their love alive." The narrator later suggests that infidelities kept her husband away. Inez's grandmother considers Carol's abandonment of her teenage daughters "a sudden but compelling opportunity to make the first postwar crossing on the reconditionedLurline." Elsewhere the narrator hints that Carol's "stubborn loneliness" while living as an "outsider" in the islands triggered her departure. Inez's married sister Janet, who maintains a "defensive veneer of provincial gentility" is suspected of having an affair with a Hawaiian. Paul Christian, who had "reinvented himself as a romantic outcast" after his wife left him, murders his daughter and her suspected lover. The shadowy Jack Lovett has been identified as an "army officer" by his first wife, an "aircraft executive" by his second, a "businessman" on his visa application, and a "consultant in international development" on his business cards. The narrator leads us to suspect he is a CIA agent but never actually confirms this.

Harry Victor also invents fictions about himself, but the narrator provides us with a clearer vision of him and his contribution to his wife's loss of self. This self-seeking, ambitious politician creates an image of himself as a moral crusader, while in his private life he commits adultery and thwarts his wife's search for identity. On a family trip to Jakarta that includes his mistress, he appears more concerned about his press conference than the safety of his family. As a result, Jack Lovett tells him, "You don't actually see what's happening in front of you. You don't see it unless you read it. You have to read it in the New York Times, then you start talking about it."

The narrator complicates our view of Inez by revealing only fragmented scenes of her life. Inez and others also contribute to our confusion, as well as her own, as personal and public pressures help strip her of her identity. During her marriage, Inez is defined by the press as the ideal politician's wife. Yet this role confines her. For twenty years, she acts solely in her husband's political interests, not in her own. Her husband and advisors suppress her desire to work with refugees, since that special interest was "often controversial and therefore inappropriate" to the political image they had created for her.

The press helps reinforce this image as it reports her "very special feeling for the arts" and "very special interest in education"—interests manufactured for her by her husband's political machine. As a result of fabricating appropriate stories for the press and viewing her life as a series of "photo opportunities," Inez's memory fades to the point where she loses a true sense of herself. She admits that during this process "you drop fuel. You jettison cargo. Eject the crew. You lose track." While being interviewed, she tells a reporter, "Things that might or might not be true get repeated in the clips until you can't tell the difference ... You might as well write from the clips ... because I've lost track "

Inez's memory also fades because she suppresses painful facts like her abandonment by her mother, her son's two car crashes (one of which left his passenger seriously injured), her daughter's heroin addiction, and her husband's frequent infidelities with the ever-present political groupies. Inez's apparent indifference to these past events often makes her appear cold.

Inez's family and Billy Dillon also suppress the truth at times, but for a different reason. They conceal details of "uncomfortable" events to avoid hurting Harry's public image and thus his career. Michael Tager, in "The Political Vision of Joan Didion's Democracy," notes that "media scrutiny requires that one establish a pleasant past for public consumption while concealing or eliminating those elements that clash with the desired image." An example of this process occurs after the shootings, when the family rallies to downplay the incident to the press, to "manage" the situation for Harry and to "contain [it] to an accident."

The deception and lack of clarity in Inez's private and public life become comparable to and intertwine with larger political issues The novel begins with a focus on this link as Jack describes to Inez the breathtaking sunrises and sweet-smelling air during nuclear testing in the Pacific in the mid-1950s, without commenting on the devastation that soon followed. The narrator offers contrasting views of the fall of Saigon in 1975, when the main action of the story takes place. While many in the United States considered the evacuation disastrous for the South Vietnamese, the narrator's students interpreted it as their "liberation from imperialism."

Tager argues that "democracy" is the "name we have given to a narrative of American global politics ... [that] placed Americans in the roles of reader and viewer of a series of adventures, in which the heroes and villains were clear, the desirable outcomes known, and the undesirable outcomes contextualized as episodes in a larger narrative that promised a happy ending." The Vietnam War, however, had no such happy ending. Both the novel's political and personal narratives fall apart during the evacuation of Saigon. The idealistic vision of America as defender of world democracy, and of the Victors as a model American family, crumbles.

