because of an illness. Then, she gives various details about her upbringing in Nevada. She remembers running into Benny Austin, an old friend of her father’s, once at the Flamingo casino, and is prompted by the memory to

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write about her parents. Benny and her parents were always concocting plans, but those plans never came to fruition. When she left her parents’ house at eighteen, she went to New York to become an actress. Her mother dies while she is in New York. Maria takes the news of her mother’s death very hard. Her grief over her mother’s death causes her to look tired and haggard so she does not get a lot of modeling work after that. Helene narrates a chapter in which she recounts trying to visit Maria in the mental health facility. The last time she was there, Maria had indicated that she didn’t really want to talk to Helene. This time, Maria refused to see her. Helene accuses Maria of being a very selfish person who doesn’t care about anyone other than herself. In the next chapter, Carter lists scenes that he remembers. He remembers a dinner party conversation in which Maria disagrees with his statement that he always eats breakfast at a restaurant. Her statement, and the manner in which she announces it, makes many of the dinner party guests uncomfortable. The next scene he recalls is Maria playing with Kate when she was a baby. He criticizes her for getting Kate wet with the hose. Maria stops playing with her and walks away, sending the baby to her father. Carter sifts through these images to search for a pattern, but he is unable to find one. The effect of these scenes on him, however, is that he believes there is little chance for a reconciliation with Maria.

Commentary The comparison between the two different snakes mentioned in the first chapter sets up a commentary on good and evil. Maria remarks that the coral snake has venom to protect itself, yet the king snake, which is not venomous, has still survived as a species. She just simply accepts these differences, although others consider the first snake ‘‘evil’’ because it can kill humans and the second snake ‘‘good’’ because it is harmless to humans. In accepting that there is good and evil in the world and no real logic for the differences between them, she rejects a standard Christian worldview in which good is rewarded and evil is punished. Instead, Maria suggests that it is just easier to accept a morally ambiguous universe. As a metaphor, the poison of the snakes serves to establish at the outset the abuse inherent in the interactions among Maria, Carter, and their friends. Maria’s opening comment, that she does not ask ‘‘what makes Iago evil,’’ also indicates that she simply accepts the existence of evil and does not wish to examine its causes—not in Shakespeare’s Iago, not in the snake, not in the disease that affects her daughter, and not in the

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sexism of the Hollywood movie industry. She just accepts that evil exists in the world. This echoes with her assertion that she recently lost all of the optimism that she acquired from her father. Although she was taught that ‘‘what came in on the next roll would always be better than what went out on the last,’’ she no longer has much hope for the future. Throughout the story, Maria’s character is content with surface-level explanations, not because she is shallow, but because the reader gets the sense that examining what lies beneath the surface of Maria’s life would be too painful for her. Thus, she becomes a complaisant character, content to acquiesce to the status quo, and resigned to her disempowerment because fighting to be recognized would make her more of a target for the repeated male-against-female violence that occurs in the plot.

CHAPTERS 1–10 Chapter 1 begins a few months after Maria and Carter have separated. Maria spends every day driving on the freeway. This gives her life a sense of purpose that it otherwise lacks. She has been sleeping outside by the pool, using beach towels as blankets. This signifies that her sleeping outside is temporary, an important distinction because she is worried that her sleeping arrangement is a precursor to a decline into mental instability. In chapter 2, readers find out about Maria’s star role in two of Carter’s movies. The first film he did was a documentary-style film shot about Maria’s life in New York. The second, Angel Beach, had Maria playing a woman who is raped by a motorcycle gang. In chapter 3, Maria visits the office of her agent to try to get a job. In the elevator, two men are exceptionally nice to her because they recognize that she is Carter Lang’s wife. Chapter 4 finds BZ visiting Maria. He has just come off the set of Carter’s movie, which is being filmed in the Mojave Desert. Maria is trying to find out who Carter is sleeping with now, but BZ won’t tell her. Instead, he tells her how much Carter is devoted to her. Maria wants him to stay, but he says that he is late for a meeting with Tommy Loew. She hears the sounds of a party coming from Larry Kulik’s house. BZ asks her whether she is going to go to the party. She says no. Later, she finds out that BZ went to the party with Tommy Loew and a young, up-and-coming actress. Maria imagines that they might have all had sex together after the party. Chapter 5 is a phone conversation between Maria and her agent, Freddy Chaikin. Freddy is trying to get Maria some work as an actress but because she walked off a set a year ago, it is hard to find someone who wants to work with her.

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In chapter 6, Maria ends up driving farther than she normally does on the freeway and is within sixty miles of Carter’s location on the film set. She imagines that if she calls him, he might invite her to visit him; then she imagines that if she visited, they would have a fight, so she does not call him. After that, she stops her daily joyrides on the freeway. Maria is now sleeping during the afternoons and is worried that this is a bad sign. The filming of Carter’s movie has been postponed for a week because of a fire. BZ calls Maria and invites her to a party at Anita Garrison’s house. After the party, a group of people go back to BZ’s. He tells Maria later that back at his place ‘‘everybody got what he came for,’’ suggesting, the reader can assume, that sexual liaisons took place and possible drug use as well. Carter comes back to the house to stay while the set is rebuilt. He and Maria fight about whether or not to try to salvage their relationship. He reproaches Maria for visiting Kate too much. The medical facility called him to report her frequent visits and to suggest that they are interfering with Kate’s ‘‘adjustment.’’ Chapter 10 is a flashback to the time when she is figuring out that she is pregnant with her second child. She is at BZ and Helene’s house with Carter, a friend of BZ’s, and a friend of Helene’s. BZ’s friend is complaining about having to make mixed drinks with bottled lemon juice instead of real lemons. Carter leaves in annoyance. Maria has trouble with morning sickness.

Commentary The chapters are now written in the third person, meaning that the story is told from the point of view of someone who can see all of the action of all of the characters. However, this third-person narrator stays focused mainly on Maria. Since this is not told from Maria’s perspective, readers are not privy to the internal workings of Maria’s mind and therefore a gap exists between their understanding of her actions and the emotions she experiences. Through this point of view, however, readers are able to find out details about how she wants to be seen by others. For instance, readers learn that she ensures that the gas station attendant sees her properly disposing of her coke bottle when she is done with it. Her concern for looking like she fits in surfaces more in the latter part of the story when she is traveling alone and is mistaken for a prostitute. There is no indication that Maria understands her own loneliness, but readers are told that she will sometimes make idle conversation with the attendant just to hear the sound of her own voice.

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As Maria’s life unfolds, she starts to become like the character that she plays in the movie Angel Beach. Carter originally ended the movie with a shot of the motorcycle gang who raped Maria’s character. However, the studio changes the ending to a shot of Maria’s character walking across a college campus. The narrator tells readers that Maria likes the studio’s ending because it conveys that the girl had a ‘‘definite knack for controlling her own destiny,’’ the very thing that Maria lacks in her life. In fact, she identifies this characteristic with herself as shot in Carter’s first film: ‘‘That girl on the screen in that first picture had no knack for anything.’’ Readers find out that BZ is most likely bisexual and probably engages in group sex with his wife and other partners. Maria does not judge him for this, but instead just accepts it as part of the decadent Hollywood lifestyle. Maria’s life with Carter is public and reveals inequalities between men and women in Hollywood. Others think that they know Maria because they have seen her movies, but mainly she is treated as famous only because of the status of her husband. His career has taken off whereas hers has not. Producers do not want to work with her because she has developed a reputation as unreliable and mentally unstable. Readers find out later in the story that this reputation is partially founded on an incident in which she had to walk off a set because of complications arising from the abortion that Carter forced her to have.

CHAPTERS 11–20 Maria tells Carter that BZ’s mother pays them money to stay married. Carter, who is late to meet Freddy Chaikin, says he does not like her saying that. Maria then breaks the news to him that she is pregnant. She says that she does not know whether the child is his or someone else’s. He asks who the other man is and she replies, ‘‘You know.’’ Readers learn that Maria had an affair with Les Goodwin. Carter knew about it, but Les’s wife, Felicia, did not. Carter is mad that she went to a new doctor who they do not know. Carter walks out on Maria and is so distraught that he does not even keep his appointment with Freddy. Carter demands that she have an abortion and gives her a number of a doctor to call who will perform it. When she says that she is not sure she wants to have an abortion, he threatens that if she does not he will take Kate away from her. Maria calls the number he gives her and speaks to the doctor’s assistant. Later, sitting with Helene, and Carlotta, BZ’s mother, as Carlotta talks about how awful her recent trip to Cozumel was, Maria remembers the phone conversation with the abortion doctor’s assistant.

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Maria begins to miss her mother again. She recalls the year following her mother’s death in which she grieved considerably. Carter calls her to find out if she called the doctor and what he said. She is short with Carter. She does not really want to talk to him. Maria begins to play superstitious games to induce menstruation or a miscarriage. She sleeps on clean, white sheets, wears white clothes without underwear, gets rid of her Tampax, and buys baby furniture. She cries a lot and does not want to talk to anyone. The abortion doctor’s assistant calls her back and tells her that her operation will occur on Monday and that they will call again with further instructions. She goes to the beach and when she gets back into town, she calls Les Goodwin. He and Felicia have been worried about her and have been trying to get a hold of her. Maria gets money out of the bank to pay for the abortion. She lies and tells the bank teller that she is going on a trip. She remembers all of the men she has ever slept with and they all blend into one. Les Goodwin senses that Maria is in trouble and calls her from New York to find out what is going on. She does not tell him about the pregnancy or the scheduled abortion. He says he is coming out to California to visit her. He tells her his flight is arriving Monday afternoon, the day of her abortion.

Commentary Maria is in denial about her pregnancy. Her real marital troubles stand in stark contrast to the carefree attitude of her globetrotting friends. There is an emphasis on keeping up appearances so that while everyone discusses meaningless vacations Maria is quietly suffering. Maria reaches out to Les and Felicia, but it is an empty gesture. How can she find the support she needs from them when Les is the man whose baby she may be aborting and Felicia is the betrayed wife? She watches a woman crossing the street from a motel to a supermarket and believes she is seeing ‘‘the dead still center of the world, the quintessential intersection of nothing.’’ Maria relates to this woman and fears becoming her because she understands that the woman’s life is meaningless. If Maria were to admit that her life was meaningless, then she might realize that she has nothing to live for and give up. Didion shows that Maria’s relationships with men are, in fact, empty and meaningless.

CHAPTERS 21–30 Maria dreams that she has the baby and is living with Ivan Costello, her ex-boyfriend from New York. She wakes up to the sound of the

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telephone ringing and rips the cord out of the wall. She visits Kate but is not received warmly by the nurses. She fears that she will die during the process of the abortion as punishment for her adultery. Maria writes three letters but she rips them up and flushes them down the toilet. She tries to call Carter in his motel room, but he was already on the set of the film. Maria is distracted and attempts to kill time until the phone call from the doctor. The doctor finally calls and gives her directions. She drives to the parking lot of the Thriftimart as instructed. There she encounters the doctor’s assistant who gets in her car and gives her further directions. He makes small talk with her on the way. The abortion takes place in a bedroom. Maria notices the details of the room and tries to think of other things. She tries to remember details from her life After the abortion, Maria meets Les Goodwin for dinner. She has another flashback to the last time she saw her mother before her death. She had flown out from New York to spend the weekend with her parents in Silver Wells. Carter calls Maria from the desert. He suggests that she accompany Helene on her trip to Pebble Beach to visit BZ’s mother. Maria says she cannot go. A few weeks later, Maria starts having heavy bleeding and pain as a result of the abortion. She consults a doctor who says everything is fine and that what she is experiencing is normal. He prescribes pain medication for her, but it does not help. Maria meets with Freddy Chaikin who tells her that Morty Landau wants her to appear in two episodes of one of his television shows. Maria tries to tell him that she is not feeling well, but he responds by saying that he understands she and Carter are separated and that work will be the best thing to take her mind off of her problems with Carter.

Commentary Christian guilt surfaces in the narration of the abortion and continues in the subsequent dream imagery. Maria’s bills reflect the emptiness of her life, how all of her gestures fail to add up to anything meaningful. She has bills for ‘‘flowers sent to people whom she had failed to thank for parties, sheets bought for beds in which no one now slept, an old bill from F.A.O. Schwarz for a tricycle Kate had never ridden.’’ Didion’s character study of Maria is the latest in a line of famous women adulterers in American literature. Whereas Hester Prynne in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is condemned to wearing a red ‘‘A’’ on her chest for her adultery, the big red ‘‘T’’ of the Thriftimart sign functions to brand Maria’s crime. Maria begins to see all men as the same. Whether it is her husband, her married lover and friend Les, or her agent, all of these male characters

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basically represent Maria’s demise. In this section of the novel, she declares to Les that she is ‘‘very very very tired of listening to you all.’’ Here, her relationship with Les becomes emblematic of her relationship with all men. Maria feels like men have control over her body, whether it is sexually or medically. Maria’s body and her sexuality are not her own—in Hollywood, her body is put on display when she acts in a movie, and it can be owned and consumed by anyone who watches those films.

CHAPTERS 31–40 Maria begins to have so much pain associated with her heavy bleeding that she calls Carter and tells him that she is afraid she will die. He makes her promise she will call the doctor. She calls him from the studio the next morning, and he says he will meet her at the hospital. She says she cannot go to the hospital because she is working. She gets pain medication from someone on the set and keeps working. She finds some kind of debris from the abortion on her pad, and when the doctor tells her it was just part of the placenta, she can finally sleep again. Larry Kulik invites her to come over to his place to use the sauna. He has heard that she is ‘‘ready for the nuthouse’’ and offers to be her friend. Maria begins having dreams about being left by herself in a house where there are pieces of human flesh in the plumbing. One morning the sink backs up in the house, and Maria decides to rent an apartment. Over Christmas, Kate stays with Maria for three days. They have Christmas dinner with Les Goodwin and Felicia. Kate smashes a porcelain doll against a mirror and begins screaming uncontrollably. After Maria returns Kate to the hospital, she is unable to read the newspaper because she is too upset by the stories of accidents resulting in deaths to children. She is plagued by images of dying children. Maria encounters a mentally ill woman in the supermarket as she is waiting in line to use the payphone. Maria does not want to call anyone in particular, but she imagines that if she cannot be reached by telephone then that will cause something bad to happen to Kate. Although Maria attempts to be kind to the mentally ill woman, she screams at Maria and calls her a whore. Although the woman does not know Maria, her words strike home because Maria is carrying a lot of guilt from her failed marriage, her affair, and her abortion. Carter calls her from New York where he went to cut the picture and asks her why she is renting an apartment when they are paying for the house in Beverly Hills. The next morning, she vomits because the shower drain is slow. She resigns herself to the fact that there will be plumbing issues in any house or apartment she goes to, and so she returns to the

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house in Beverly Hills. In February, Carter and Maria decide to get a divorce. Helene serves as Maria’s witness. On the day of the hearing, they meet for lunch. Helene shows Maria the new ring that BZ’s mother gave her ‘‘for staying on the desert’’ and tells Maria that BZ had a lot of lovers while they were there. During the divorce hearing, Helene testifies that Carter is guilty of mental cruelty toward Maria. Helene and Carter gossip about two lesbians seen earlier that day at the restaurant where Helene and Maria ate lunch. The next time she sees Carter, he asks her who she has been seeing. When she replies Helene and BZ, he warns her not to ‘‘get into that’’ in reference to BZ. Maria has a flashback to the time she and BZ met. She and Carter had visited him as a potential investor in the movie Angel Beach. During that meeting, BZ could hardly take his eyes off Maria. Back in the present, BZ suggests that Maria, Helene, and Larry Kulik go to Mexico City because Susannah Wood is there. Maria says that she does not want to go.

Commentary In these chapters, readers see that Maria’s character is plagued with quirky superstitions, the kind of illogical thinking that might affect someone who has suffered mental anguish and who spends too much time alone. In fact, the kind of thinking that Didion will later chronicle in her work The Year of Magical Thinking. Maria posits a cause-andeffect relationship with the universe that roots disasters in personal culpability—if Maria gets on a plane in bad spirits, it will cause the plane to crash; if she cannot be reached on the telephone, something bad will happen to Kate. Her superstition is a kind of illogical and highly personal cause and effect that reveals her isolation and alienation. By the end of the novel, readers know that Maria is healthier, having been tested by BZ’s invitation to join him in committing suicide, and having passed the test. She is no longer burdened by this superstitious cause and effect or by the constant self-monitoring that it entails.

CHAPTERS 41–50 In her mind, Maria invents an imaginary house where she, Kate, and Les Goodwin could live. She pretends that the three of them are living happily in that house. She wants to call Les, to reach out to him, but she knows that it is pointless. She buys a silver dress to try to divert her thoughts from her grief over the abortion. Maria unexpectedly runs into Carter. She tells him she is going to New York although she had no plans

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to do so. Afterward, she has visions of fetuses floating in the East River. She has a flashback to a time when she was modeling with a girl who was telling everyone about the abortion she had which was paid for by the district attorney’s office in exchange for false testimony she gave. Maria receives a mimeographed letter from a hypnotist and decides to call him to schedule an appointment. She goes to a hair salon and listens to a conversation between her male hairdresser and a girl. The girl seems desperate for the man’s company. It makes Maria uncomfortable. Maria talks about how she buys food in supermarkets so as not to appear lonely. Instead of just buying food for herself, she stocks up on large quantities of food so no one thinks she is alone. Maria visits the hypnotist, but he is unable to help her. Maria notes that for a while there were a few homosexual men who would invite her to parties but that eventually they got tired of her. She is drinking heavily so that she does not have nightmares. In one of her nightmares, she is assisting in a gas chamber where children are being killed. Helene comes to visit Maria. She tells her that she is upset because her hairdresser has gone out of town. A reporter calls Maria to ask who she is dating and to find out what she thought about Carter dating Susannah Wood. Helene starts to cry because she is depressed. Maria takes a trip to the coast to meet Les Goodwin. There is little for her to do there. She checks into a motel and eats crab at a restaurant where she is the only customer. She takes a drive, then goes for a walk, and finally sits down on a bench in the downtown plaza. A group of guys with Harley motorcycles watch her as they smoke pot. Then, they begin to go through the glove compartments of parked cars. Maria gets up and tries to call Les Goodwin again, but he is not available. The group of guys are now surrounding her car. She walks over and they back off. She unlocks the car, gets in, and one of them waves at her.

Commentary Readers start to understand that many of the other characters in the novel are as unhappy as Maria but that they hide behind a fac¸ade. However, none of them seems to be in as much danger as she is. By this point of the novel, Didion’s achievement of a great work of nihilist fiction is evident as the plot is about the nothingness at the center of the everyday lives of these Hollywood couples.

CHAPTERS 51–60 Later that night, Les Goodwin meets Maria at a motel. They drive up the coast and discuss all of the things they could do the next day. Les

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has to call Felicia. They both feel uncomfortable. Maria tells him that it is pointless for them to do any of the things they have talked about. They discuss the reasons why their clandestine meeting was so awkward. However, the one reason that they do not discuss is Maria’s abortion. Maria makes a list of things that she would never do. Carter comes by to visit her to let her know that he will be gone for a few weeks. Maria says that whenever Carter comes by they always fight but that after he leaves she has these images of her, Carter, and Kate living together as a happy family. She calls the night before he’s leaving town and tells him that she just saw his new film and that she really liked it. He knows that she is lying because it has not been shown in Los Angeles for the past week. For the next few weeks she tries to follow Carter’s travels through the newspapers. Helene calls to tell her that Carter is staying an extra week in Paris, but she is really calling to gossip about Carter and Susannah Wood’s relationship. Maria tells her that she’s ‘‘missing the point.’’ Later that afternoon, Maria gets into a minor car accident, finds out that her bank account is overdrawn, and discovers that the pharmacist will not refill her prescription for barbiturates. Part of her is relieved. She goes to a meeting scheduled with a director who was interested in having her in another film about a motorcycle gang. When she gets there, she finds out that the director is not there and that she is being considered only for a minor role. She leaves and drives for some time until she pulls over and cries. She realizes that today would have been the day her baby would have been born. She has a flashback to a conversation with Ivan Costello in which he tells her that they can be together but that they will not ever get married and have a family. She accepts. Later, she suggests that if she got pregnant she would at least have a baby. He says, ‘‘No you wouldn’t.’’ Maria visits the hypnotist again but does not find any answers there. He tells her that it is her fault that he cannot help her. Maria goes to a bar and calls Ivan Costello. She tells him that she needs help. Ivan is drunk and berates Maria for not taking his previous calls. The next day she calls Larry Kulik. Larry and Maria go to Las Vegas together. At the Flamingo, she runs into her father’s old friend, Benny Austin. She excuses herself and hides in the ladies restroom. She hears her name being paged and sneaks into a back elevator up to Larry’s suite. From the room, Maria has Benny paged and apologizes to him on the phone. She invites him to visit next time he is in Los Angeles and he says he will. Maria knows that Benny never visits Los Angeles. The next morning she leaves without Larry. Maria goes to a party in May with a choreographer and ends up leaving the party with an actor she just met. She

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goes back to his house and smokes pot again. He calls her by the wrong name and she likes the fact that he does not know who she is. Even though Maria does not like the actor very much, she has sex with him. Maria gets dressed and leaves the house, taking the actor’s car. She drives all the way past Vegas until she is stopped for speeding. The office discovers that the car was reported stolen and arrests Maria.

Commentary The action now develops a spiraling momentum, where one bad situation leads quickly into the next. Maria has run out of options and has begun to reach out to strangers. In the latter part of this section, she spends a significant amount of time wandering aimlessly around Las Vegas. Vegas is a place that represents a turning point, a place where one’s luck can change or where one can lose it all. The plot is reaching its final resolution as Maria’s self-destructive behavior intensifies.

CHAPTERS 61–70 Maria is allowed one phone call from jail. She calls Freddy Chaikin, who uses his connections to have the charges against her dropped. He borrows a private jet and picks up Maria. He hands her a drink and, after a first sip, she vomits on the floor of the borrowed jet. As she cleans it up, Freddy tells her that he does not understand ‘‘girls like [her]’’ and says that she has a ‘‘self-destructive personality structure.’’ She flirts with him, holds his hand, and falls asleep. The actor’s business manager sends her two dozen roses. The actor calls her and gets heated, calling her a ‘‘cunt’’ and blaming the incident on her because she ‘‘never told [him] who [she was].’’ Helene has started visiting Maria regularly. Freddy had called Carter to tell him what happened to Maria. Carter told BZ and BZ told Helene. Helene says that they are all worried about Maria. Freddy Chaikin begins calling producers to ask for work for Maria so that she can ‘‘take her mind off herself.’’ Maria receives a letter from Benny Austin sending her some of her father’s papers. He gives her a number where he can be reached. Maria is drunk at a bar. Felicia and Les tell her they are leaving and will drop her home. She won’t go with them. Felicia gets Helene and Maria starts to cry. BZ and Helene take her home. In the car, she throws up on Helene. When she wakes up in Helene’s bedroom, she finds that someone took her clothes off and bathed her. She sees Helene and BZ lying together on a chaise and only remembers some details of

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the night before. To erase these from her memory, she falls back asleep. The next morning she sees that Helene has a bruise on her face and she has an image of BZ ‘‘holding a belt and Helene laughing.’’ Helene and BZ begin to argue. BZ hits her. Maria screams at him to stop. BZ laughs and tells Maria that wasn’t what she was saying last night. Maria drives back to Vegas. She tries to call Benny Austin but finds that the number is out of service. She checks into the Sands, and the bellboy asks her if she is by herself. Maria lies and says her husband is meeting her. She takes a letter for Benny Austin to put in his post office box. She waits three days until a woman comes to pick up the mail. She tells the woman she is looking for Benny Austin and the woman says she doesn’t know him. The woman mistakes her for someone else and thinks that Maria is trying to get money out of her. Maria stays in Vegas for two weeks, walking or driving around aimlessly. She takes a tour of Hoover Dam. She runs into Freddy Chaikin in Caesar’s who insists that she come to a party. When she asks at the front desk how to get to the room number Freddy gave her, they mistake her for a prostitute and refuse to give her directions to the room. She goes back to her room and orders a drink. The boy who brings her drink offers to ‘‘introduce’’ her to a guy. Maria agrees and tells him to bring a guy up to her room in an hour. Then she leaves the hotel abruptly, gets in her car, and drives home. The next morning she calls Freddy Chaikin and asks him to get her things out of the room and pay her bill. Carter comes to see Maria and tells her he want her to come out on location with him in the desert because he does not believe she is capable of taking care of herself. He almost hits her but an unknown girl appears from within the house. Helene and BZ picked up a girl named Jeanelle who is now hanging out at their place. Carter kisses Maria but then tells her that he feels nothing anymore for her. BZ sends her out of the room to do some cocaine and tells Helene to get rid of her. Helene blames him for starting the whole thing. Carter calls Maria and asks her again to come to the desert with him. She says she won’t because he said he feels nothing for her. He leaves with Helene and BZ for the desert. Maria gets a refill on her barbiturate prescription. She returns home to find Ivan Costello in her house. In the middle of the night she kicks him out. He comes over again in the morning as if to apologize. She tells him to leave her alone. She calls Les Goodwin in the afternoon and tells him that something bad is going to happen to her and that he should take her away. Les cannot take her away because he has a deadline. She drives out to the desert to stay with Carter. Chapter 68 is written again in the first person, narrated by Maria. She recalls receiving letters from insane people when she first married

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Carter because her name would appear in the paper. She says that she can tell even when someone is thinking about her. Chapter 69 returns to third-person narration. Carter and Maria spend most of their time fighting or in silence. They share a motel room but are not making any attempt to reunite as a couple. Maria usually gets up late and drives out to the set, but Carter tells her not to come anymore because she is making Susannah Wood nervous. Carter suggests that she and Helene go do something together. Maria begins to hang out in the small town, talking with some of the locals.

Commentary While Maria is with Carter, BZ, and Helene on the film location, the desert acts like a kind of retreat where her faith in her life is tested. By choosing to take the action of the novel to the setting of the desert at this point, Didion is referencing Christian stories of Christ and saints who go to the desert to pray and test their religious conviction. Nature images in these chapters foreshadow BZ’s death and reflect the harshness of the human environment at the same time that they suggest the potential for rebirth.

CHAPTERS 71–80 Maria speaks to a young boy at the bathhouse who guesses that she is with the movie. She tells him that she comes from Silver Wells, which is nearby. Maria, Carter, BZ, and Helene are hanging out in Susannah Wood’s motel room. Maria comments that someone is going to complain because their music is too loud. Susannah makes fun of Maria. BZ tells Carter to turn down the sound. Susannah tells Carter to turn it up. Maria stands up and announces that she does not like any of them. Later, Maria asks Carter whether he enjoyed having sex with Susannah, and he says, ‘‘not particularly.’’ Maria tells BZ that she is getting tired of Carter and Susannah. When BZ asks her what else she is tired of she does not have an answer. BZ confesses that Maria is beginning to get to the place where he is. Susannah Wood gets beaten up in a hotel room in Las Vegas, but they manage to keep it out of the papers. They have to shoot other scenes of the movie while they wait for her bruises to heal. BZ reports that the studio is not happy with Carter’s movie. Maria finds out that Carter and Helene were in the room with Susannah and Harrison when Susannah got beat up. BZ tells Maria that it makes no difference who is sleeping with whom. Carter lashes out at Maria telling her she is getting old, but then he asks her not to leave. Carter asks her to

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come out onto the set to watch him shoot. She does not go. Instead, she borrows a gun and goes out to the highway to shoot at signs on the road. Carter tells her he does not want any guns around. Carter still tries to get Maria to come with them to the set, but instead she sits in a coffee shop and talks to a woman working there. She goes home with the woman on her break and listens to the woman’s life story. Chapter 74 is again told from Maria’s perspective. She recalls when she was ten years old and her father taught her how to play craps. Her father told her that life was a crap game. He also warned her that if you turn over a rock you might find a rattlesnake. She finds truth in these lessons but has trouble applying them to her life. Chapter 75 returns to the third person. BZ comes to Maria’s motel room to tell her that Carter is at that moment having sex with Helene. Maria tells him that nothing matters to her anymore. Chapter 76 is written from Maria’s perspective. She is speaking from the present in the mental institution and says that Carter and Helene want to blame her for what happened to BZ. They think that she did not know what he was doing. Helene visits her at the mental institution and Maria tries to explain that she knew perfectly well what BZ was doing. The narrative jumps back to the past in the desert. Maria is telling Carter a story about a man who goes ‘‘out for a walk in order to talk to God’’ but who ends up dead from a rattlesnake bite. She asks Carter if he thinks that man talked to God and, if so, did God answer. Carter walks out of the room. When he comes back, he tells her that he will try once more to reach her. He asks her what she wants. She says that she wants nothing. Chapter 78 is again written from Maria’s perspective in the present. She says that she does not mind being in the mental institution but that she does not want to see Carter or Helene. The only problem with being in the institution is that she wants to be with her daughter Kate. Chapter 80 is again narrated from Maria in the present. Although Carter and Helene think that she is insane, she thinks that maybe she just lost her sense of humor, which is what Ivan told her when he called her on the phone.

Commentary Maria doesn’t ‘‘turn over any rocks’’ in her life because she is afraid, as her father taught her, that she might find a rattlesnake. This lesson is one of the reasons why she does not examine the meaninglessness of her existence and only deals with everyday activities on a surface level. Her stay at the mental institution is represented not as a punishment but as a kind of salvation from the life she had with Carter, Helene, and BZ. In

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fact, readers know from an early chapter that Helene is jealous of Maria and thinks that she is self-indulgent. Snakes are a recurring image in the novel, but they do not always represent evil: they are the vehicle through which Maria explores the philosophy that you ‘‘play it as it lays,’’ that you accept both the good and the bad, and you find a way to survive.

CHAPTERS 81–84 Carter, Susannah, and Helene are planning on meeting people in Vegas to celebrate the end of shooting the movie. BZ declines to go. Helene asks him what he wants and he says nothing. Chapter 82 is written from Maria’s present perspective. She says that it is useless of Carter and Helene to ask questions. She explains that the answer is ‘‘nothing.’’ Now that she understands that, her future plans include getting Kate, living alone with Kate, and doing some canning. She says that if Carter and Helene aren’t careful, they will find out the answer as well. Chapter 83 goes back into the past. BZ finds Maria in her hotel room when all the others have gone into Vegas. BZ is dressed up and shows her that he has a large quantity of Seconal pills. Maria tells him to lay down next to her and go to sleep. She holds his hand. After a while he gets up and takes almost all of the pills. Maria holds onto him and falls asleep. She is woken up by Carter. He is shaking her and Helene is screaming. The last chapter of the novel is written from Maria’s perspective. She says that Carter had called today, but there was no point in speaking to him. That morning she had thrown the I-Ching coins into the swimming pool and they caught the light so beautifully that she was almost tempted to read them, but she didn’t. Maria says that Carter and Helene do not know what she knows. She knows what ‘‘nothing’’ is and she keeps on living. BZ would have wanted to know why she kept playing, but her answer would have been ‘‘why not?’’

Didion’s novel Play It As It Lays was made into a movie by Frank Perry. Didion and her husband co-authored the screenplay. The film was released in 1972 and starred Tuesday Weld as Maria Wyeth. The character of BZ was played by Anthony Perkins. The snake imagery was successfully brought to bear on the film through a camera shot of a Los Angeles freeway, which appears like a snake from a distance.

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Commentary The end of the novel is brilliantly crafted by Didion not as an overt salvation of Maria but as a subtle step toward hope for her future now that she has been removed from the toxic Hollywood scene. She fantasizes about canning, which is a domestic activity, one in direct opposition to her previous self-image. She is also reading coins, a Chinese method of foretelling the future. This is an important detail because it means that she is interested in what the future holds. By ending on this note, Didion reveals that Maria is not truly insane or mentally ill, but that she is an ordinary woman who was led to the brink of self-destruction by the poisonous relationships cultivated by the Hollywood elite and by the brutal force of male domination, all of which took its toll on her sanity and nearly destroyed her, as it destroyed BZ.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS • What are some of the symbols or images in the novel that reference fertility? How does Didion use this imagery to comment on issues of pregnancy and motherhood? • To what extent does Didion’s narrative rely on the class status of the characters? • What characters in the novel represent authority? How does Maria interact with them? What does this say about Maria’s status as the heroine of this story? • What are the connections between dreams and reality in the story? What are the connections between movies and reality? In the deterioration of Maria’s mental state, do these three concepts become indistinguishable? • What literary devices does Didion use to represent Maria’s fragmented, disconnected, and disembodied state of mind?

6 THE WHITE ALBUM (1979)

The White Album is a series of interrelated essays, reportage, and memoirs from the late 1960s and 1970s that focuses on American culture. Divided into five thematic groupings, it is framed at the outset by the essay ‘‘The White Album’’ and concludes with ‘‘On the Morning After the Sixties’’ and ‘‘Quiet Days in Malibu’’; these framing essays constitute Didion’s estimation of an American people whose culture is changing faster than they can comprehend. Simply put, from Didion’s perspective, even those people liable for the transformations in American culture sense in some way the loss of certainty they’d had in an earlier time. Page numbers cited from The White Album are from the 1995 paperback edition (New York: Noonday Press). In these essays Didion does not directly confront the driving issues of the age; instead, she challenges them obliquely, examining minor characters and what feels to her like a distinctly American subjectivity. The structure of the collection is presented as a montage, a style that best suits the spirit of the age she is describing. Variously described as a collage or a mosaic, the book encompasses the largest worldview possible to fully illuminate Didion’s chosen subject. If ‘‘things fall apart’’ for American culture in the sixties, as Didion revealed in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, then The White Album is concerned with what happens after that breakdown.

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Joan Didion is not, of course, alone in her passionate investigation of the atomization of contemporary society. But she is one of the very few writers of our time who approaches her terrible subject with absolute seriousness, with fear and humility and awe. Her powerful irony is often sorrowful rather than clever; the language of A Book of Common Prayer, like that of Play It As It Lays, is spare, sardonic, elliptical, understated. Melodrama is the nature of Didion’s world, but very little emotion is expressed, perhaps because emotion itself has become atrophied. From Joyce Carol Oates, ‘‘A Taut Novel of Disorder,’’ 140.

In the title essay, Didion looks at myth creation, her own uncertainty, and the ‘‘paranoia of the times.’’ In the ‘‘California Republic’’ section, she tackles subjects as disparate as Episcopal ministers, the details of California’s water project, the governor’s mansion built by the Reagans and ignored by Jerry Brown, the Getty Museum, CALTRANS, politics in Hollywood, and what she calls ‘‘the invisible city’’ of romantics swallowed by the American Dream. This section puts the people of California into dialogue with the daunting infrastructure put in place to support them. Didion’s personal uncertainty parallels her incredulity that all of these presences can coexist in the same universe and in such proximity. This section of The White Album illustrates the cultural quandary of such a baffling whole. A deliberate sense of ungovernability to these pieces confounds traditional democratic notions, yet Didion is able to conceive of them in cohesion. The ‘‘Women’’ section of this collection is perhaps even more problematic because of its opening essay ‘‘The Women’s Movement.’’ It critiques the emerging modern feminism, and drew much fire from the left when it was initially published. This essay, more than any other, brings into focus Didion’s difficult conservatism, while at the same time highlights her tremendous power as an essayist with a journalist’s eye. She challenged the movement’s vision of itself, its style, and its revisionism. In an otherwise laid-back 1970s take on difficult times, ‘‘The Women’s Movement’’ is perhaps The White Album’s only direct attempt at engagement with a divisive issue. The critical biographies of Doris Lessing and Georgia O’Keeffe that follow, although less divisive, seem to offer examples of ‘‘types’’ of women alluded to in ‘‘The Women’s Movement,’’ as if to ask, ‘‘Who are our role models now, and how do they represent themselves? To what end do they devote themselves?’’

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Lastly, ‘‘On the Morning After the Sixties’’ clarifies Didion’s point of view as an author. She had come of age the decade before, in the conservative 1950s, and it was the world her generation had inherited that was pulled apart by the turmoil in the decade that followed. She comprehends the hypocrisy of sustaining a system so out of step with its people’s needs and she spends much of The White Album decidedly pointing it out; nevertheless, she is openly nostalgic, not for ‘‘a simpler time’’ necessarily, but for an appropriate evaluation of the worth of the culture that has replaced the traditional order. This essay is followed by what is in essence an epilogue, an example of the aftermath of the disarray. ‘‘Quiet Days in Malibu’’ is meant to provide the reader with an understanding of the way in which people persisted in their daily lives after the cultural upheaval and in many ways experienced a continuum that went largely unchanged through it all. The final images of ‘‘Quiet Days in Malibu’’ are of a wildfire that devastates many of the lives of the people with whom Didion associates. It gives a clear example of the tenuous balance of life in the modern age, and the ability of men and women to pick up the pieces and to move forward, rebuilding and refining as they go, along with a sense of an abiding earth that carries on unchanging despite human drama.

PART I. THE WHITE ALBUM ‘‘The White Album’’ Didion begins ‘‘The White Album’’ with the line: ‘‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live’’ (11). She then offers a series of examples of troubling, almost folkloric images, and shows the manner in which people will amplify or develop backstories for images they see. She suggests people do this to give meaning to these images; in a larger sense, they do it to create meaning in their lives. These ‘‘histories’’—the image and its given narrative—get built into master narratives that may or may not have any true relation to the reality of the image that inspired them. Didion broadens this concept into a theory for the way humans construct their systems of belief, and then delves into her own self-doubt, which she feels is based on this premise that her own most trusted narratives may be illusions after all. Among other things, she refers to this as having ‘‘participated in the paranoia of the time,’’ meaning the late 1960s (12). Regarding this paranoia, she points to the fact that people of her generation were taught to follow a script, one assembled similarly to the master narrative construct she has just walked her readers through, specifically the blueprint narrative of the middle class. Taught

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The opening line of The White Album is perhaps Didion’s most famous and in 2006 it was used as the title of her complete collected nonfiction, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live. The collection includes all of Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, Salvador, Miami, After Henry, Political Fictions, and Where I Was From. When asked in a 2008 interview in VOX of Dartmouth (where she is a Montgomery Fellow) whether she felt that famous line could be taken as a personal credo, she expressed with certainty that she did.

not to improvise, she feels that she is among many in this era who live their lives by improvisation, and who have therefore lost their foothold, who now have a less certain faith in themselves and their beliefs. She calls this a type of ‘‘revisionist theory of my own history’’ (13). For example, while spending time in Hawaii, experiencing the world through newspapers, she begins to realize her disconnection and her headline overload, and she feels this is somehow related to her need to create stories ‘‘in order to live.’’ In characteristic fashion, Didion quickly complicates her reporting. She follows the preceding section by sharing the official psychiatric report of a woman who has lost touch with reality, then she reveals that she is the woman in question; readers not only learn this intimate detail, but also are told that this report was written at nearly the same time the Los Angeles Times had named Didion ‘‘Woman of the Year.’’ Didion has a special knack for sharing this type of impossible dichotomy. She has simultaneously proved that fantasies are what keep people from experiencing an objective reality, potentially destroying them (hence the psychiatrist’s report), at the same time she has disproved this very theory. A person who is ‘‘cracking up’’ can be woman of the year because the otherwise self-created fictional life sometimes aligns with the lives of others. It is human nature to believe in self-created fictions. At the very moment Didion manifests signs of coming unglued, she is honored for her participation in her culture. In another move that is characteristic of Didion’s style, she steps back from what is essentially the focus of this piece. She is not as much interested in her own diagnosis as she is in its ability to provide a commentary on the time and city in which she lived, specifically Los Angeles in the late 1960s. Using her home in L.A. as a central theme, she discusses the people and things she comes in contact with, beginning with the Manson trial and spreading out to include the pervasively strange social climate of the city at that time. She offers the band The Doors as

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ambassadors of the weird climate she experiences and describes an encounter she had with them in the recording studio. They are waiting for vocalist Jim Morrison to arrive. Didion describes a slowness, a telepathy between the members of the group, something unresolved even after Jim shows up, that underlines a component of her culture, an indecisiveness that succeeds despite itself. As she had done with great success in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Didion begins a type of scrapbooking of the people and things that became icons in popular culture around this time. After The Doors, she mentions experiences with Janis Joplin and John and Michelle Phillips (of The Mamas and The Papas), and then she tells the story of Huey Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, beginning with the night he was shot in Oakland. Here, ‘‘The White Album’’ expands to become a California montage rather than merely one focused on Los Angeles. Didion follows the Panther story through various trials and speeches. Then she tries to meet directly with Eldridge Cleaver, another highranking Panther, at his home in Oakland. She is fascinated by the Panthers’ narrative and their particular paranoia. Through her version of the Panther story, she offers another example of the ‘‘revisionist theory of one’s own history’’ being put to use, and its ability to engage or disengage one from society. The collage style continues as she describes the contents of the packing list she has made for the out-of-town journalism work she does. She points out that of all the necessities she carried, a watch was not one of them. She says that being unaware of the time could be seen as a ‘‘parable, either of my life as a reporter during this period or of the period itself’’ (36). As proof of this timelessness, or out-of-timelessness, exhibited first by The Doors and seemingly countermanded by the Panthers’ call to action, Didion guides her reader next to the ‘‘takeover’’ of San Francisco State College, also in 1968. She points out that the causes for the uprising were lost within the act of uprising itself, that ‘‘disorder was its own point’’ (37). Finally, she reaches the conclusion that the white middle-class narrative is largely one of ‘‘aimlessness’’ (38). Selfhood, throughout this essay, to Didion is little more than a delusional undertaking, controlled more or less successfully by the individual to fit within the parameters of the larger narrative of the times. In the final sections of this essay Didion lingers again on the Manson family and on the weird vibes in Los Angeles at the time. She seems to settle on the overarching idea of disorder as an explanation for the way separate social and personal narratives were coming together in the late 1960s. She concludes that all narratives are sentimental, and that disorder comes from the senseless organization of them into a

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forced meaning (44). Her collage form, in the end, assumes a kind of stream-of-consciousness style. She appears to write entirely in the moment: she narrates that she is in Oregon, that she has a broken rib, and that this experience of a broken bone somehow leads to an analysis of the 1960s that moves from the personal to a larger political and cultural sphere. For many, she says, the decade ended with the Manson murders, when ‘‘the paranoia was fulfilled’’ (47); for her, it ends when she leaves the house in Los Angeles for a house on the coast, which, in the course of an extended renovation, has its 1960s demons exorcised by the noise of the carpenters’ tools. Rather than ending by tying her narrative’s loose ends together, Didion tells readers that she too has failed to see how this all adds up: ‘‘but writing [all of these scenes] has not yet helped me to see what it means’’ (48). Having tautly suspended so many discursive images before the reader, Didion is first to comprehend that the clarity of her reasoning, despite its acuity, nonetheless fails to provide essential meaning.