This process begins when Inez's father shoots Janet, an incident that jolts Inez's memories to the surface and prompts her to begin to sort out truth from fabrication. After she leaves with Jack to find Jessie, she breaks from her family, deciding "she was not particularly interested in any of them." While she waits in Hong Kong for Jack to ship Jessie home, she begins to separate herself not only from her family, but her country as well: "The world that night was full of people flying from place to place and fading in and out and there was no reason why she or Harry or Jessie or Adlai or for that matter Jack Lovett ... should be exempted from the general movement ... Just because they were Americans." When Inez decides to stay in Kuala Lumpur to work with the war refugees, ironically, she becomes a refugee herself, from her family, her country, and her past.

This separation allows Inez to begin to find freedom and a sense of identity. She permits her love for Jack to surface, and they find happiness for a short time, until his accidental death. At the end of the novel, Inez seems content with her new life, noting the "colors, moisture, heat, [and] enough blue in the air" to keep her in Kuala Lumpur "until the last refugee was dispatched." Yet, the narrator tells us she learned of Inez's intention of staying on from an article in the newspaper—not, as she has proven, a reliable source.

While Inez seems to gain a clearer vision of herself by the end of the novel, the narrator leaves the reader with only a partial view of her, attained through the fragmented narrative. We have only gained glimpses of Inez, and thus are not sure whether or not Inez has completed her search for identity and meaning in her life. The narrator voices her uncertainty as well, when she concludes: "Perhaps because nothing in this situation encourages the basic narrative assumption, which is that the past is prologue to the present, the options remain open here. Anything could happen."

Source: Wendy Perkins, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 1998.
Perkins is an Assistant Professor of English at Prince George's Community College in Maryland.

[In] Democracy, Didion writes in the terse, elliptical style [her] novels had taught us to expect of her, but with a somewhat different and more highly politicized import. As in A Book of Common Prayer, the narrative strategy involves a first-person narrator only slightly distanced from the author herself. Indeed, the distance is even less here. The narrator of the earlier book is particularized with a name, Grace Strasser-Mendana, and a personal background clearly distinct from Didion's own. The narrator of Democracy is a thinly fictionalized Joan Didion; we might call her "Joan Didion": a persona in only the most circumstantial of ways. This persona advances and retreats. At those points when she is at the narrative fore, she addresses the reader directly, calling our attention to the difficulties entailed by getting and presenting the story. Several chapters open abruptly with terse one-line "paragraphs" focusing on the act of telling—imperatives:

"Call me the author," "See it this way," "Let me establish Inez Victor"; personal declarations: "I also have Inez's account," "I am resisting narrative here." The directly accostive narrative voice that such openings establish creates the sense of urgency avowed in the narrator's "warning" to the reader,

like Jack Lovett and (as it turned out) Inez Victor, I no longer have time for the playing out

Call that a travel advisory

A narrative alert.

The issuance of a "narrative alert," an overt tactic for gaining reader involvement, is a part of the entire strategy by which "Joan Didion" is placed within the novel. The narrator's struggle to understand her characters' story becomes part of the fiction, which is a fiction of reporting rather than creating. "Joan Didion" is here, like Joan Didion in fact, an interpretive journalist, trying to get at the truth and communicate it before the failure of the social situation, represented in the fall of South Vietnam, makes investigation and interpretation impossible. When she says that she does not have time for a fully elaborated narrative, we feel not only the wildly accelerating events of the evacuation of Hanoi and the family tragedy being played out against it but also the impending breakup of the social order and the brevity of human life. The urgency "Didion" asserts is communicated to us, in part, by the rapid succession of terse, often fragmentary phrases ...

In all Didion's work, the breaking into brief stand-alone sentences or phrases, or often strings of such sentences or phrases, is a device for emphasis, usually an ironic twist of emphasis. But in Democracy, the device gains a faster pace and a more hard-bitten, slangy tone. The rapidity is largely a matter of achievement of a sense of fast-breaking events, even of events being out of control. This is true both of family events and of events on the large scale. Social structures collapse more rapidly than politicians, generals, and weapons dealers can shore them up. The fast verbal pace is achieved also through associative listing of items ...

Rapid exchanges of smart dialogue, often in brief, slangy phrases tossed off sarcastically, also contribute to the fast pace of the dramatized scenes and to the harsh tone. The narrative voice, as well, often employs bitten-off slang to convey a mocking commentary or a sense of world-weariness ...