PART II. CALIFORNIA REPUBLIC ‘‘James Pike, American’’ Didion writes a kind of elegy for Bishop Pike, the former charismatic minister of Grace Episcopal Cathedral in San Francisco. He authored a type of reform in the church, only to disappear in 1969 into the Jordanian desert, his body found five days after his wife barely made it to safety alive. Didion compares Pike to men like Howard Hughes, whom she wrote about in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, stating that like Hughes, Pike was so ‘‘revealing of his time and place that his gravestone in the Protestant Cemetery in Jaffa might well have read only JAMES PIKE, AMERICAN’’ (53). Didion launches into Pike’s biography. His childhood was strangely unorthodox, but his personality was favored and encouraged from an early age. He wanted badly to be a success in East Coast society, and Didion invokes the names of several of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s characters to make her point. She fits Pike’s story into the traditional motif of Westerner gone East to make a name for himself. She exposes how much of his own narrative he created in his own mind. Not surprisingly, his selfpossession leaves its victims by the wayside. What is most attractive about him for Didion is his willingness to reinvent himself, which will prove to be an all-consuming theme of her life and work. More than that, however, is her feeling that Pike, as a man who would dare to reinvent the world, reveals so much about his time and place and in fact

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embodies the 1960s mind-set. She does not present him in an entirely positive or entirely negative light. As she so often does, his life in this essay is merely relayed as a statement of fact.

‘‘Holy Water’’ ‘‘Holy Water’’ tells the story of the infrastructure in place in California to collect, store, and move water around the state. Didion begins with her own infatuation with such infrastructure. She appears more interested in the engineering that dominates the resource than the water itself. She considers not only the weirs and dams and pipelines and pumps, but the communications network in place to manage and manipulate the water in the California aqueduct system. Didion even goes so far as to admit that she feels she has missed her calling and wants to do the work of moving water herself. Briefly, she gives an anecdote of a movie shoot near Needles, California, on the Colorado River. The flows in the river are utterly controlled by human intervention, and yet nature still finds a way to assert itself. As Didion describes it, an unseasonal storm blankets the farming area served by the Davis Dam impoundment on the Colorado, and subsequently there is no need to release water from the dam into the river to be used for irrigation. Because no water is released, the film crew in Needles cannot complete their shoot and must wait until downstream need necessitates upstream release. In essence, this story exhibits the near total authority humans have over nature in California, at the same time showing that the elements still have the ability to undermine the entire manmade system. She then turns to historian and critic Bernard DeVoto for her definition of the West, for whom place is delineated by rainfall. Her excitement for technology is tempered, if not eventually thwarted, by her insistent awareness of a past in which landscape once defined people, and was not defined by it, no matter how inconsequential it may now appear in their lives. Didion clearly loves both: man’s ability to overcome nature and the world that once prevailed over him. The essay ends in the State Water Project Operations Control Center, where Didion has been an observer for most of the day. She returns to her fantasy of taking part in the distribution process, feeling like a latter-day farmer, giving a drink to all those living things that need it.

‘‘Many Mansions’ The official California governor’s residence and its history are scrutinized in this essay. By exploring the construction of a new governor’s

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mansion at the behest of then-governor Ronald Reagan, and comparing the Reagans’ aesthetic to Jerry Brown’s, who as governor refused to live in the mansion, Didion captures the spirit of the cultural divide in the state. Didion portrays the newly built, unused mansion as a costly mistake, a veritable ghost town except for the work the maintenance crews perform daily, making the emptiness of the place seem even more odd. She describes the mansion itself as a ‘‘curious structure,’’ and characterizes it as Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s ‘‘dream house’’ (68). The Reagans’ dream house is ‘‘contemporary’’ and starkly artificial. The walls and countertops and beams all ‘‘resemble’’ original materials but are themselves of manmade origin. Only the teak cabinetry is real, but none of it is intended for holding books, which to Didion, is significant. Her point here is to underline that there is nothing truly exorbitant about the house, despite all of the disparaging remarks levied against it; it is simply an enlarged version of the standard unimaginative tract homes being built all over the state. Didion is overcome by the sheer mediocrity of it. In contrast to the plainness of the new mansion, Didion takes her reader to the former governor’s home in downtown Sacramento. It is a Victorian Gothic she describes as replete with eccentricities. Didion has a personal connection to this home, and she gives her reader a sense of where her bias against the new mansion comes from. Her father was born down the street from the old mansion, and as a teenager she had spent time there with Governor Earl Warren’s daughter. She says, ‘‘The old governor’s mansion was at that time my favorite house in the world, and probably still is’’ (71). Didion tempers her bias by taking a walking tour of the old mansion after visiting the new one. The other people on the tour deride the old place for its number of stairs and wasted space. Didion has put her own taste next to her contemporaries to show that despite her portrayal of the new mansion, taste (and not a deeply rooted sense of right or wrong) is the central issue of the cultural divide symbolized by the two homes. Governor Jerry Brown and those of his mind-set, like Didion, don’t find the new mansion to be their ‘‘style.’’ Didion points out that this is the problem: ‘‘the house so clearly is not only the style of Jerry Brown’s predecessor but of millions of his constituents’’ (73). The divide between Californians, according to Didion, becomes a question of taste and class, and so the real reasons people like or dislike the new mansion must remain unspoken for fear of offending the other party. This essay becomes an example of cultural difference and the truce, at least at the official level, that must be forged between ideologies.

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‘‘The Getty’’ Didion visits the Getty Museum in Malibu, and discusses the conflicted aesthetic the museum represents. She focuses again on the vagaries of personal taste, but magnifies them so that it can be seen as the heart of the culture wars of the 1970s. The formula is the same as it was in ‘‘Many Mansions’’: she gathers sources that have gone on record reproaching the Getty, and then she gives her own personal interpretation of the museum, followed by her less biased pedagogical rationalization for it. Again, she unravels a secret and unspoken conflict between the social elite and the general public, focusing on the common predilections of each. In a simple rhetorical analysis of the Getty collection, Didion’s special talent for revealing the interplay between oppositional forces reminds her reader of the subtle influences at work in their daily lives.

‘‘Bureaucrats’’ This essay is a behind-the-scenes look at Southern California’s freeways, and the somewhat misguided policies that lead to their gridlock. In tone and form, it is reminiscent of ‘‘Holy Water.’’ Didion’s reader learns of the Operations Center that monitors the flow of traffic on a specific stretch of freeway known as the ‘‘Loop,’’ comprising the Santa Monica, San Diego, and Harbor freeways. It is a modern road and has sensors built into it to keep track of the traffic flow. At issue is that all of this technology does not actually have an impact on the actual traffic. Didion shifts her attention to a particular facet of this technologically advanced freeway, the carpool lane. CALTRANS officially designated a ‘‘Diamond Lane’’ for cars carrying three or more people in them. This was CALTRANS’s attempt at modifying the driving behavior of Southern Californians, which Didion says is exhibited by a belief in the ‘‘illusion [of] individual mobility’’ (81). Not only did drivers resist the Diamond Lane, but it was recognized as the primary cause of the gridlock on these freeways. Didion points out that this gridlock was expressly designed in part by CALTRANS to frustrate drivers. CALTRANS decided to make it harder for drivers to use freeways ‘‘in order to pry John Q. Public out of his car … I would emphasize that this is a political decision and one that can be reversed’’ (82). In other words, the daily driving habits of average citizens had become a social experiment. Forward-thinking people in power had noted the need for use of public transportation and were putting their beliefs into practice.

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At odds with this social experiment as Didion describes it is the Southern Californian’s freeway experience, the ‘‘only secular communion Los Angeles has’’ (83). She recognizes that, for many, driving its freeways equates to a kind of rapture. She believes that deliberately disrupting such an arcane car culture might be more difficult than it would first appear, despite the progressive thinking behind such an undertaking. On one level, driving is only a necessary way of getting oneself from place to place. On another, driving has ascended to the status of a basic right, and attempting to orchestrate a citizen’s driving habits is tantamount to imposing sanctions on a true Western cult, and is an attack on the mythical West of individuality and personal freedom. Didion has extended prior arguments she had made pitting a social elite against the common person. In the ‘‘rarified air’’ of the Operations Center, she claims, they miss the point. Engaged in erstwhile behavior modification, CALTRANS has failed to see the irony that Didion sees in its projects. She ends the essay explaining how, since the advent of the Diamond Lane, accidents on the same stretch of freeway have more than doubled, going on to say that, in spite of this fact, CALTRANS has plans to install Diamond Lanes in other freeways. A rare sense of outrage in the tone of this piece surfaces here that generally does not appear elsewhere in Didion’s work. She seems to ignore any of the good reasons, which are commonly discussed in political debates about protecting the environment, why authorities might wish to force drivers to change their habits, increasing the number of carpoolers and those riding public transportation.

‘‘Good Citizens’’ This essay is written in three parts over the course of two years (1968–1970) and revolves around California politics. Part 1 focuses on politics and activism in Hollywood, and Didion’s encounters with various celebrities involved in civil rights and elections. Moving from a meeting at Sammy Davis Jr.’s home to a rally for Eugene McCarthy that ends in a debate between William Styron and Ossie Davis over Styron’s novel about Nat Turner, Didion reaches a conclusion about such evenings: their ‘‘curious vanity and irrelevance stay with me, if only because those qualities characterize so many of Hollywood’s best intentions’’ (88). She suggests that such gatherings revolve around plots just as a screenplay might, that positive outcomes are an integral part of a formulaic political activism in Hollywood. She weighs this briefly against the earlier communist-related blacklistings in Hollywood and positions the

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individual’s good will as a far more effective force of change than an actor’s scripted public appeal. Part 2 of the essay turns to Nancy Reagan, whose husband was the governor of California at the time of Didion’s encounter with her. Didion watches as Mrs. Reagan is directed by a cameraman as she is guided through a reenactment of an ‘‘ordinary day.’’ Again, Didion appears to indict the ‘‘scripted’’ aspects of any public life. She has begun to construct an understanding of how inauthentic even the most deliberate attempts at sincerity such acts generally are. In Part 3 of the essay, Didion writes about a Junior Chamber of Commerce national conference. While interviewing the young men in attendance, she is told of the positive impact the chamber has had on their lives, but as she observes their wives she sees a considerably less flattering version of the truth. The elements of the scripted encounter exist here as well, and Didion reveals the vast difference between the seen and the felt in this culture. The Junior Chamber members are viewed as out of touch with social change even as they attempt to address it. From this experience, however, Didion is left with the sense that, although their meeting is as scripted as the encounters in the first two parts of this essay, the Junior Chamber comes across as far more sincere. On some basic level, she sees that they are the ones who must understand that it is their neighborhoods that are the frontiers of progressive social change, and that it is the actions of middle America that elicit the most profound changes across the face of American politics.

‘‘Notes Toward a Dreampolitik’’ Another series of sketches that build to a recognizable whole, ‘‘Notes’’ begins with the story of a young Pentecostal minister who moves his congregation from California to Tennessee. The next section is a discussion of late 1960s and 1970s outlaw biker movies and their interpretations of marginalized American society. The outlaw leader is a romantic hero, capable of great brutality, and notably without a message for his audience at film’s end. Didion says, ‘‘Bike movies are made for […] children whose whole lives are an obscure grudge against a world they think they never made’’ (101). The third section of this essay is about a young woman who wants to be an actress. She wants to be a known commodity who is able to provide for her family. Didion shows her reader that such girls are clinging to an old myth that no longer exists after all the social unrest of the time. The final section of this piece focuses on a Gamblers Anonymous meeting in Southern California. Nearby is the poker capital of Los Angeles County, and attendees of the

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meeting share the various incidences that led to their downfall. Didion insinuates that each of the people involved in these sketches is a member of the ‘‘invisible city,’’ part of a vast body of Americans living their lives outside of the main flow of history, and who are forgotten, falling prey to, and not meaningfully contributing to, the society that makes the rules and decides their tastes and fates.

PART III. WOMEN ‘‘The Women’s Movement’’ In this difficult, infamous essay, Didion takes a hard look at the new feminism. She begins by explaining feminism as the most recent component in a tradition of social reform, almost as if the women’s movement were merely consuming a bill of goods and women were themselves merely an invented ‘‘revolutionary class.’’ Didion turns the new feminist’s argument against itself, invoking Margaret Fuller’s admission that she ‘‘accepts the universe.’’ Fuller’s stance seems to be Didion’s as well and she accuses feminists of becoming deliberate revisionists. She then considers how feminist critics have reinterpreted the Western literary canon, and briefly discusses the texts they have ‘‘salvaged.’’ She says of this revisionism: ‘‘[New feminists] had invented a class; now they had only to make that class conscious’’ (112). What follows is Didion’s explanation of herself. She feels she is being level-headed where her peers are overly idealistic; at the moment they try to raise consciousness among their ‘‘class,’’ Didion points out that the movement becomes diluted by women who are merely bitter and who do not understand the ideology behind the equality they seek. Didion sets about undoing the claims the new feminists make about their marriages, their jobs, and the demands of contemporary society. Her issue with the new feminists becomes ‘‘nobody forces women to buy the package’’ (116), and then she shows her reader the manner in which the ‘‘package’’ is bought regardless, nearly wholesale, but with some critical changes. She points out that much of the new feminism still desires eternal love, romance, and fun, but looks at life through the lens of idealism, as a child might. According to Didion, by setting out to undo their traditional roles, new feminists are indulging a childhood fantasy. Didion’s final shot at new feminism is also her most scathing. Claiming that the movement is less political than it is angry, more romantic than revolutionary, Didion states that feminism is itself not a cause, but is in fact a symptom.

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‘‘Doris Lessing’’ This essay is not a biography in the traditional sense. Didion is concerned with the force and instinctual emotional power writer Doris Lessing commands. Here, Didion almost gives her reader an anodyne for the women of the new feminist movement in the preceding essay. Opposed to movements, and predisposed to believe in the strength of the individual, Didion portrays Lessing as a thinker, who opts to create art rather than suffer. A few of Lessings works are given cursory close readings, including The Golden Notebook, Briefing for a Descent into Hell, and The FourGated City. Didion then examines the impact Lessing’s childhood in Africa had on her imagination and her first novel, The Grass Is Singing. Didion compares the artistry of the young Lessing with the later works. She sees the mature author as thinker, undoing the work of her younger self. Although she admits to not generally agreeing with Lessing or her basic compulsion to find an eternal truth, it is obvious that Didion acknowledges Lessing’s literary struggle, partially as being similar to her own and partially as a kind of warning against clear-cut solutions in a world that refuses them.

‘‘Georgia O’Keeffe’’ Didion’s essay begins with an anecdote about taking her daughter to a Georgia O’Keeffe exhibit. Didion’s daughter takes O’Keeffe’s style to be reflective of O’Keeffe herself. Didion, in a more refined way, does the same: she describes her as ‘‘hard’’ and admires her for it. She says she is ‘‘astonishingly aggressive’’ and describes her as an ornery fighter bent on doing in her art what those around her were unwilling to do (128). Underscoring O’Keeffe’s independent spirit, Didion recounts moments from O’Keeffe’s art school days when she appeared undaunted in the face of adversity and punctuates them by O’Keeffe’s desire to go as far from that traditional art world as possible. In Texas, Didion believes, O’Keeffe found herself, and her work is left as a reminder of how an independent spirit comports itself.

PART IV. SOJOURNS ‘‘In the Islands’’ The year is 1969. Didion is in Hawaii and the first part of her sojourn in the islands reads like a personal letter to her reader. She is

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with her family in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel on Waikiki Beach on the island of Oahu. They are expecting a tidal wave that never arrives, and Didion is in the midst of an existential crisis. She admits to having lost faith in, and all connection to, the world. After relating short, personal anecdotes, her style and tone change. The next part of this essay is still personal, but in the form of straight reportage, focusing on a stretch of private beach adjacent to the Royal Hawaiian. The year is 1970. Didion observes the people using the private beach and is reminded of the type of high Californian society the hotel once, and still, represents. Past its heyday but seemingly in possession of its former cache, it had been a rival of the great hotels on the west coast and an important part of a circuit that society people made when vacationing. Although Didion knows that the world the Royal Hawaiian represents is part of the past, this section ends with her wishing somehow that it still might live on, because she envies that world’s predictability and security. In the third section it is still 1970. Didion is visiting the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific on Oahu. Soldiers killed in Vietnam are being buried there, alongside casualties of World War II and the Korean War. She interviews the man in charge of interment and watches a family from afar as they bury their son, just killed in Vietnam. This section acts as a counterpoint to the first two sections; the personal and historical significance of Hawaii is here transformed into the political. Section four takes place in 1975. Didion offers a vignette about a man and a woman quarreling before a flight Didion took from California to Hawaii. The narrative in section five relates events from 1977. Didion presents an homage to James Jones’s Hawaii and his novel From Here to Eternity. She remembers a time in 1966 when she first sought out the places in Jones’s novel and is reminded of an article written by Jones in which he’d gone back to do the same thing, revisiting places he hadn’t seen since 1942. As Didion goes through the steps of remembering Jones and making the sentimental journey into his novel, looking for it in real life as well as for the novel itself in Honolulu bookstores, she reaches a conclusion that seems to suggest that of all the changes she cannot accept, it is change itself that does her the most psychic damage. That explains the reason for the pull she feels being exerted on her by the life she finds being lived in the Army barracks and in the Royal Hawaiian. They are places that have not much changed: contemporary barracks life is the same life Jones had lived; it is as equally immutable as the scenes she witnessed on the beach between the Royal Hawaiian and the sea.

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‘‘In Hollywood’’ Written about Hollywood as a distinct place, Didion begins this essay with an excerpt from Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, and guides her reader through a typical Hollywood party, from a female perspective and then from that of a male. As an insider, she undoes the usual stereotypes about Hollywood sin and excess—the ones that cause her to seemingly indict Hollywood in Play It As It Lays—even going so far as to present the Hollywood she knows as starkly opposite of the traditional notion of its instability (again, a notion that she seems to embrace in Play It As It Lays, written a few years earlier). Didion delves into the perceived ‘‘death’’ of the Hollywood scene and the demise of the big studio. She attempts to unravel the economics of filmmaking and she recognizes it as a gamble that rarely pays off. On this topic Didion states: ‘‘I pass along these notes by way of suggesting that much of what is written about pictures and about picture people approaches reality only occasionally and accidentally’’ (162). She then initiates a discussion about the ‘‘reality’’ of filmmaking and the manner in which the industry’s detractors characterize it.

‘‘In Bed’’ ‘‘In Bed’’ is an essay about the debilitating effects of migraine headaches and the impact migraines have had on Didion’s life. She notes a few famous migraine sufferers, her first experience with migraine, and its hereditary implications. She then describes the medicines prescribed for migraine and the different phases of a migraine attack, specifically her own symptoms.

‘‘On the Road’’ This essay is a description of Didion’s first real book tour. It details the strange world of quickie interviews and faux public sincerity. She learns to shed the things she brings with her, the books and letters, to make room for press releases and blow dryers. She also learns something new about the tempo of America: despite its sameness, she finds it moving at a fevered pace she’d formerly only guessed at. She redraws America as a ‘‘child’s map’’ of inconsequential and random encounters (176). It is a child’s world because she becomes infected by her book tour’s unreality, and she begins pretending her circumstances to get herself through its strangeness. Didion is asked two burning, recurrent questions: ‘‘What does that say about us as a nation?’’ and ‘‘Where are we

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headed?’’ neither of which she feels she can answer in principle, let alone under the circumstances provided by a radio call-in show.

‘‘On the Mall’’ Didion grapples with the suburbs as the new frontier, and the largescale shopping mall as its center. Early in the essay, she points out that the automobile is the reason for the suburbs’ existence. To make sense of the relationships between car, suburb, and mall, she recounts the story of a correspondence course she’d taken that outlined the specific details of suburban development, including the principles behind location and product placement. Didion mentions highlights in the history of the mall, including prominent features that set certain malls apart. In the end, the mall represents for her not only an equalizer, a place of vaguely comfortable sameness, but also a place where personalities are suspended outright.

‘‘In Bogota’’ Didion has gone to Colombia in South America and has overstayed her visit to the city of Cartegena on the coast. She is hot and feels disconnected from the rest of the world. For relief she fantasizes about Bogot a, high in the Andes in the interior of the country. When she arrives in Bogot a, it appears to be everything she’s dreamed of. She thinks of the old Spanish stories and the pursuit of gold that brought explorers into the continent. Didion then recalls her experiences in the city, meeting other Americans, watching other tourists, and attending a party where she met Colombian newspapermen and filmmakers. She thinks of Bogot a as a city of images ‘‘indelible but difficult to connect’’ (193). She thinks of Colombia in literary terms, in the words of Pablo Neruda, Gabriel Garca M arquez, and Robert Lowell; lastly, she thinks of the residual European culture still thriving in certain strata of Colombian society.

‘‘At the Dam’’ The dam in this essay refers to Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, which supplies water and power to the Southwest. For many years, Didion has been overwhelmed by the thought of its scale and symbolic power. She takes a guided tour of its interior and finds the inside to be strange and empty and disconcertingly loud. She thinks of the wind and native elements out in the desert and the dust blowing from the desert into the streets of the cities and finds Hoover Dam unnaturally removed

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from all of those forces of nature. Didion is absorbed by the idea of a star map that has been installed at the dam site to date its construction for whatever form of life might come along and find it there after all of humankind is gone.

PART V. ON

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Didion underscores an essential component to her perspective as a journalist at the outset of this section: ‘‘I am talking here about being a child of my time. When I think about the Sixties now I think about an afternoon not of the Sixties at all, an afternoon early in my sophomore year at Berkeley, a bright autumn Saturday in 1953’’ (205). What stands out to the reader is that Didion is not a child of the 1960s at all, but a woman who had come of age in the 1950s. Those who are familiar with Didion’s earlier work Slouching Towards Bethlehem already understand this. They will recall that Didion was already considered an outsider by her subjects when she researched that piece because she was over thirty and not recognizably a part of the counterculture. While the 1960s are not necessarily entirely encompassed by the counterculture, which Didion points out often enough, one who is a ‘‘child of their time’’ would have had to negotiate the changes that surrounded them regardless. Didion laments that because of the changes imposed by the children of the generation after hers she is reminded of ‘‘the extent to which the narrative on which many of us grew up no longer applies’’ (205).

‘‘On the Morning After the Sixties’’ This essay is in many ways the second bookend, figuratively and literally, of this essay collection, the first being ‘‘The White Album.’’ Didion looks back on an afternoon that seems to be an eternity away from the life she is living and the world she lives in ‘‘now,’’ on the other side of the 1960s. Her coming-of-age was in the mid-1950s, and she is reminded of a tremendous psychic distance between the Berkeley of her girlhood and Berkeley ten years later. She writes about her generation as the ‘‘silent’’ generation, and explains their silence for what it was: not the apathy that was assumed, or the fear that many felt was an undercurrent of the time, but rather a response to both, an otherwise deliberate attempt at realism and an expression of human frailty. She describes her generation as the ‘‘last generation to identify with adults’’ and one that had assumed it would ‘‘survive outside history’’ (207). Didion alludes to the seeds of change already in the air in her time, the seemingly irreconcilable concurrent existences of flowering plum trees, hillside walks, and the cyclotron

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and Bevatron at work on the hillside above uncovering the mysteries of the atom. While students a generation later questioned the conflicting coexistence of these things, her generation stalwartly accepted them as attributes of an imperfect humanity. Written in 1970, this essay presages the ‘‘me-ness’’ and ennui of the 1970s, after what so many regarded to be the failure of the humanist project of the 1960s.

‘‘Quiet Days in Malibu’’ If one is to read ‘‘The White Album’’ and ‘‘On the Morning After the Sixties’’ as bookends to this collection, then ‘‘Quiet Days in Malibu’’ acts as its postscript. In ‘‘On the Morning After the Sixties,’’ Didion says of her generation, which came of age in the 1950s before the social turmoil that was to follow, that many of them wished only vaguely for ‘‘some little town with a decent beach’’ (207). Her ‘‘Quiet Days in Malibu’’ is the oddly palpable fulfillment of that unclear promise to herself she’d made years before. After an introduction, Didion follows the lives of those who work in Malibu, the atypical residents who are overlooked as components of the beach community that seems to have a considerable amount of baggage associated with it. The first section examines the routine of the lifeguard station there, describing specific guards, their duties, and all of the details they are responsible for. The next section tells the story of a man who is responsible for orchid production, which is a high-stakes, almost invisible industry. She gives the background on this particular grower, the history of certain flowers, and the intensive nature of orchid cultivation. She comments on the love and commitment these people feel for their jobs, whether guarding the beaches or cultivating delicate flowers: ‘‘In fact this was not a way of life I had expected in Malibu’’ (222). She weighs the unexpected against the expected at the beginning of this piece by describing the actual condition of the water and beaches and hills behind the highway and then noting the advance of a wildfire, a seasonal phenomenon in the area, that each year threatens to, and in this case did, destroy the labor of the people she has written about.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS • ‘‘The White Album’’ begins with Didion’s famous line, ‘‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live.’’ Based on her ideas of the purpose of the personal narrative and the cultural narrative, what makes the ‘‘story’’ so elemental to one’s survival?

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• In ‘‘Many Mansions’’ and ‘‘The Getty,’’ Didion draws her reader’s attention to the gulf in personal taste among Californians. She has at times been criticized for what appears to be her conceit regarding high and low culture, and yet in these two pieces she makes legitimate points about elitism and cultural literacy. What do these essays say about changes in Americans’ social, if not moral, values? What does Didion mean when she says at the end of ‘‘Many Mansions,’’ ‘‘I have seldom seen a house so evocative of the unspeakable’’? What must remain unsaid? • In 1972, Didion wrote critically of what was then being called the ‘‘New Feminism.’’ During this time Americans of all ethnicities were fighting for personal freedom and equality, and many felt that gender equality was a logical next step in social change. Literature now held in high esteem was being produced by Native American author N. Scott Momaday and Chicano playwright Luis Valdez among many others. At the same time scholars like Annette Kolodny were reexamining traditional American literature in terms of the influence of the metaphor of the female body, and the poet Adrienne Rich would attempt to revive the ‘‘lost’’ work of women authors with her poem ‘‘Diving into the Wreck’’ as a blueprint. What reasons does Didion give for not joining in the rallying cry for gender equality and the New Feminism? Were they valid then and are they valid today? Was Didion shortsighted or myopic? Consider the points she makes in ‘‘The Women’s Movement’’ in light of successes of the literary subgenres ‘‘chick lit’’ or ‘‘mommy lit’’ and the issues they grapple with. • The American suburb has held Didion’s attention for at least thirty years. If the American Dream is predicated on freedom and that freedom is predicated on land—room to move—then the suburb both undoes and has come to fully represent that Dream. While Didion writes at length about its meaning in the American mind in Where I Was From, the earlier essay ‘‘On the Mall’’ in The White Album represents her first attempt to grasp its significance. Keeping in mind the idea of the creation of a personal narrative that may or may not be conversant with the cultural narrative, what spirit does Didion feel the shopping mall represents? What does the mall as the center of the suburb say about egalitarianism and democracy? • What role does the essay ‘‘Quiet Days in Malibu’’ play in the overall construction of The White Album? It seems almost inconsequential after the brevity of the preceding works. Didion left California (which is so precious to her) for good not very long after she wrote the Malibu piece. Does its tone contain a type of bittersweetness? Does it indicate she has learned all she can from living in the state of her birth?

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7 WHERE I WAS FROM (2003)

Where I Was From is collection of essays written in a hybrid form. Much of it is memoir, recalling Didion’s family history and its pioneer past. Didion places her family’s restlessness into the greater tradition of Western expansion of the country and she focuses specifically on the predispositions of her female ancestry. She does this in an attempt to establish a Californian character, one that may or may not still exist in its masses, but that nonetheless shapes the way many in California and the West in general perceive themselves. The rugged individual, the restless soul, are motifs Didion is trying to reconcile with contemporary society. Page numbers cited for Where I Was From are from the 2004 paperback edition (New York: Vintage International). Stories of Didion’s childhood mix with actual reportage on California’s social and political history. She places the personal aspects of her life in direct conversation with the shared public aspects of all Californians’ lives; water, the railroads, and the government’s role in California’s economy all serve her overriding project of examining the impact of place on the person. Much of the history she examines is ‘‘hidden history.’’ Her focus is often on infrastructures past and present that many take for granted or never really see, yet which shape the way Californians’ lives unfold. Or she focuses on minor characters whose lives are doubly anonymous because they have no pioneer past and because their 101

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families are more recent transplants to California who believed in the myth of reinvention only to end up in featureless suburbs. Didion states: This book represents an exploration into my own confusions about the place and the way in which I grew up, confusions as much about America as about California, misapprehensions and misunderstandings so much a part of who I became that I can still to this day confront them only obliquely. (18)

Where I Was From is a combination of the emotion and intellect of a native daughter of California, attempting to reconcile myth with reality. The book is divided into four interrelated parts, similar to long essays on a central theme, which are themselves broken into smaller numbered sections. These numbered sections within the larger structure act as chapters of development that push in different ways on Didion’s thesis of place influencing person and the production of the self.

Where I Was From begins with an account of Didion’s pioneer ancestry. By placing herself within the chronology of her family’s history she also links herself to the land—or not. What she actually highlights is her family’s—and America’s—rootlessness. The pioneer story, Didion discloses, is one not simply of determination and conquest, but of the accompanying fear, despair, and loneliness that came with pushing West. The most horrifying and dystopian version of expansionism is the story of the Donner Party, forced into cannibalism by extreme need in the snowbound Sierra Nevada of California in 1846. What Didion attempts by including mention of the Donners is to confront the traditionally held belief that such extreme privations contained a moral lesson, and were not merely the unfortunate by-product of a people bent on exploitation, and that their desire to move stemmed from some greater virtue than simple restlessness. While she (and her reader) enjoys the anecdotal information that her ancestors traveled with the Donners and could have suffered a similar fate, Didion, by association, infers that she has had a hand in the despoliation of California’s ecology and that her lesson is not of pioneer greatness, but of usury. Nonetheless, it is hard not to share in the excitement of the overland epic. Among the most influential California authors is George R. Stewart, and his Ordeal by Hunger: The Story of the Donner Party (1936) remains a classic of the genre.

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PART ONE Functioning almost as an introduction to all of the book’s themes, Part One is composed of California snapshots: part family history, part early California literature, and part discussion of water in the Central Valley, the influence of the railroad, the advent of agribusiness, and the role of the state and federal governments. Didion supplies her reader with background information on all of the materials she will address throughout the book. With these materials as a backdrop, she engages the enduring notion that Californians are rugged individualists, introducing that notion alongside of her understanding of ‘‘local dreamtime,’’ the combination of boosterism and delusion that goes into myth creation (17).

Section 1 As if sorting through an old trunk in the attic of her family home, Didion recalls first one ancestor and then another. She relates their personalities through oral traditions within her family, through their memoirs or diaries, and through photographs. In this way, she leads her reader from the earliest stages of her family’s and America’s history to the present, in California, her central theme. By leading her reader through this process, she divulges her belief that oneself is intrinsically, almost mystically, bound to ‘‘place.’’ However, she also accepts that truths about place, especially in the West, and especially in California, are often either false or are utterly embellished. Didion seems to suggest that by removing this distance between the real and the fictional or mythical space, one can find the true character of California and the Californian. Lastly, Didion shows how Californians appear deeply affected by California as a place, yet are also guilelessly willing to sell it off for profit. This first section of Part One acts as a sort of overture or prologue for the entire collection in all of its parts. Without directly stating what she will be focusing on, Didion hits on most of her themes, particularly women, movement, and California as a Western place.

Section 2 Section 2 is a brief reenactment of a speech she gave as a schoolgirl in 1948. The speech demonstrates the features of California and its people to which she had been indoctrinated. Didion speaks of her longstanding belief in the traditions she had been raised on, as well as her realization that hers is a California fixed in time, whereas the state itself

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To a large extent, the vague ‘‘optimism’’ her heroines initially possess is based on ignorance and evasion of their own pasts. Only when the diffusion of their security and good faith begins do they apprehend their own histories, obtain a sense of where they come from and what they are; the more sharply that new sense of history focuses itself, the more each realizes how irrecoverable the past is. In turn, that realization, having come too late, adds to their despair and accelerates their decline. A number of Didion’s essays have been concerned with the idea of ‘‘home,’’ which, after all, is the most vivid part of anyone’s personal history. Her observations in those pieces provide a kind of thematic key to her novels insofar as the three books concern themselves with their characters’ lost pasts. She has written of herself as having been ‘‘born into the last generation to carry the burden of ‘home,’ to find in family life the source of all tension and drama’’ (Slouching Towards Bethlehem). She knows that anyone of her generation—and her heroines are all roughly of it—travels at one’s peril any real distance from home and the past. From Thomas Mallon, ‘‘The Limits of History in the Novels of Joan Didion,’’ in Joan Didion: Essays & Conversations, 62.

had moved into a future of people and things completely unrelated to her vision of it. This idea of progress baffles her because it undoes an entire system of beliefs she had held for so long. The second section is Didion’s thesis statement, following on the heels of the overture played in section one. It opens with an excerpt from an essay she wrote and presented at her own eighth-grade graduation, and it accents her indoctrination into a system of beliefs about what she was taught California represented.

Section 3 Section 3 is a discussion of Northern California’s hydrology, relating the historic fact that the Sacramento Valley naturally floods each winter and remains flooded through the spring and much of the summer. Didion vividly recreates the valley landscape and the geography of the northern mountains where the flooding rivers originate, in lists that are almost map-like in their insistency, and through sources as varied as family diaries, Army Corps of Engineers’ declarations, descriptions of

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historic lithographs, and book excerpts. She then lists the entire infrastructure put in place to hold back and collect for later use the annual, natural flow of floodwater, including Northern California’s dams, levees, and aqueducts. She alludes to the early railroaders and to the federal water projects as a way into a topic she brings up later regarding the influence of monopolies in the state. She has shown, by way of these impediments to the state’s natural hydrology, how artificial even the most basic properties governing California have become. Didion reveals the contradiction of considering California a natural wonder when in reality it has been transformed into an utterly systematized environment.

Section 4 Didion begins with a short biography of the native Californian and Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce to frame her narrative on the meaning of the overland crossing for her own ancestors and for all those who crossed the plains in the mid and late 1800s. She is, in many respects, following in Royce’s footsteps, noting that his project was to apprehend the same sense of wonder she feels about California. She notes significantly that he failed in his task. Didion looks at several overland accounts, which ultimately fulfill a ‘‘kind of single master odyssey’’ with fixed familiar features (31). She examines the emigrants’ stories, among them her own family’s stories and those of Royce’s parents, and includes parts of Jack London’s novel Valley of the Moon, all of which induce wonder at the sheer will involved in such an undertaking, rather than make sense of it.

Section 5 Didion begins with her own childhood in Sacramento and then expands on the idea of California as a literary backdrop through a discussion of Josiah Royce and Frank Norris and their connections to the worlds of American philosophy and literary criticism, notably to William Dean Howells and William James. She then discusses the actual events that inspired Norris’s novel The Octopus. This leads her to examine the railroad’s involvement, not only in the plot of the novel, but also in the history of the state of California. She weighs the ranchers’ involvement in the novel’s plot against their role in state politics. She points out that the real conflict of The Octopus is the result of the difference between what Californians believe themselves to be and what they actually are. Didion highlights the interrelated nature of the web of

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infrastructure that runs the state, political and otherwise, even from the outset, which is normally hidden from the average Californian’s superficial experience.

Section 6 Didion pursues the individual components of relationships that she sees as so inextricably bound. Beginning with her own history in earlier sections, and moving through the history of water use, the railroad, and early literatures, she begins a discussion on landowners in the region of Central and Southern California where Frank Norris’s The Octopus takes place. Not surprisingly, Didion finds the same inconsistencies between appearances and fact as she had in her earlier subjects. She examines the history of the Hollister family’s and the Irvine family’s land holdings and the contradictory musings of Jane Hollister Wheelwright and Joan Irvine Smith, one a romantic and the other a pragmatist, both in the process of selling off the family lands to real estate developers. Coming from an old California family, Didion has personal, although tangential, ties to these women. Through people and places, she writes a social map of an isolated, ‘‘hermetic’’ California that she witnesses coming to an end in the 1950s (64). The last moments of this section are much heavier in nostalgia than the earlier, primarily economic discussion Didion had embarked upon. She describes California’s regional differences and the relative isolation of its parts and people from each other. She feels that the romanticism of this isolation could largely be held accountable for much of the change that came about in the state after World War II, and also for her own confusion. The residual effects of romanticism are brought to bear on an idealized version of individuality that Californians believe themselves to possess to this day. Didion points to this romantic individuality as the hallmark for a type of intolerance that demands wide open spaces in the state, in spite of the reality of its enormous population. She sees this as the break between figurative and literal, the myth of the Californian and his or her actual condition. To reach this point, she again uses Josiah Royce’s text, along with quotes from John Muir and the poetry of Robinson Jeffers. In reaching this belief about Californians’ character, Didion compares them to the Southerner, realizing that ‘‘in the South they remained convinced that they had bloodied their land with history. In California we did not believe that history could bloody the land, or even touch it’’ (71). Her personal sense of isolation, the geographic isolation California existed in for so long, grows out of this conflicted notion.

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Section 7 This section begins with a biography of the popular artist Thomas Kinkade. Didion uses Kinkade’s work along with the late-nineteenthcentury artist Albert Bierstadt to show the way in which Californians view their surroundings sentimentally rather than through the lens of stark reality she finds in the overland journal written by Virginia Reed, a Donner Party survivor. Didion focuses specifically on Reed’s advice to her cousin back in the states: ‘‘Remember, never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can’’ (75). Didion moves from this first comparison to The Valley of the Moon, the Jack London novel about young Californians nostalgic for the state’s pioneer past. London’s novel exemplifies an unapologetic racism that Didion gives historical evidence of through the works of Josiah Royce and Carey McWilliams. She then traces the history of California laws against African Americans, Asians, and Native Americans. She makes these moves to begin a discussion of entitlement and governmental subsidy that cuts against the conventional perspective of Californians as self-made, rugged individualists. To underscore this reality, she compares the world London’s characters believe they inhabit to the sentimental paintings of Kinkade. In addition, Didion comments on the almost regionalist project London himself had actually embarked on, and the abject failure of the project and the man himself.

Section 8 Didion recalls the members of the Bohemian Club of San Francisco, many of whom she has written about previously in Where I Was From. What began as an exclusive group of like-minded artists, journalists, and writers in the middle and late nineteenth century, quickly extended beyond the scope of ‘‘bohemians’’ to include men with money who could afford to indulge certain tastes. Less than 100 years later, the group was composed almost entirely of businessmen and had close connections to the White House and to the highest ranking officials and entrepreneurs in America. Didion uses this transformation of the Bohemian Club into something antithetical of bohemianism to highlight the change that California itself had undergone, from something close to free-spiritedness to a place that is completely entrenched in the business and politics of the world at large. As an example, she uses an article written in the Overland Monthly in 1868 about the character of Californians and the relationship of the railroad to the state. Again she returns to the work of Josiah Royce for

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clarity of her subject. She states that Royce believes in the character of Californians also, especially in its sense of community, and although Royce admits to certain failings, she points out that he believed Californians eventually would do what was best for themselves and the state. This part ends with Didion returning to the hard facts of the Californian character—that it has not looked after its own best interests, that it relies on big government and not ingenuity, and that its belief to the contrary have gotten its ‘‘dreamers’’ little if anything other than the perpetuation of the dream.

PART TWO Section 1 Section 1 begins with a close reading of a California story written by William Faulkner in which a family shows the wear of upward mobility. The father is a successful Okie who has gotten ahead in the real estate boom but whose children have not adapted well. Didion debates which immigrants can lay claim to California: those who came overland early, during the nineteenth century, or those who arrived in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She launches into the story of Joan Irvine and Jane Hollister Wheelwright, descendants of early emigrant families in the process of selling off the vast land holdings their families amassed to land developers interested in building subdivisions. Didion describes these holdings as ‘‘familiar yet vanished landscapes’’ (98). She puts the present in direct contact with the past, illustrating that, however Californians think of ownership, they must likewise also recognize it in the context of something lost, either because the land has been so irredeemably transformed, or because what remains of it is beyond the reach of most who live in the region.

Section 2 This section is Didion’s first direct look at contemporary Californian society. She discusses the suburban community of Lakewood in Los Angeles County. She chooses Lakewood as an example of the post– World War II emigrant communities that were built to satisfy the American Dream. Lakewood represents ‘‘the perfect synergy of time and place’’ because veterans and their young families were able to experience real upward mobility and enter the middle class as new home owners (104). Lakewood remained a white, middle-class enclave into the 1990s, insulated economically by various aerospace and federal military

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contracts. In the early 1990s, these contracts ran out and hard times hit the community. Didion examines the youth culture that developed in Lakewood just as their parents were being laid off from their jobs. The young men and women in, and just out of, the local high school, insulated and accustomed to middle-class privilege, had formed the infamous ‘‘Spur Posse,’’ which resulted in arrests and numerous daytime talk show appearances. Didion focuses on the confusion of those involved in the Lakewood community, including their unwillingness to accept personal responsibility, the insistence from nearly all parties that the allegations had been blown out of proportion, and an underlying helplessness in suburbia of the feeling that things have gotten beyond individual control, manifested primarily by the sentiment that times have changed.

Section 3 Times indeed have changed in communities such as Lakewood. The age of the government contract, at least at the time of Didion’s writing, has passed. Didion focuses on the artificiality of communities like Lakewood, which was built in a hurry during the post-War boom for G.I.’s with new families. These young men were employed by industries (defense, aerospace) that eventually outlived their government funding. The character of such communities was a mix of entitlement (the American Dream) and individuality (home ownership, the achievement of the Dream). Using strong, divisive words, and still focusing on the fallout of the Spur Posse scandal, Didion delineates the evolutionary dead end of such a culture: ‘‘This is what it costs to create and maintain an artificial ownership class. This is what happens when that class stops being useful’’ (117). Section 3 concentrates on the Spurs themselves, their organization, their earliest crimes, and the inability of their community to come to terms with the deeply seeded problems a group like the Spur Posse represent. Beyond the allegations of sexual assault are arrests for credit card theft, forgery, theft (of handguns), the exploding of a pipe bomb, and miscellaneous accounts of several types of intimidation perpetrated across the age, gender, and social strata. Didion points out that when the first arrests were made the boys in the posse were treated like heroes. Following the history of the posse, Didion goes into the details of their parents’ histories in an attempt to underscore some moment where things went wrong, to apprehend the moment where a large portion of a communities’ children were let down. She seems to find it in the fact that the older members of the posse, unable to find jobs, are trapped in a protracted adolescence, already believing that their best days are

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behind them, those years in high school, when they had acclaim and an identity.

Section 4 Didion looks at the economic situation in California during the early 1990s. In Southern California, at least, this was a time when defense contracts were coming to an end. She analyzes the rhetoric of the era and region as it neared the end of its heyday: ‘‘correctives’’ became ‘‘reorganizations’’ or ‘‘consolidations,’’ which in turn became ‘‘restructuring’’ (132). She reports on several plant closures and the overall frustration of middle-class Southern Californians. In an attempt to make concrete connections between events that seem all to abstract, Didion ends this section ominously: ‘‘This is what people in Los Angeles were talking about when they talked about the 1992 riot’’ (134).

Section 5 Section 5 covers the defense industry, including what is being manufactured and the type of community that is engendered by assembly work. She describes manufacturing of the type this industry requires as a kind of closed society predicated on a limited skill set in an environment increasingly becoming mechanized. She looks at the tremendous machinations involved behind the scenes to construct such an industry as well as those involved in disassembling it. What she outlines is a world in a delicate balance that has finally been upended. This section concludes as apocryphally as Section 4 did, bringing the abstract into a cohesive focus: ‘‘This is what people in Lakewood were talking about when they talked about the Spur Posse’’ (141).

Section 6 Didion says of Lakewood, California, ‘‘This was not a community that pushed its children hard, or launched them into the far world’’ (142). As proof, she investigates where former students of Lakewood High are living and how many of them are attending college. She points out again how highly the citizens of Lakewood prize sports, and in particular, she notes that the local shopping mall is the center of Lakewood culture.

Section 7 Section 7 begins by taking a step back to an earlier point in the arch of narration Didion has set forth, to the previously noted 1868 piece

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written by Henry George, ‘‘What the Railroad Will Bring to Us,’’ published in The Overland Monthly, out of San Francisco (see Part One, Section 8). She uses a passage from George’s piece to frame her idea that the failure of the Californian ideal is simultaneous with the failure of the infrastructure, visible or otherwise, driving it. At the same time Lakewood Spur Posse members are trying to sell their story to television for profit, their parents are fighting for their livelihoods. Didion describes several ‘‘stays of execution’’ for various plants and communities: last gasps of the former glory days, including small defense orders and new complexes of forward-reaching global business projects that eventually fail to pan out. Didion quotes Frank Norris’s The Octopus again: ‘‘California likes to be fooled’’ (150). She is able to thus align the Spurs and their parents, the crumbling California Ideal, the American Dream, and her own upbringing as a pioneer child into focus: she realizes that Westward expansion was not necessarily for the greater good, nor was her own ancestors’ optimism much more than the same kind of careless self-interest she witnesses in suburban communities across the West (151). Didion seems to suggest that the unspoken character of the people, an earlier topic on which she dwelled, has not changed, while the opportunity to live out the values it espouses has become increasingly difficult. The difference, as she sees it, is land. The nature of what Californians believe to be virtuous is directly related to tracts of open land to escape into that no longer exist. This same virtue was artificially suspended and encouraged for a time, with its subsequent failure—leaving the suburbs in limbo—rendering them a ‘‘no man’s land’’ creatively, intellectually, and morally.

PART THREE The final idea of the virtues of open space in the previous section can be seen playing out against ‘‘history,’’ which is presented as being stable but never truly is. It is always ephemeral and adapted to people in motion as a kind of subterfuge as they strive upward, either successfully or unsuccessfully holding onto what they’ve gotten, even while they exclude others like themselves, who are also searching for the same dream. In Didion’s ancestors’ era, claiming the land meant performing the role of a kind of landed aristocracy similar to that of the old south; in its suburban manifestation in contemporary California, the virtue of a space of one’s own looks more like the average, attainable American Dream, in which one does not strive too high, while at the same time believing that everything is possible. In Part Three, for Didion, at least as she expresses in her first novel Run River, change and loss amount to the type of decline she appears to

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highlight in Where I Was From as a whole. Whereas Run River is a nostalgic first work, Where I Was From attempts the mature perspective of reportage. By including Run River as the topic of Section 1, Didion is reconnecting with a past that is often apparent throughout her body of work, but in a manner that puts myth, literature, and nostalgia beside the less-appetizing facts for an extended period of time. In the last part of this work, Didion returns to the materials of her earlier sections, using them as reference points for discussion. Throughout Part Three of Where I Was From, after the extended foray into the modern suburb, the reader gets the sense that Didion is now coming full circle, putting her points together with her proofs and reaching conclusions.

Section 1 Section 1 covers Didion’s discussion of the influences and themes of her first novel, Run River. She engages it not only in terms of its theme of change specifically, but also of loss, and as an acknowledgment of its connection to a failed or crumbling Californian Ideal. For Didion, at least in Run River, change and loss amount to the type of decline she appears to highlight in Where I Was From as a whole. She lingers over specific passages and characters in the novel that draw attention to change, loss, and decline: Lily Knight’s mother, who sells off acreage for subdivisions; Everett McClellan’s sister Sarah, who is interested in doing the same; and Ryder Channing, who comes to California during the war and stays behind to try his hand at getting rich on various development schemes. Didion writes further about particular changes that occur in the Sacramento of her novel that happened in reality in Sacramento: foreign films, bookstores, swimming pools. Although these diversions are appearing in the city, the old downtown is likewise being turned into ‘‘Old Sacramento’’ in an effort to get new tourist dollars. The section closes with Didion describing the writing of Run River as having been a way for her, already living as a young woman in New York City, to put a ‘‘protective distance’’ between herself ‘‘and the place I came from’’ (169).

Section 2 Section 2 examines the opposite perspectives at work in California, the first being that development is bad, the other that it is good. Didion uses her own experience compared with those who had conceived of and built subdivisions like Lakewood in Southern California. She points out that many saw the early stages of such developments as affronts to their

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way of life, which they believed was truer to the ideal, while many more saw the expanding middle class as an indication that the dream was indeed alive and well in California. Furthermore, Didion points out the way in which critics of the suburbs fail to consider a sense of loss. Instead, she notes that these critics see development in California as a series of failed promises, but they do not comment on the loss of the landscape and open spaces. Didion is able to attribute the loss of open space and the growth of the suburbs to an ever-increasing influx of people into the state. She points to California’s history as one of exodus, using population growth figures beginning in the mid-1800s until present day. What follows are illustrations of the effects of rapid population growth on landscapes, communities, and people.

Section 3 Section 3 points out a trend in what Didion sees as Californians’ short-sightedness: the development of the prison system. In the mid1990s it becomes an industry; in 1995 the state spent more on its prison system than it did on its two university systems. Section 3 shows the reader that the shift in California to building a substantial prison system economy is not so different from any other development venture experienced by California in the past. The ‘‘change’’ so many Californians habitually seem to fight and chafe against is in reality business as usual in the Golden State.

Section 4 Section 4 begins with a long passage from Josiah Royce’s California: A Study of American Character. She has used this text throughout Where I Was From; she is in fact never far from her earliest premises derived from Frank Norris, Jack London, Henry George, and Josiah Royce. Didion then recounts a phone call to her mother and a discussion they had about the sale of an old family cemetery outside of Sacramento where, as a young woman, Didion would drive out to and spend time. She is beginning to see the myth of California not in terms of bureaucracies or new and old populations and middle-class promises, but in terms of actual stewardship, in particular the failure of any group of Californians to be proper stewards. Didion switches her focus from ownership and stewardship to the rate of insanity in early California. For instance, she points out that in 1870 ‘‘the federal census classified one in every 489 Californians as

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insane,’’ and in 1903 the rate increased to one in every 260 (194). In addition, she points out that this rate of institutionalization, and the ensuing sterilization of asylum inmates, goes against the perception of Californians as easy-going and ‘‘tolerant’’ (197). The digression into the history of the network of asylums in California that Didion makes brings her back to her point about ownership, and the sale of her family’s cemetery. Alongside these issues, she brings into play other images she has been considering throughout this book— that is, images of her childhood, her ancestors’ overland journey, and the ethic she and many other Californians had been raised on. She asks a series of questions in response to these images and in response to Josiah Royce’s commentary on the American character that amount to ‘‘keep moving’’ and ‘‘never look back’’ (199).

Although presented as a memoir, Where I Was From is not so much about Didion’s personal revelations as it is ‘‘an exploration into [her] own confusions about the place and the way in which [she] grew up’’ (18). Much of her exploration is framed by books written by California authors, primarily of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her love of place reveals itself equally as a love of books; California is a literal place and a ‘‘place of the mind,’’ which perhaps partially explains her confusion. Along with lists of place names and important figures, these texts form her understanding of California as both myth and reality. A short list of authors and novels she mentions in the book, in no particular order, are as follows: Charles Nordhoff, Northern California, Oregon and the Sandwich Islands (1874); Josiah Royce, California (1886); Frank Norris, The Octopus (1901); Gerald Haslam, The Great Central Valley (1987); Carey McWilliams, California: The Great Exception (1949); Jack London, The Valley of the Moon (1913); Edwin Markham, The Man with the Hoe: And Other Poems, John Muir (in general); Robinson Jeffers (as a theorist); Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream (1973); Henry George, ‘‘What the Railroad Will Bring Us’’ (essay, 1868), William Faulkner, ‘‘Golden Land’’ (short story, 1935); Donald J. Waldie, Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996); Victor Davis Hanson, The Land Was Everything: Letters from an American Farmer (2000); Richard W. Fox, So Far Disordered in Mind: Insanity in California (1978); Lincoln Steffens, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (1931); Sarah Royce, A Frontier Lady (1932).

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PART FOUR Section 1 After a passage from Lincoln Steffens’s Autobiography, Didion tells of her mother’s death. Her flight home reminds her of Lincoln Steffens’s sentiments upon returning to the state, and it gives her the book’s title: ‘‘I had, like Lincoln Steffens, ‘come back,’ flown west […] then home, there, where I was from, me, California’’ (204). Her reader learns that it was perhaps her mother’s death that was the impetus for this book. Didion is reminded of her opinionated mother’s life before and during World War II, and of her own childhood living on or near the bases during wartime. She begins to reminisce about her father and about his mental health struggles. Even Didion’s mother wants to know where it all (the California she knew, loved and remembered) went.

Section 2 Barely more than two pages in length, this brief section explains the moment at which Didion first felt remote to everything she associated with Sacramento as a real place. Not only has it physically changed, and not only has its culture seemed to have changed, but she realizes— watching her adopted daughter walking down the streets that countless of her ancestors had walked down—that it is the present, and the person in the present, that matters most, more than any myth people allow to direct their lives.

Section 3 Didion remembers her mother’s funeral and her belongings being divided among the grandchildren. She recalls a box mailed to her home in New York City full of papers and family pictures and the memories it inspired.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS • Didion indicated in Slouching Towards Bethlehem that she believes there are ‘‘places of the mind.’’ Because she isolates her ‘‘own confusions about the place and the way in which I grew up’’ (18) as her reason for writing Where I Was From, it is worthwhile to consider the role of literature in her confusion. Throughout her career she has been highly

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referential of California authors, in particular, and Where I Was From is steeped in the work of Josiah Royce, Jack London, Henry George, and Frank Norris especially. Does she imply that these authors are the cause of much of her confusion? Likewise, does she use them in Where I Was From to undo their sway over her? What does that say about Didion’s principles of reading? How does literature effect the creation of myth and inform its impact on ‘‘places of the mind’’? • Although she mentions it only briefly early in Where I Was From, and only in passing in Run River, her formative years in Sacramento coincided with central moments in the migration of the Dust Bowlers and in the significance of the bracero fieldworkers in the organization of the Central Valley, yet she makes no direct references to John Steinbeck’s writing, to William Saroyan, to Luis Valdez, or to the struggles of Cesar Chavez. Does her inability to contend with the underserved add to her confusion about California as a place? What can be said about her preoccupation with the white middle and upper classes and the fallacy of entitlement? • In Part Two of Where I Was From Didion appears to glean a moral from the story of Lakewood’s Spur Posse. She finds this moral in the unacknowledged influence of the infrastructure of the defense and aerospace industries. How has the creation of an artificial middle class lead to the formation of a group like the Spurs? • Part Three, Section 1 involves an extended discussion about the creation of Didion’s first novel Run River. Remembering herself as a young woman living alone in New York for the first time she recalls that she wanted to put a ‘‘protective distance’’ between herself ‘‘and the place [she] came from’’ (169). Why does she feel she needs this separation, and how does she feel she gained it by so thoroughly remembering? Why did she focus on the river as symbol? In Where I Was From and Run River, why does she dwell on change? • Part Four is perhaps the most personal segment of this work. In it she discusses her father’s mental illness. Earlier in Where I Was From, she examines the California prison system alongside its university system before delving into the historic rates of diagnosed insanity in the state. What larger point does she attempt to make with these discussions? How, if California embodies a distillation of the American Dream, do the circumstances of its institutions affect our understanding of what has become of that Dream?

8 THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING (2006)

This memoir, which won a National Book Award and was adapted into a successful Broadway play starring Vanessa Redgrave, is an intimate study of the grieving process based on Didion’s own life experiences in the wake of her husband’s death. She studies the working of the human mind and its imagination, the ‘‘magical thinking’’ that survivors go through after losing a loved one. Didion intends this book as a manual for her readers to help them understand the grieving process and to provide comfort for them in their own personal losses by offering this narrative of how she is able to continue living after losing the person she shared her life with for more than forty years. Page numbers cited for The Year of Magical Thinking are from the 2006 paperback edition (New York: Vintage).

CHAPTER ONE Didion opens the first chapter with notes she wrote just a few days after her husband died from a heart attack as she was preparing dinner. The death of her husband, John Dunne, came so unexpectedly for her, in the middle of a very ‘‘ordinary’’ evening, that she had a hard time believing that it really happened. She marvels at the contrast between disasters and the routines that they disrupt, citing numerous examples of 117

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descriptions given by survivors about the otherwise ‘‘ordinariness’’ of the day when loved ones die. In the week after her husband’s death, Didion is the survivor telling about how the day was ‘‘ordinary.’’ She comments that in her storytelling she cannot yet refer to the house as hers, but still calls it ‘‘ours.’’ As the book progresses, many more of these issues arise, items that belonged to her husband that she cannot bear to part with or shared goods that she resists calling hers. Didion remarks how exhausted she was in the week following her husband’s death, so exhausted that she does not remember telling anyone about it, although she knows she did. Even though she told people what happened, she left out the detail of the blood that remained on the floor after the paramedics left. Her housekeeper, Jose, understood what had happened only after he saw the blood. After a break on page six, Didion begins an ‘‘outline’’ of the details of her husband’s death from a heart attack, more than nine months after it happened, narrating it in a clinical fashion. But before she can tell that story, she must tell the story of her daughter, Quintana, who had been hospitalized five nights earlier from what appeared to be a flu and then complications from pneumonia (from which she dies just as this book is going to press). Didion states that, as a writer, it is through the written word that she tries to make sense of the world and understand it. Therefore, this book is her attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself. (7)

CHAPTER TWO She narrates the events of the night of John’s death. She mentions that she had taped emergency numbers by the phone in case someone else in the apartment building needed help. She emphasizes the notion that she had been prepared for ‘‘someone else’’ to have an emergency, suggesting that people never think something like this is actually going to happen to them. She describes her chaotic experience of the paramedics working to revive John with injections and defibrillating paddles. They finally transport him to the hospital, with Didion riding in a second ambulance. A social worker greets her as she arrives at the hospital, and she knows at that instant that her husband must be dead.

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Eleven months later she reads about something similar in a New York Times article. The mother of a teenager killed by a bomb blast in Kirkuk stated that if she did not let the man in who was coming to announce her son’s death, then it would not be true. Didion felt the same way about the social worker at the hospital. Didion’s actions portray a mind in grief: she gets into the line to process admittance paperwork and her mind races with plans to get her husband and daughter transferred to the same hospital. Her husband is dead, however. The social worker pulls her out of line and has her wait in an empty room. She remembers some research she had done once into how long a brain can be deprived of oxygen. She remembers that it was only four to six minutes before brain damage occurred and then she thinks that she must be remembering the statistics wrong. The social worker appears with her husband’s doctor, and she asks them if he is dead. The social worker gives the doctor permission to tell her, saying that ‘‘She’s a pretty cool customer.’’ They take her to John’s body, a priest says a few words over him, and they give her John’s belongings and put her in a taxi to go home. At home, she sees John’s jacket and scarf there, and she thinks about what an ‘‘uncool customer’’ would have done. Her first impulse is that she wants to ‘‘discuss this with John’’ as she had done with everything for almost forty years. She notes how silent the apartment is. Because they were both writers, they were home a lot with each other, sharing their thoughts and offering feedback on each other’s writing. She empties the bag of his belongings and puts everything away, as if he were going to use them again. She meets with the undertaker and chooses a coffin. She tries not to hear what the undertaker is saying about a grandfather clock in the office that does not work; she tries to concentrate on her daughter but all she can hear in her mind are lines from Shakespeare’s The Tempest Act 1, scene ii. In Didion’s pursuit of details to try to understand the death of her husband, she requests the doorman’s log from the manager of her

Joan Didion’s art has always been one of understatement and indirection, of emotion withheld. Like her narrator, she has been an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time, a memorable voice, partly eulogistic, partly despairing; always in control. From Joyce Carol Oates, ‘‘A Taut Novel of Disorder,’’ 141.

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building. The entry about the paramedics arriving for her husband is juxtaposed with a note about a light-bulb needing replacement in one of the elevators. Didion’s search to understand how and why her husband died only leads her to more findings that seem ridiculous in the face of her grief because of their everyday nature, the light-bulb that needs replacing, and other tasks of a noneventful nature. When asked if she would authorize an autopsy, Didion agrees. Later, in her research, she uncovers that doctors are often anxious about asking such a question because many patients react badly to the idea of their loved one’s body undergoing such a procedure. Although Didion has seen some and knows all of the things that are done to the deceased’s body, she wants one to better understand what happened. Didion spends time trying to establish whether John was alive while the paramedics worked on him or not and what time exactly that he died. Didion wonders whether John somehow, on some level, knew that he was going to die. She remembers comments he made and things he did in the year or so preceding his death and tries to understand whether he had felt that he was going to die soon. Didion explains that her feeling of grief after John died was not the same feeling that she experienced after her parents died. In the case of her parents, she had been dreading their loss for most of her life and felt sadness after they passed. The grief she felt after the loss of her husband came in waves that debilitated her. Before going to bed that night, she had made phone calls to her family and friends to tell them that John was dead. Her agent had come over to her apartment to see her. She started wondering if she could go back in time by traveling to the West Coast. She started having anxiety that her contacts at the Los Angeles Times would find out what happened from the New York Times, so she called someone at the Los Angeles Times to let them have the news. She experienced her first wave of grief the next morning when she woke up alone in her apartment. She would wake up in this manner for the next several weeks, thinking of a line of poetry by Gerard Manley Hopkins that John had repeated after his younger brother committed suicide. She realizes that she wanted to be alone that night so that John could come back. In her grief, her mind clung to the possibility that his death was reversible. This fantasy is what she calls her ‘‘magical thinking.’’

CHAPTER THREE Didion cites studies that prove that grief can alter a person’s way of thinking. She admits about six months after the incident that there were

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occasions in the months that followed his death in which she did not think rationally. For instance, she is unable to give away his shoes because, she thought, he would need them if he came back. This same irrational thinking was what prompted her so quickly to agree to the autopsy. She thought that if what went wrong was simple then it could still be fixed. She remembers an interview with Teresa Heinz Kerry from the 2004 campaign in which she said that after her first husband died she felt she had to leave Washington and go back to Pittsburgh. Now, Didion understood what she meant. Teresa Heinz Kerry was thinking, on some level, that if her husband were to come back, he would go to Pittsburgh, not Washington. Didion remembers getting a call from the hospital the next morning asking her if she would agree to donate her husband’s organs. She cannot say yes to that decision. Later, she understands that since he was not on life support most of his organs would have shut down. She gets frustrated with the hospital for not being more specific, calling and saying ‘‘organs’’ when the only things they could have used from him at this point were his corneas. Later, she realizes that her anger at the caller stems from her thought that John will need his organs if he comes back. She is reminded of another line of poetry, but she isn’t positive that they were written by e. e. cummings. She goes to look in one of John’s poetry textbooks that he had from his days as a student at Portsmouth Priory, the boarding school he was sent to after his father died of a heart attack in his early fifties. Didion is struck by the similarity between John’s and his father’s deaths. On this occasion, she forgets to confirm it, but she finds many months later that indeed it was a line from a cummings poem.

CHAPTER FOUR She explains that in her grief rationality and irrationality existed simultaneously. On one level she knew John was dead and that he was not coming back, but on another level of thinking she was still living in her ‘‘magical thinking,’’ where she played games with herself imagining that he could come back, where she performs rituals to make it happen. She describes the funeral service held for John and her disappointment that none of her efforts had managed to bring him back. Didion tries to gain control over the situation by learning as much information as she can about John’s death, his heart condition, and the grieving process. She turns to C. S. Lewis’s book A Grief Observed, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, pieces of classical ballet, and poetry by Matthew Arnold and W. H. Auden. She finds an echo to her own situation in a

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work called Bereavement: Reactions, Consequences, and Care. Didion finds that there is documented evidence that grief can affect people so badly that they are very likely to die in the wake of it. She starts to take precautions against it. Didion diagnoses the symptoms of her grief through medical treatises and finds that she has the worst kind of grief, known as ‘‘pathological bereavement,’’ which occurs in situations in which ‘‘the survivor and the deceased had been unusually dependent on one another.’’ Didion reflects on her marriage and how close she and John were. They rarely spent a night apart in all the years they had been together. She is reminded of one of John’s novels, Dutch Shea, Jr. She now recognizes that the novel was really about grief, and that the main character, like her, is obsessed with the death of his daughter and goes over every detail of her death. Didion quotes from the chapter on funerals in Emily Post’s book of etiquette. She finds good sense in Post’s recommendations but thinks that they are no longer useful in contemporary society in which no one wants to be reminded of death, and mourning is considered inappropriate. Didion considers how death used to occur in homes but now it occurs in hospitals. This removes people from the process and makes them more uncomfortable with any reminder of it, as in dealing with someone else’s grief.

CHAPTER FIVE Didion begins telling the story of her daughter’s illness. When she is first admitted to the hospital, she is diagnosed with pneumonia. Within twenty-four hours, Quintana is showing sign of septic shock. Three months later she is able to attend her father’s funeral. She eventually dies of her ailments, although Didion does not include this information in this book. Her publisher asked her to rewrite this book to include the death of her daughter, but Didion refused saying that the book was done. Less than five months earlier, Quintana had gotten married. Didion was reminded of her own wedding day. The dress she wore was bought on the same day as John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Didion has to avoid looking at the photographs on her apartment wall because they remind her of those early years of their marriage. She tells the stories behind the photographs. Many of the people in them are now dead. Didion realizes that she has a certain look on her face that marks her as one who is grieving. She finds that she has new understanding of the representation of death in the form of the ferryman of the river of Styx, as well as the Hindu practice of suttee (also known as sati) where recent

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widows kill themselves by setting themselves on fire or putting themselves on the funeral pyres of their husbands.

CHAPTER SIX Didion names two moments when she had felt death. One was a certain quality of light, a visual experience involved falling leaves and a fast-moving shower of gold light, and the other was a dream of an ice island that she knew to be an image of death. Both of these experiences were ‘‘transcendent [and] beautiful.’’ Since she perceives death in this way, she cannot understand why she fails to accept that John is gone. She begins, for the first time in her life, to complete crossword puzzles in the newspaper as an exercise to return her cognitive functions. However, her answers to the questions reflect her feelings of grief. She believes now that John knew he was dying and had tried to tell her. He had been having trouble with his heart for years and had a pacemaker. When they were deciding whether or not to go to Paris in November, he had said that he felt this was his last chance to see Paris. Many events in her daily life bring her back to her grief because they bring her back to memories she has of her life with John. She refers to this kind of thinking as the ‘‘incorrect track,’’ when she lets something she sees spiral into a memory of John. Didion had dismissed John’s warnings to her as simple depression, but three hours before his death he had expressed to her that he felt that ‘‘everything he had done […] was worthless.’’

CHAPTER SEVEN Didion takes issue with her narrative and the way she is trying to make certain things out to be normal when nothing is normal about the death of a loved one. She tries again to lay out a chronology of events starting with the illness of her daughter.

CHAPTER EIGHT Didion’s chronology of her daughter’s illness continues. Her daughter had gotten better and had made a plane trip from New York to California. Quintana passed out as they were leaving the airport. Didion learns the significance of the doctor saying that her ‘‘pupils were fixed,’’ that this is a sign of brain death. Didion wants to book the next flight out to Los Angeles but is advised against it because her daughter is currently in surgery. Instead, she calls friends to meet her daughter’s husband at the hospital. Didion finds notes she took on Quintana’s condition a month

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later when she arrives back at her New York apartment. They are next to a grocery list. Although Didion does not comment on it, the juxtaposition of these two again reinforces how grief comes out of nowhere into the everyday lives of people who do not expect it. Didion has researched the condition of ‘‘fixed pupils’’ and finds that survival rates are low. Those who do survive usually have brain damage.

CHAPTER NINE Didion visits her daughter in the intensive care unit of the UCLA hospital after her surgery. She promises her daughter that everything is going to be alright. She recognizes that this is a lie, that Didion cannot fix this situation for her daughter. During the weeks she is with her daughter, she is amazed by people’s faith in their own skills, especially the power of the telephone numbers they have at their disposition. She herself had always believed that she could make things happen by placing the right phone call to the right person. Yet, this was the kind of problem that she had always feared because she could not control or do anything to solve it. Didion spoke with many doctors on the phone in her attempt to try to understand the situation. One of them suggested that the slight fall could have caused the brain hemorrhage. In dealing with Quintana’s hospitalization in New York, Didion had a crash course in medical terminology. Now, she was much more fluent in medical terms and practices. However, now that she began to investigate brain surgery procedures, she found the medical language impossible to understand. In one manual, she finds reference to a method of neurological examination that consists of telling a patient a story and having them explain it. The story that was to be told is called the ‘‘gilded-boy story.’’ In the story, a young boy dies, despite the best attempts by medicine to help him. Didion finds the story inappropriate to tell to patients and demonstrative of the medical profession’s insensitivity to the feelings of patients.

CHAPTER TEN During Quintana’s stay at Beth Israel North Hospital in New York, Didion played games with herself to distract her mind from why she was at her hospital, as a way to assuage her grief temporarily. She allows her mind to wander and recalls a woman she worked with at Vogue who had an abortion at this hospital and how she had used that story in her novel Play It As It Lays. But eventually, her mind inevitably would return to her daughter. She calls the moment that she is brought back to

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reality ‘‘the vortex.’’ This feeling has to do with the way she tries to take her mind of her grief by thinking of other things besides John and Quintana but the way her memories invariably lead her back to times with them and thus open up her grief again. In Los Angeles, she tries to manage the ‘‘vortex’’ by avoiding places that she associated with John and Quintana. The vortex effect was not logical. Even though the Beverly Wilshire hotel should have triggered it, because she had many memories of it that were associated with John and Quintana, it rarely conjured up the ‘‘vortex.’’ However, many other places in the area did.

CHAPTER ELEVEN Quintana is flown back to New York and is hospitalized at the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine. She has lost some of her memory. Didion finds it hard to remember all of the events that happened at the UCLA hospital. For instance, the doctors had turned off the EEG (electroencephalogram) monitor without telling Didion and at first she feared the worst. They pressured her to allow a tracheotomy, but Didion resisted at first, thinking that if she allowed it then she would be admitting that Quintana was not going to get up out of bed and be ready to go home. She listens to the stories of the patients on either side of Quintana. They all were going along in their lives perfectly ordinary when out of nowhere disaster occurred. As usual in this book, Didion’s style relies heavily on starting from a present moment and flashing back to the past, so that after a few chapters, the time of the events becomes disorienting to the reader, simulating the experience of someone suffering from grief. Didion gets resistance from the hospital staff when she tries to be heavily involved with the decisions being made about her daughter’s treatment. She says that they resented her efforts to take control over what was happening to her daughter. By now, Didion’s medical knowledge has grown immensely. She is prompted by the scene of a swimming pool outside the window to remember a party she once threw at her house in Brentwood Park. This memory led her to another in which an ambulance arrived for a neighbor. She has entered ‘‘the vortex’’ and begins to question her acquiescence to her husband’s wish to spend more time in New York. She wonders if they had stayed in California whether John would have died and whether Quintana would have gotten sick. Didion narrates her daughter’s transfer by air ambulance from Los Angeles to New York. Didion is faced with editing the final proof of her husband’s last novel written before he died. She cannot decide whether one line contained a grammatical error, or if that was the way her husband wanted the line. She decides to leave it as it was.

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CHAPTER TWELVE At Rusk, Quintana’s condition improves. Didion remarks that she had only grieved, not mourned, her husband’s passing. Didion remembers part of a song that had been a private joke between her and her husband related to his time at Princeton. She cannot remember the name of the song. What readers see in Didion’s narrative is the attempt of an old woman, whose memory is failing her, to piece together a past that was held together by her relationship to another person who is no longer with her. Her story is an attempt to come back to herself and figure out who she is after forty years of sharing a life with her husband. She thinks that this is one of the many things she would like to ask John about. She returns to the idea that John knew he was going to die. John noted, the night before his death, that the plot of his latest novel involved the death of many of its characters. Months afterward, Didion finds a notepad with a list of 13 characters who die in the novel. Didion returns to her question about the definition of death to try to understand exactly when it happens, because it seems like a confusing term. She rereads Alcestis to understand the divide between life and death, the moment where the one gives over to the other. She wonders if John came back from the dead, as one of the characters does in the Alcestis, would he blame her in any way for somehow allowing him to die, although rationally she knows she had no power to keep him from dying. She understands that she is looking back trying to read signs that she could not see at the time. She rereads some of his earlier novels. She comes across a line describing what one character experienced at the point of death. She wonders if that was how John experienced it. She thinks back to his ‘‘near-death’’ experience in 1987 when he had an angioplasty to relieve a 90 percent blockage of an artery. After that experience, he told her that ‘‘he now knew how he was going to die.’’

CHAPTER THIRTEEN Didion stops dreaming for some time after her husband’s death. She attributes this to the fact that she used to share her dreams with him and now she cannot. When she finally does start having dreams again, they are filled with anxiety about his death, dealing with her feelings of having caused it somehow and with her feelings of abandonment. One evening she pulls out a plate for dinner and realizes that it is part of a set that was given to John by his mother before he was married. She realizes that although John and his mother are both dead, she is left with these

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plates. She begins using them regularly when she eats alone. Didion is struck by the irony that she and John were so close and so rarely separated from one another that she has no letters from him, but she has presents that he gave her that she cannot get rid of—a travel alarm clock, a set of pens—even after they stop working. The last present he gave her was twenty-five days before he died. His birthday present to her was to read from one of her novels and admit that she was a fantastic writer.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN Didion is still raw and fragile in her daily life. She reads a short story by Roxana Robinson entitled ‘‘Blind Man,’’ which deals with the kind of instability she is experiencing. When visiting their family doctor for a physical, Didion breaks down in tears when he asks her how she is doing. She had previously considered herself someone who could find the silver lining in any situation, but she cannot find one in her husband’s death.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN Quintana is discharged from the Rusk Institution in mid-July. Didion travels to Boston to cover the Democratic convention. She thinks that the city of Boston will not trigger memories of John. Suddenly, she realizes that it is the one-year anniversary of Quintana’s wedding and she is plagued by memories of that day involving John. She has a subsequent panic attack while at the convention and leaves. Didion realizes that her vortex moments involving memory are her attempts to reverse time and bring John back.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN Didion feels guilty because John had begun commenting in the last year that they were not having any fun, that they were always doing things because they had to or because they normally did them, not because they wanted to. She thinks of a couple they met only twice, Joe and Gertrude Black, who had impressed them both. She realizes that John wished his life had been more like theirs. He had made a brief note about this couple in one of his computer files named ‘‘AAA Random Thoughts’’ where he kept notes for future writing projects. He had changed or added something in this file on the day of his death.

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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Didion says that it is impossible to ‘‘imagine’’ grief in the wake of the death of a loved one. She says that the prevailing rhetoric of grief is healing and that those who have not been in mourning imagine that the first few days are the worst but that afterward things get better. Didion suggests that there is no progression toward understanding grief in the real experience of it. Didion asserts that grieving people spend a lot of time worrying about self-pity and trying to avoid it. Didion recounts the special nature of her and John’s attachment to one another: they were married for forty years and for all of that time (with the exception of five months at the very beginning) they had both worked together from home as writers, sharing their thoughts constantly. With these details, it is unclear whether Didion seeks to connect herself to all those who have experienced the death of a loved one or to distinguish her experience as something particularly extreme because of how unusually close she and her husband had been, but perhaps ultimately both of these occur over the course of her narrative. Didion almost regrets not having some of those experiences common to grieving survivors, that of seeing or hearing from the deceased. She remembers times when he had tried to advise her on what to do if something happened to him and he died. He wanted her to be surrounded with friends and family to help her get through the ordeal and he wanted her to marry again within a year. She says that neither one of them understood that a death of a loved one cannot become the stage for a new life. Too many adjustments must happen. For instance, for the forty years of her marriage, Didion saw herself through John’s eyes and in her mind she pictured herself at a much younger age than she actually was. After his death, she begins to

In all her work, Didion is obsessively fascinated with the interpretation of facts, events, the motives of people. Over and over, in different ways, she must ask: What does it mean? What do all the disparate events add up to? Quite frequently, however, the act of interpretation breaks down, or the storyteller becomes frustrated with the act of constructing meaningful patterns. Instead, the narrator reverts to recording a series of disconnected snapshots. From John Hollowell, ‘‘Against Interpretation: Narrative Strategy in A Book of Common Prayer,’’ 164.

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see herself through other’s eyes, and she realizes that she is actually much older than the image of herself that she carries in her mind. She remembers the book that Dylan Thomas’s widow wrote after his death, Leftover Time to Kill. Didion was in her twenties when it came out. She could not understand it then, but now, with time, she can.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN About a year after John dies, Didion receives the autopsy report and records from the emergency room. It took longer than usual to receive these documents, Didion realizes, because on the night of John’s death she had written down an old address, despite having lived at her current address for sixteen years. She discerns from the hospital notes, and her knowledge of the time it takes for lividity to be visible, that John was probably dead by the time she called for the ambulance. Her rational mind understood all the bleak statistics for people like John with previous coronary artery disease that she read about in the New England Journal of Medicine and in Sherwin Nuland’s book How We Die. However, she was not operating from her rational mind. When she heard that Julia Child died, for instance, she feels a sense of relief, thinking that John can have dinner with her now. Although John was taking anticoagulant medication, Didion begins to wonder if she could have saved him by giving him an aspirin. It is not until she reads the autopsy report that it really sinks in that there was nothing she could have done and nothing that John could have done to prevent this from happening.

CHAPTER NINETEEN Didion reflects on what she perceives were her shortcomings as a wife. She includes decisions they made as a couple that in hindsight seemed illogical and impractical but that actually worked out for them.

CHAPTER TWENTY Although Didion finds socializing with others difficult, she is able to finish her first piece of writing since John’s death. This, for her, is a step in the right direction, a step toward resuming her own life. It is now approaching one year since John’s death and Didion relives the events of the previous year.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Didion remembers the night of John’s death. She muses on the coincidence that Quintana was also near death that same night. She recalls that when Quintana was little she called death ‘‘the Broken Man,’’ and said that she would refuse to go with him if he came for her.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Didion quotes a passage from her novel Democracy about earthquakes. She returns to this passage after an earthquake strikes in India and causes a tsunami that destroys vast portions of the Indian coastline. A year after John’s death, Didion hosts Christmas Eve dinner so that she does not feel so helpless. She writes that she is reluctant to finish this story. Although she is plagued by her thoughts of John’s death and her memories of him, she is afraid of letting them go. It is the one-year anniversary of his death. She realizes that she has to let him go. She worries that in letting him go she will feel like she is betraying him. John had once told her while they were swimming, commenting on the tide, that she had to ‘‘go with the change.’’ In ending with these thoughts, Didion ends with the hope that she will find the strength inside herself to accept this change and move on with her life.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS • How does this work reflect Didion’s assertion in The White Album that ‘‘we tell ourselves stories in order to live’’? • What is ‘‘magical’’ about Didion’s thinking in the year following her husband’s death? Is this kind of thinking specific to only writers or does everyone engage in it at times? • In what way is the narrator of this book unreliable? Does that make her observations and conclusions any less true? • Is there any humor in this book? If so, what purpose does it serve? • Didion’s daughter died soon after she finished writing this book. How does the knowledge of this second tragedy change your understanding of the story? This book has come to have a reputation as a ‘‘handbook’’ for understanding the grieving process. Do you think its reputation is justified? How can Didion’s reflections help friends and loved ones understand the mind-set of a grieving spouse?

9 TODAY’S ISSUES IN JOAN DIDION’S WORK

The major contemporary issues that Didion addresses in her works revolve around the political and moral spheres. The moral dilemmas presented in her works are more present in her early analyses of 1960s culture and the jettisoning of traditional American values associated with mainstream lifestyles of American families in the fifties. The idea of a coherent family unit—and the related issue of marriage—is one of the elements whose loss Didion mourns in much of her early work such as Run River and Play It As It Lays. This concern became relevant again in 2005 when Didion lost her family after the death of her husband and the subsequent death of her daughter, which are documented in her work The Year of Magical Thinking. Her political musings, however, take center stage in her contribution to understanding important contemporary issues.

POLITICAL ANALYSIS Political Fictions is Didion’s masterpiece with regard to political analysis. In this nonfiction work, she takes issue with the way journalists pander to the American public and blatantly construct ‘‘fictions’’ about political candidates that are meant to force a political agenda on the American people. Didion views the creation of these ‘‘fictions’’ as an 131

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affront to democracy. Didion finds that, sometime in the 1980s, politics became increasingly distanced from the experiences of the American people, and instead of having decisions about politics emanate from those experiences, political decisions were spun through a series of myths about the American experience that had the result, by the late 1980s, of ‘‘reducing the nation’s political dialogue to a level so dispiritingly low’’ (8). She abhors the class of career politicians that resulted from this shift and the ‘‘code’’ language used by these political insiders. Didion’s analysis of the presidential campaign of George H. Bush Sr. provides context for the subsequent presidency of his son, George W. Bush. Didion finds that many reporters and journalists are active in the process of inventing an illusion of consensus that helps to obscure the real issues and that aids politicians in placing more attention on public relations to get reelected than on finding solutions to national problems. Much of what Didion documents in this work, about how politics has become more akin to marketing, was hotly debated during the 2008 presidential election. Didion examines how the use of moral values entered the political arena as a fiction after President Bill Clinton’s persecution for his sexual behavior.

FOREIGN RELATIONS Didion’s other political works address politics on a more global scale, although always with a running commentary on American foreign relations. In Salvador (1983), a nonfiction work whose title is a tongue-andcheek reference to American delusions of ‘‘saving’’ the rest of the world, she paints a gruesome portrait of the brutality and danger of everyday life in El Salvador during its civil war. Didion’s conclusion is critical of U.S. policies toward this country and its predictable and criminal involvement in El Salvador’s internal affairs as soon as resistance to a murderous regime is labeled ‘‘communist.’’ Miami (1987), another nonfiction work, investigates the mind-set of Cuban exiles living in south Florida, and the role of the city of Miami in international relations between the United States and Cuba. Democracy (1984) is a novel about the instability of the political world at the time of the Vietnam War as viewed from the state of Hawaii. These three works that examine U.S. foreign relations positioned Didion as an analyst for the attacks of September 11, 2001. A long article she wrote for the New York Times was printed in 2003 as a small book under the title Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11. Her many other newspapers articles, contributed mainly to the New York Times, offer shorter glimpses into her political acumen

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and savvy, especially her piece on the 2008 presidential race between Barack Obama and John McCain. Didion stays abreast of the news and incorporates analyses of news stories into her writing to examine aspects of American culture, especially the myths constructed around its national identity. Didion’s masterpiece treating the contemporary political climate (her New York Times piece titled ‘‘Fixed Opinions, or the Hinge of History’’ that became Fixed Ideas) breaks down the diabolical strategies of the Bush administration and the war in Iraq to use the events of September 11 to bolster policies that had been part of the Republican agenda since Reagan. Didion addresses the American’s public unwillingness to consider that they are being manipulated by a rhetoric of national security that masks imperialism. It is difficult to say much more about the relationship between Didion’s work and twenty-first-century issues. This is partly due to her writing style, which demands that the reader make such connections as they are not always explicitly spelled out by Didion. Additionally, this is complicated by the universal nature of many of the themes important to her work, and the mythic level at which she addresses other more historically grounded themes. Because so much of her work documents 1960s culture, the relevance of her investigation of this era to contemporary issues is sometimes difficult to extrapolate. In interviews that she has conducted in the early twenty-first century, she has expressed more of her ideas on events in American politics and culture. See chapters 11 and 12 for more information.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS • What kinds of political ideas does Didion express in her writing? Do you share her political views? What political party or parties does she represent? • What time periods in U.S. history does Didion favor in her writing? Why are those time periods significant to her?

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10 POP CULTURE IN JOAN DIDION’S WORK

Joan Didion was initially attacked by early critics of her work for her attention to what are seen as trivial matters. However, the matters considered ‘‘trivial’’ by these past critics are now called elements of popular culture, and they certainly are no longer considered ‘‘trivial.’’ Instead, they are recognized by universities and intellectuals as important objects of study that reflect U.S. culture. Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, both essay collections, are the major works in which Joan Didion references elements of popular culture. For Didion, the popular culture of the 1960s is important because it defines that time period and its historical context. References to popular culture, such as movies, actors, and music, are the materials that Didion combines to create her collage-like essays whose structure, in not being organized around a formal center, mirrors the grassroots spirit of the decade.

CULTURAL ICONS In her work Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Didion portrays herself as an outsider to the 1960s, but also as an outsider to the traditional culture of the 1950s. Although she is dismissive of 1960s popular culture for the most part, she does glorify some of its characters. She picks and 135

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chooses, however; she does not simply embrace all of the decade’s cultural icons, and she offers cultural critique. Didion tears down the tradition culture of the 1950s and is equally as critical of the 1960s generation as a counterculture. She points out the failure of the 1960s cultural revolution to be inclusive, noting that the hippie movement isolated those who held on to the values of a previous era and did not make it easy for those people to participate in the redefinition of American culture.

MUSIC

AND

FILM

Perhaps the biggest and most important group of references to popular culture employed by Didion in her writing have to do with the music and film industry, both situated in central California around Hollywood and Los Angeles. However, often these references are made either in anecdotal fashion or as a setting for larger ideas about what it means to be American and the changes that were set in motion by the 1960s. Her use of popular culture almost represents her ambivalence about the paradigm shift that occurred. Part of the 1960s desire to question authority means that ‘‘traditional’’ art, such as that embraced by the elite, was thrown out in favor of more ‘‘popular’’ varieties. The common references to popular culture in Didion’s work are evidence of a lesson learned from the aesthetics of the 1960s, but because most of the messages behind Didion’s essays come not from a full-on tackle of the popular culture itself, but instead as more of a glancing blow, her work does not really place the icons of that era on a pedestal like many others have done. In fact, one popular culture reference seems to blend in and be equal to the next one—the Mansons exist simultaneously with The Doors with little distinction made except that both are cultural markers of the time period. Perhaps this style has grown out of her journalistic approach to culture and her documentary tendencies. References to Janis Joplin, The Mamas and the Papas, the Black Panthers, and Allen Ginsberg are just stories that have weight equal to those of some of the nameless characters who bear witness in her writing. Joan Didion is well versed in the popular music of the 1960s. Many references to musicians, as popular icons of that era, appear in her works. She mentions Janis Joplin in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, as well as The Dead. She notes the juxtaposition of different generations and a certain clash of cultures when she remarks in this work that The Dead shared the same stage as Lawrence Welk. Her work The White Album is named after the Beatles record of the same name. In that work,

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she references two bands that were defining features of the 1960s: The Doors and The Mamas and The Papas.

NEWS The news figures prominently in the lives of many of Didion’s heroines. In The White Album, she reports on the Manson murders and includes newspaper clippings. She discusses the activities of the Black Panthers, an activist group promoting the rights of African Americans. In Play It As It Lays, Maria Wyeth is beset by images of devastation and destruction on the televised news. For many of Didion’s characters the news is a source of evidence of the moral decay of society.

CALIFORNIA California is another category of popular culture images that emerges in Didion’s writing. One of the best examples of this is her discussion of the CALTRANS system in The White Album. Here, she looks at the way in which technology fails to improve the lives of Californians and is instead used for ideological purposes when the State Highway Department begins monitoring freeways with sensors to keep data on the traffic flow. These data are pointless: even though they show that after instituting the diamond lanes for carpooling the traffic accident rate doubled and gridlock was made worse, CALTRANS proceeded with its plans to institute more diamond lanes on the California freeway system. Technology is often, in Didion’s works, a paradox that reveals the absurdities of modern existence. One Hollywood icon stands out in Didion’s work. John Wayne embodies for Didion all of the hopes for America embodied in the myths of Western culture and in the film genre of the Western. Although Didion is well aware that the West as it has been defined by Hollywood is a constructed fiction, she cannot let go of her admiration for John Wayne. Her appreciation of him belies Didion’s inability to let go of the traditional values that were targeted by the 1960s counterculture. However, this is an appropriate metaphor that occurs time and again in her work for the ‘‘in between-ness’’ that unsettled many in her generation. Sometimes that ‘‘in between-ness’’ is the source of anxiety and negativity, other times—such as in her story in The White Album about the lawsuit brought against the Joan Baez Institute for the Study of Nonviolence by its neighbors—that ‘‘in between-ness’’ is the possible source of a solution to bridge two extreme value systems.

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DISCUSSION QUESTIONS • How do Didion’s references to popular culture establish a clash of cultural values at certain times in history? • Does Didion portray her characters as consumers of popular culture? Or do her protagonists exist outside of mainstream society? What about her nonfiction? Does she portray herself as a consumer of popular culture or is she merely an observer?

11 JOAN DIDION ON THE INTERNET

As of early 2009, no official Web site is run by Joan Didion, her family, or her literary agent. However, a few Web sites from journals and publishers do provide bibliographies of her work. Many additional Internet sites provide transcripts of interviews or speeches that she has given.

WEB SITES The New York Review of Books (http://www.nybooks.com/authors/ 238) sponsors an entry on Joan Didion. Didion wrote for the New York Review of Books for many years. The site offers a caricature of Didion done by David Levine, a bibliography of the essays and letters she wrote that appeared in the New York Review of Books (dating back to March 22, 1973), and a list of her book-length publications by year of publication. Some of her essays are available free of charge, but others can be purchased through the New York Review of Books Web site. The site includes a link (http://www.nybooks.com/shop/product?product_ id=1147) to a summary of a small book (Fixed Ideas) created out of a long essay that Didion wrote about the September 11 attacks. Another link (http:// www.nybooks.com/shop/product?product_id=259) provides a summary and review of a book entitled Seduction and Betrayal, by Elizabeth Hardwick, for which Didion wrote the introduction. A page in The Borzoi Reader (http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/ catalog/results2.pperl?authorid=7051), a publication of Alfred A. Knopf, 139

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lists Didion’s major novels, nonfiction books, and collections, providing summaries and some reviews.

OTHER RESOURCES Mahalo (http://www.mahalo.com/Joan_Didion) offers a thorough list of resources on Didion’s complete works. eNotes (http://www.enotes.com/contemporary-literary-criticism/didionjoan-vol-32 and http://www.enotes.com/contemporary-literary-criticism/ didion-joan/introduction) provides background on the life and works of Didion. An article in the Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2005/ dec/16/biography.features) is based on an interview done with Joan Didion by Emma Brockes. It was published in the Guardian on Friday, December 16, 2005. The author interviewed Didion about her work The Year of Magical Thinking. The article turns into a biographical study of Didion, summarizing her life’s trajectory. New York magazine (http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/books/14633/) features a three-page article titled ‘‘When Everything Changes: Joan Didion on John, Quintana, her devastating memoir, and her persistent critics.’’ This article is based on an interview with Didion by Jonathan Van Meter for the New York Times. It was published in the New York Review of Books on October 2, 2005. In addition to offering a summary of The Year of Magical Thinking, this Web site offers a section for readers to discuss Didion’s work by posting comments. The Joan Didion fan site (http://www.joandidion.info/) is devoted to Didion and the latest developments in her life and career. The home page describes the site as ‘‘50% Reference. 50% Reverence’’ and will soon offer a selection of reviews of Didion’s work. Links are provided to photos, audio files of interviews, video clips, a comment section where fans can join in discussion of her work, and a store where users can purchase Didion’s books.

TRANSCRIPTS

OF INTERVIEWS OR

SPEECHES

Salon.com includes a link (http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/ 2008/10/17/next_president/index.html) to the text of a talk Didion gave at the 2008 Brooklyn Book Fest. The text was published in the New York Review of Books on October 18, 2008, and the topic was the presidential race between McCain and Obama.

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The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/packages/khtml/ 2005/10/09/books/20051009_DIDION_AUDIOSS.html) includes a link to four audio clips for a 2005 interview. The interview was conducted by Rachel Donado and totals just over ten minutes. This interview was the source for Donado’s article on Didion ‘‘Every Day All There Is’’ (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/09/books/review/09donadio.html? scp=8&sq=joan%20didion&st=cse). An interview conducted by J. Hale Russell on October 19, 2001, for the Harvard Crimson newspaper (http://www.thecrimson.com/article. aspx?ref=121772) includes Didion’s views about her political fictions as well as the September 11, 2001, attack, the war in Iraq, and the presidency of George W. Bush. A short interview on Salon.com (http://www.salon.com/oct96/inter view961028.html) was conducted by Dave Eggers in October 1996. The topic was Didion’s book The Last Thing He Wanted, which was published twelve years after her last-published book-length work. Wired for Books (http://wiredforbooks.org/joandidion/) includes a link to the audio file of an interview with Didion done by Don Swaim in 1987 for his radio shows. Wired for Books has uploaded the thirtyeight-minute interview about her work Miami, her writing process, and her relationship with her husband and fellow writer, John Gregory Dunne. The Paris Review (http://www.theparisreview.org/media/3439_ DIDION.pdf) includes the transcript of an interview by Linda Kuehl. Titled ‘‘The Art of Fiction No. 71, Joan Didion,’’ the interview was published in 1978. Kuehl died soon after the interview, and Didion wrote the introductory paragraph detailing the setting of the interview. The interview includes a copy of a page from one of Didion’s manuscripts that shows her editing process.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS • How do the online interviewers try to make sense of Didion’s work based on her life experience? Does such an autobiographical approach help to explain Didion’s works or does it hinder an understanding of them? • What do you think of the Internet fan sites devoted to Didion? • What do you think of some of the criticism leveled against Didion’s work as noted on the Web sites discussed in this chapter?

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12 JOAN DIDION AND THE MEDIA

Joan Didion’s writing career technically began with her internship with Vogue magazine. Her early apprenticeship was in the field of journalism, and throughout her entire career she has been a regular contributor to the New York Times. She and her husband had ties to the Hollywood movie industry through the screenplays they wrote. Perhaps because of all of these facts, Didion has always kept a lively presence in the media. She is frequently well received by other journalists and writers, as well as radio and television program hosts, and the interviews she conducts reveal how well read she is and how thoroughly she thinks through the literary devices and techniques employed in her works.

SELECT RADIO INTERVIEWS

AND

DOCUMENTARIES

National Public Radio (NPR) hosts a number of pages on Joan Didion. ‘‘Joan Didion, Writing a Story After an Ending’’ (http://www. npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4956088) features an audio link for a twenty-nine-minute interview with Terry Gross conducted in the fall of 2005 and aired on the radio on October 13, 2005. The interview includes an excerpt from The Year of Magical Thinking. Gross’s questions to Didion deal largely with passages from The Year of Magical Thinking and related biographical questions about Joan Didion’s experience of marriage, her life with John Dunne, and how she is coping after his death. This Internet page includes, below the link for the October 13, 143

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2005, interview, a biography and pictures of Didion put together as part of a program on her work The Year of Magical Thinking that aired on November 18, 2005, on the radio show Fresh Air. ‘‘Joan Didion Survives ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’’’ (http://www. npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4866010) is an NPR featured interview with Joan Didion by Susan Stamberg. The audio link for the interview is fifteen minutes, but the site offers an excerpt that aired on the Morning Edition on September 30, 2005. ‘‘Rabid Reader: Joan Didion, ‘Where I Was From’: Author Finds a Dark Truth Behind California’s Golden Myth’’ (http://www.npr.org/ templates/story/story.php?storyId=1451093) was an interview conducted for NPR by Karen Grigsby Bates, which aired on Day to Day on October 1, 2003. The Web site includes a summary of the interview and a link to a five-minute audio file. The main topic of the Web site and interview is the political and economic history of California and its formation out of the greed of eighteenth-century pioneers to this territory, including some of Didion’s own ancestors. Karen Grigsby Bates touches briefly on how Didion links economic issues to moral and cultural ones in such as way that she undoes the myths associated with California life to reveal her disappointment with its development. A five-minute interview with Joan Didion by Renee Montagne aired on Morning Edition on October 26, 2001 (http://www.npr.org/ templates/story/story.php?storyId=1132154). The interview focuses on Didion’s book Political Fictions, a collection of essays debunking the strategies by which the American public is delivered the news. Didion covers the presentation by journalists of presidential politics, including the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H. Bush, and Bill Clinton. ‘‘Didion Brings ‘Magical Thinking’ to Broadway’’ (http://www.npr. org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7238970) is an interview for NPR conducted with Joan Didion and Vanessa Redgrave, who plays Didion in the Broadway production. The interview discusses the adaptation of Didion’s work The Year of Magical Thinking for the broadway stage. The site provides a link to a seven-minute interview, a picture of Didion and Redgrave, and an excerpt from the book. The interview originally aired on Morning Edition on February 8, 2007. ‘‘In Literature, What Makes a Classic?’’ (http://www.npr.org/tem plates/story/story.php?storyId=6519562) Alfred A. Knopf chairman and publisher Sonny Mehta talk with Joan Didion and another author, Z. Z. Packer, about what makes a literary classic. The site provides a link to a thirty-minute audio file of the interview, which was aired on Talk of the Nation on November 21, 2006.

Joan Didion and the Media

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APPEARANCES

A two-part video of the 2007 New York Book Awards Ceremony on November 14, 2007 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0ZwN8sVOXI, part one; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=845yE6v23dg, part two) covers the event at which Didion received a lifetime achievement award, presented by Michael Cunningham. The two parts total about twelve minutes. A YouTube conversation with Didion was hosted by Michael Bernstein (Department of History, University of California at San Diego) and aired by University of California Television in December 2002 (http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUwO6LwjDog). This YouTube post provides the full fifty-eight-minute televised interview about her work Political Fictions. A video provided on YouTube includes an interview with Didion done by Charlie Rose that was televised by PBS (http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=fJUnp9sNYV8). Rose interviewed Didion for almost an hour about The Year of Magical Thinking.

FILM The Internet Movie Database entry for Joan Didion (http://www. imdb.com/name/nm0225820/) lists the screenplays and teleplays written by Didion, as well as the shows, documentaries, and televised interviews in which she has appeared as herself.

CRITICAL RECEPTION The New York Times is one of the most complete sources of information on Joan Didion, especially given that she has written for them regularly over her career. An archive includes all of the stories related to and by Joan Didion from the beginning of her career until the present day (http://query.nytimes.com/search/sitesearch?query=joanþdidion&submit. x=26&submit.y=3:). The essay ‘‘Joan Didion: Only Disconnect’’ by Barbara Grizzutti Harrison from October 1979 (http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/103/ didion-per-harrison.html) was originally published in her collection of essays entitled Off Center (1980). The article, like many of its kind, critiques Didion’s writing style.

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DISCUSSION QUESTIONS • What do you think about Didion’s treatment by the media? Has she received adequate attention for her work? What other programs do you think should showcase her work? • Which of her works has garnered the most attention in the media? Why? • Are the criticisms leveled in the media against Didion’s work accurate?

13 WHAT DO I READ NEXT?

Those who enjoyed the works of Joan Didion covered here may wish to read more of her books.

Nonfiction Salvador (1983) Miami (1987) After Henry (1992) Political Fictions (2001) Fixed Ideas: American Since 9.11 (2003)

Novels A Book of Common Prayer (1977) Democracy: A Novel (1984) The Last Thing He Wanted (1996)

Plays and screenplays Panic in Needle Park (1971) Play It As It Lays (1972) A Star Is Born (1976) True Confessions (1981) 147

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Up Close and Personal (1996) The Year of Magical Thinking (2007)

Readers who appreciated Didion’s work for the window it offers into women’s lives and issues might enjoy works by the following authors: Kate Chopin Charlotte Perkins Gilman Doris Lessing Jean Rhys Gloria Steinem Jeanette Winterson

Issues of adultery, infidelity, and the strains of marriage are recurring motifs in Didion’s work. Other major American works that also deal with these issues include John Updike’s Rabbit series and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic novel The Scarlet Letter. After The Year of Magical Thinking, readers who want to read more works about death and the grieving process should try the following works: About Alice by Calvin Trillin Loving Frank: A Novel by Nancy Horan A Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis Lament for a Son by Nicholas Wolterstorff Landscape without Gravity: A Memoir of Grief by Barbara Lazear Ascher

Didion writes frequently about her connection to California. Other authors from California or who write about the state in their works include: Ambrose Bierce Gelett Burgess Ina Coolbrith Emma Frances Dawson C. W. Doyle Chester Bailey Fernald Margaret Collier Graham Bret Harte Jack London Flora Haines Loughead

What Do I Read Next?

Edwin Markham Joaquin Miller W. C. Morrow John Muir Frank Norris William Saroyan Charles Howard Shinn John Steinbeck

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RESOURCES

Brady, Jennifer. ‘‘Points West, Then and Now: The Fiction of Joan Didion.’’ Contemporary Literature 20 (1979): 452–470. Braudy, Susan. ‘‘A Day in the Life of Joan Didion.’’ Ms., February 1977, 65. Brockes, Emma. ‘‘Emma Brockes Interviews Joan Baez,’’ Guardian, January 24, 2006. http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2006/jan/24/usa.popandrock (accessed May 27, 2009). Chabot, C. Barry. ‘‘Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays and the Vacuity of the Here and Now.’’ Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 21, no. 3 (1980): 53–60. Clemons, Walter. ‘‘Didion Country.’’ Newsweek, June 25, 1979, 84–85. Coale, Samuel. ‘‘Didion’s Disorder: An American Romancer’s Art.’’ Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 25, no. 1 (1984): 160–170. Davidson, Sara. ‘‘A Visit with Joan Didion.’’ New York Times Book Review, April 3, 1971, 1. Dinnage, Sara. ‘‘A Taste for Devastation.’’ Times Literary Supplement, November 30, 1979, 52. Felton, Sharon. The Critical Response to Joan Didion. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993. Friedman, Ellen G., ed. Joan Didion: Essays & Conversations. Princeton, NJ: Ontario Review Press, 1984. Geherin, David J. ‘‘Nothingness and Beyond: Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays.’’ Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 16, no. 1 (1974): 64–78. Hanley, Lynne T. ‘‘To El Salvador.’’ Massachusetts Review 24, no. 1 (1983): 13–29. Harrison, Barbara Grizzeti. ‘‘Joan Didion: the Courage of Her Afflictions.’’ Nation, September 29, 1979: 277–286.

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Henderson, Katherine Usher. Joan Didion. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1981. ———. ‘‘Run River: Edenic Vision and the Wasteland Nightmare.’’ In Joan Didion: Essays & Conversations, edited by Ellen G. Friedman, 91–104. Princeton, NJ: Ontario Review Press, 1984. Hollowell, John. ‘‘Against Interpretation: Narrative Strategy in A Book of Common Prayer. In Joan Didion: Essays & Conversations, edited by Ellen G. Friedman, 164. Princeton, NJ: Ontario Review Press, 1984. Johnson, Michael. The New Journalism. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1971. Kakutani, Michiko. ‘‘Joan Didion: Staking out California.’’ New York Times Magazine, June 10, 1979, 44–50. Kazin, Alfred. Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailer. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973. ———. ‘‘Joan Didion: Portrait of a Professional.’’ Harper’s, December 1971: 112–114. Kiley, Frederick. ‘‘Beyond Words: Narrative Art in Joan Didion’s Salvador.’’ In Joan Didion: Essays & Conversations, edited by Ellen G. Friedman, 181– 188. Princeton, NJ: Ontario Review Press, 1984. Lardner, Susan. ‘‘Facing Facts.’’ New Yorker, June 20, 1977, 117–118. Leonard, John. ‘‘The Cities of the Desert, The Desert of the Mind.’’ New York Times, July 21, 1970, 33. Mallon, Thomas. ‘‘The Limits of History in the Novels of Joan Didion.’’ Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 21, no. 3 (1980): 43–52. Oates, Joyce Carol. ‘‘A Taut Novel of Disorder.’’ In Joan Didion: Essays & Conversations, edited by Ellen G. Friedman. Princeton, NJ: Ontario Review Press, 1984. Prescott, Peter S. ‘‘Didion’s Grace.’’ Newsweek, March 21, 1977, 81. Raphael, Frederic. ‘‘Grace Under Pressure.’’ Saturday Review, March 5, 1977, 23. Romano, John. ‘‘Joan Didion and Her Characters.’’ Commentary, July 1977, 61–63. Royce, Josiah. California: A Study of American Character. (1886) Santa Clara and Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 2002. Sheppard, R. Z. ‘‘Imagination of Disaster.’’ Time, March 28, 1977: 87–88. Shorer, Mark. ‘‘Novels and Nothingness.’’ American Scholar 40 (Winter 1970–1971): 168–174. Starr, Kevin. Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915. (1973) New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Stimpson, Catharine. ‘‘The Case of Miss Joan Didion.’’ Ms., January 1973, 36–41.

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Towers, Robert. ‘‘The Decline and Fall of the 60’s.’’ New York Times Book Review, June 17, 1971, 1. Wilcox, Leonard. ‘‘Narrative Technique and the Theme of Historical Continuity in the Novels of Joan Didion.’’ In Joan Didion: Essays & Conversations, edited by Ellen G. Friedman. Princeton, NJ: Ontario Review Press, 1984. Wilson, James Q. ‘‘In California.’’ Commentary, September 1979, 79–80. Winchell, Mark Royden. Joan Didion. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989. Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. ‘‘Play It As It Lays: Didion and the New American Heroine.’’ In Joan Didion: Essays & Conversations, edited by Ellen G. Friedman, 124–137. Princeton, NJ: Ontario Review Press, 1984.

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INDEX

abortion: in Play It As It Lays, 61, 63–64, 68–72, 74, 124; in Run River, 25–28, 32–33, 69–72 adultery: in Play It As It Lays, 63, 68, 70–71; in Run River, 14, 17, 22, 24, 34, 70; in After Henry, 84 American Dream, 9, 10, 82, 108–109, 111; in Play It As It Lays, 64; in Run River, 27; in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 39, 44–45, 56; in Where I Was From, 108–109, 111, 116; in The White Album, 99 American foreign relations, 132 Arnold, Matthew, 121 Auden, W. H., 121 autobiography, 3, 101; pioneer ancestry, 34–35 awards: Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Foundation, 3, 145; Los Angeles Times ‘‘Woman of the Year,’’ 2; National Book Award, 2, 117; Prix de Paris, 1; Time magazine’s 100 best books in the English language, 2 Baez, Joan, 137 Beatles, The, 136 Bierstadt, Albert, 107 Black Panther Party, 85, 136–137 Bohemian Club of San Francisco, 107

Book of Common Prayer, A, 3, 5, 82 Breslin, Jimmy, 6 Brown, Jerry, 82, 87–88 Bush, George H., 132, 144 Bush, George W., 132, 133, 141 California: aqueduct system, 87; character of people, 107; culture, 82, 137; development, 112; Didion’s residence, 1, 5, 8; economy in the 1990s, 110; economy in Where I Was From, 101; floods in Northern California, 104; Getty Museum, 82, 89; governor’s mansion, 82, 87–88; history, 144; immigrant identity, 108; literature, 8, 9, 10; ‘‘old,’’ 33; overland trail, 31; pioneers, 14, 15, 17; prison system, 113; railroad in Where I Was From, 101, 103, 105–107; regional differences, 106; in Run River, 29–30, 32; setting, 11, 14, 17; in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 54; transportation, 82, 89–90, 137; University of, see University of California; in Where I Was From, 103, 105–106; in The White Album, 82, 87, 89, 96. See also water CALTRANS, 82, 89–90, 137 cannibalism, 9 Central America, 5, 8

155

156

INDEX

Child, Julia, 129 Christian imagery: in Play It As It Lays, 63, 65, 70; desert, 76; snakes, 76, 78–79 Cleaver, Eldridge. See Black Panther Party Clinton, Bill, 132, 144 Colombia: Bogota as setting, 96; Cartegena as setting, 96 Coolbrith, Ina, 31 criticism of Didion’s work, 5 defense industry, 110 desert, as symbol in Play It As It Lays, 76 DeVoto, Bernard, 87 divorce: in Play It As It Lays, 63, 72; in Run River, 30, 32; in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 40 Donner Party, 9, 31, 102, 107 Doors, The, 84–85, 136–137 drugs: in Play It As It Lays, 62, 74–76, 79; in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 48 Dunne, John Gregory, 1. See also The Year of Magical Thinking Dunne, Quintana Roo, 2; in The Year of Magical Thinking, 118, 122–127, 130 elopement, in Run River, 18–19 Episcopal ministers, 82 family: decline of, 131; in Play It As It Lays, 131; in Run River, 131 Faulkner, William, 18, 108 female characters. See women characters feminism, 7; criticism of in The White Album, 82, 92. See also women characters fifties, the, 6; in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 97, 135–136; in The White Album, 83, 97–98 film industry. See movies Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 86, 95

floods. See water Fort Bliss, 23–24 frontier, 5, 9, 34, 50–51, 96 Fuller, Margaret, 92 Gamblers Anonymous, 91 gaming, 63–64, 78 George, Henry, 113 Getty Museum, 82, 89 Ginsberg, Allen, 6, 136 Gone with the Wind, 17 Grateful Dead, The, 136 grief, in literature, 121, 127, 129 Haight–Ashbury, 6, 8 Harte, Bret, 31 Hawaii: setting in Democracy, 132; in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 54–56; in The White Album, 93–94 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 70 Hemingway, Ernest, 20 heroines. See women characters Hollowell, John, 8 Hollywood, 9, 61–62, 68, 71, 80; critique of, 137; music and film industry, 136; in Play It As It Lays, 95; politics of, 82, 90; in The White Album, 95 home, theme of, 104 honors. See awards Hoover Dam, 96–97 Howells, William Dean, 105 Hughes, Howard, 43, 44, 86 Irvine, Joan, 108 isolation, theme in Run River, 20, 22 James, William, 105 Jeffers, Robinson, 9, 106 Jones, James, 94 Joplin, Janis, 49, 85, 136 Junior Chamber of Commerce national conference, 91 Kerouac, Jack, 6 Kerry, Teresa Heinz, 121

Index

kiln, symbol in Run River, 25 Kinkade, Thomas, 107 Korean War. See National Memorial Cemetery, Oahu Lakewood, 108–110, 112. See also Los Angeles land, changing role in the West, 111 Las Vegas, in Play It As It Lays, 61, 64, 74–77 Lessing, Doris, 82, 93 Lewis, C. S., 121 London, Jack, 9, 105, 107, 113 Los Angeles, setting in The White Album, 84; Lakewood community, 108–110, 112 Los Angeles Times ‘’Woman of the Year,’’ 84. See also awards Lowell, Robert, 96 magazines/journals, Didion published in: American Scholar, 2; Denver Quarterly, 2; Esquire, 2; Harper’s Bazaar, 1; Holiday, 1; Life, 2; Mademoiselle, 1; Michigan Quarterly Review, 2; National Review, 1; New York Review of Books, 2; New York Times Book Review, 2; New York Times Magazine, 1; Saturday Evening Post, 1; Vogue, 1 Malibu, setting in The White Album, 98 Mamas and the Papas, The, 85, 136–137 Mann, Thomas, 121 Manson, Charles, 9, 84–86, 136–137 M arquez, Gabriel Garcıa, 96 marriage: in Play It As It Lays, 131; in Run River, 25, 131 McCain, John, 132 McClellan Air Force Base, 14 McWilliams, Carey, 9, 107 memoir, genre, 101. See also The Year of Magical Thinking Miami, 84

157

Morrison, Jim. See The Doors movies/movie industry, 8, 136; column in Vogue, 1; Didion’s presence in, 145; outlaw biker genre, 91; Panic in Needle Park, 2; Play It As It Lays, 2; A Star Is Born, 2; True Confessions, 2; Up Close and Personal, 2 Muir, John, 31, 106 music, 136. See also band or artist name National Memorial Cemetery, Oahu, 94 nature: loss of, 113; and time in Run River, 19; as symbol in Run River, 27; versus technology in The White Album, 87 Neruda, Pablo, 96 New Journalism, 6, 7 New York City, residence, 2 news: in Play It As It Lays, 137; significance in Didion’s work, 137 Newton, Huey. See Black Panther Party Norris, Frank, 105–106, 113 Oates, Joyce Carol, 3, 82, 119 Obama, Barack, 133, 140 O’Keeffe, Georgia, 82, 93 outlaw biker movies, 91 Phillips, John and Michelle. See The Mamas and the Papas Pike, Bishop, of Grace Episcopal Cathedral in San Francisco, 86 pioneers, 31, 101–102, 144; Western, 14, 15, 17. See also California place, importance of, 103 Play It As It Lays, 2, 5, 7, 61–80, 82; desert imagery, 76; divorce, 72; Hollywood setting and politics, 95; movie, 79; significance of news in, 137; snake imagery, 65, 76, 78–79; superstition, 72; violence against women, 63–64, 68, 77. See also Christian imagery Political Fictions, 2, 84, 131–132; interview about, 144–145

158

INDEX

politics, in Didion’s work, 131–132 popular culture: in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 135–138; in The White Album, 135–138 Post, Emily, 122 prizes. See awards Reagan, Nancy, 91 Reagan, Ronald, 144; governor’s mansion, 82, 87–88 Redgrave, Vanessa, 2, 117, 144. See also The Year of Magical Thinking Reed, Virginia, 107. See also Donner Party Reno, Nevada, 18–19 Robinson, Roxana, 127 Royce, Josiah, 9, 105–107, 113–114 Royce, Sarah, 31 Run River, 5, 6, 9, 11–36: abortion, 25–28, 32–33, 69–72; adultery, 14, 17, 22, 24, 34, 70; American dream, 27; divorce, 30, 32; family, decline of, 131; isolation, theme of, 20, 22; kiln, as symbol, 25; marriage, 25, 131; nature and time, 19; references in Where I Was From, 12, 14; Reno, Nevada, setting of elopement, 18–19; suicide, 30, 32; water, 29–30, 32 Salvador, 5, 84 Scharnhorst, Gary, 31 September 11, 2001, 132–133 seventies, the, 6, 7, 81; in The White Album, 82, 98 Shakespeare, The Tempest, 119 Shirley, Dame, 31 shopping malls, in American culture, 96 sixties, the, 6, 7, 9, 81, 131; in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 135–136, 97; in The White Album, 83–86, 97, 135–136 Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 2, 5, 6, 9, 37–59, 81, 84–85; the fifties in, 97, 135–136; the sixties in, 97, 135–136; popular culture in, 135–138; theme of home, 104 Smith, Joan Irvine, 106

snakes, as symbol in Play It As It Lays, 65, 76, 78–79 Snyder, Gary, 6 Sontag, Susan, 8 Spur Posse, 109–111 Starr, Kevin, 9 Steffens, Lincoln, 115 Stewart, George R., 102 suburban development, 96 suicide, 3; in Play It As It Lays, 62–64, 72, 79; in Run River, 30, 32; in The Year of Magical Thinking, 120 superstition: in Play It As It Lays, 63, 72; in The Year of Magical Thinking, 120–121 Taylor, Bayard, 31 Thomas, Dylan, 129 Thompson, Hunter S., 6 University of California: Berkeley, 1, 2, 6, 17, 20, 29, 97; Davis, 21 upward mobility. See American Dream Vietnam. See National Memorial Cemetery, Oahu war in Iraq, 133 water: California, 82, 87; California aqueduct system, 87; California water projects in Where I Was From, 104–105; floods in Northern California, 104; Hoover Dam, 96–97; symbol in California literature, 31 Wayne, John, 137 We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, 3, 84 Welk, Lawrence, 136 West, the, in literature, 16, 103 Wheelwright, Jane Hollister, 106, 108 Where I Was From, 5, 9, 84, 100–116; California water projects, 104–5; interview about, 144; references to Run River, 12, 14 White Album, The, 5–7, 9, 81–99; CALTRANS, 137; criticism of

Index

feminism, 92; Doris Lessing, 82, 93; feminism, 82; the fifties, 83, 87–88; Georgia O’Keeffe, 82, 93; Hollywood in, 95; Janis Joplin, 85; Los Angeles in, 84; Malibu in, 98; nature versus technology, 87; popular culture in, 135–138; the seventies, 82, 98; the sixties 83–86, 97, 135–136 Wolfe, Tom, 6 women characters, 3, 7, 8; difficulties of, in A Book of Common Prayer, 3;

159

difficulties of, in Play It As It Lays, 3; difficulties of, in Run River, 3; violence against, in Play It As It Lays, 63–64, 68, 77 World War II. See National Memorial Cemetery, Oahu Year of Magical Thinking, The, 5, 117–130; Broadway play, 117, 144; interview about, 143–145; superstitions in, 72

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About the Authors LYNN MARIE HOUSTON is assistant professor of American literature at California State University, Chico. Her research interests include postcolonial studies, women’s literature, and American food culture. She is also co-author with Jennifer Warren of Reading Barbara Kingsolver (Greenwood, 2009). WILLIAM V. LOMBARDI is a master’s student in the English department of California State University, Chico, where he is completing a thesis on regionalism and a sense of place in literature of the American West.