The narrator's hard-bitten phrases, not quite hiding a fullness of emotions sensed behind them, often, though not consistently, emulate the glibness of sarcasm of this campaigning, image-building circle in which Inez moves as Harry Victor's wife. Mulling her story, she comments mockingly: "Cards on the table"; "Water under the bridge" "The Alliance qua Alliance"; "His famous single room at the Y." At other times, it is the laconic, tough yet nostalgic voice of Jack Lovett that we hear in the narrator's brief phrases. The beautifully taut opening of the novel, for instance, starts in Lovett's voice, then elides into Didion's own terse identification of the character, emphasizing (significantly) Inez's marital state, then returns to Lovett's distinctive blend of nostalgia and hard-boiled realism ...

In part, Didion adopts Lovett's savvy understatement as a way of conveying, through its own cadences, some sense of an elusive personality, as if, though the mystery cannot be analyzed, it can be glimpsed ...

In part, however, she adopts this tone, with its characteristic curtailments, as a protection from the pressure of emotion—just as, we suspect, Lovett himself adopts it. Indeed, all the people we respect in this book—Lovett, Inez, and the narrator—are "wary to the point of opacity." They adopt a tough exterior—such as Lovett's exclamation, conveying a lifelong caring and a lifelong frustration, "Oh shit, Inez, Harry Victor's wife" (repeated or echoed [several times])—to cover their vulnerability, knowing full well even as they do it that toughness "never stopped any plane from crashing." Disaster happens despite the surface toughness that they nevertheless maintain because, like the Hemingway hero's style, that is the way to do it, or at any rate their way to do it

The narrator tells things in a compressed shorthand, sometimes imagistic but sometimes carefully abstract, both for impact and for control, for protection from the disorder. Inez's mother, Carol Christian, she tells us, clung to an assortment of romantic notions "in the face of considerable contrary evidence." It is not necessary to specify what that evidence was; we get the idea well enough, and she would rather not go into it. Just as the device of curtailed references is a means of refraining from specification, implying that that specification would be too unpleasant, so silences in the text, blanks or gaps, serve the same purpose, conveying ideas without spelling them out. In this novel, many blanks are structural, signaling shifts in the action. Many [blanks], however, ... tacitly invite the reader's particularized understanding even as they imply the narrator's brooding. After a long, wordy sentence conveying, in its cadences, the jumbled, densely populated quality of Harry Victor's politicizing, the narrator sums up,

These people had taken their toll, [space]

By which I mean to suggest that Inez Victor had come to view most occasions as photo opportunities.

After an account of Inez's conference with her daughter Jessie's first therapist, ending in "'What I don't do is shoot heroin,' Inez said," there appears a gap on the page, then, "The second therapist believed ..." In the gap occurs the whole messy process of breaking off with one and finding the second, a process the narrator spares us all. Indeed, the gap says something that a full account could not say, that that messy process is not worth repeating and that it is so obviously unavoidable at this point that it goes without saying.

Inez Victor herself, in this way a typical Didion heroine, is equally reticent. In part her silences and the oddity of her speech when she does express herself are a result of being squelched. As the daughter of a son of a powerful family in a relatively closed society (Hawaii) and the wife of a powerful man with presidential ambitions, she has had to preserve appearances throughout her life. Her expression of self is subordinated to the building of her husband's political image. She has had to calculate every word, every facial expression, to ensure that that image is not damaged, playing a role in a planned script, repeating empty enthusiastic phrases—"Marvelous day." ''You look marvelous.'' "Marvelous to be here"—and "fixing her gaze in the middle distance." When traveling she always has to go through a routine of phony accessibility, to "trot out the smile" and, as her husband's public relations aide puts it, "move easily through the cabin." So well trained is she in playing the "tennis" game of public relations that Billy Dillon, the aide, has only to "mim[e] a backhand volley" to get her back on track if she slips into real communication. What she says gets smoothed over and reinterpreted, polished for press release beyond all recognition. Even the personal interests she is allowed to pursue are selected for their political appeal: a trumped up "special interest" in selecting the paintings to be hung in American embassies is safe; her real interest in "work with refugees" is off-limits because it is controversial and therefore "inappropriate." This is why it is so significant at the end that after Jack Lovett's death she devotes herself, in an almost saintly way, to the administration of refugee relief in Kuala Lumpur: it is the most emphatic possible way to express her independence from her husband's control.

Inez's public self has been an "impenetrable performance" protecting the mystery and the vulnerability of her private self. At times she uses silence, as she uses diversionary performances, to protect her self from manipulation and from the intrusion of a curious public, largely the intrusion of journalists. Within that protection, she has developed a "capacity for passive detachment," avoiding verbal acknowledgment of unacceptable things. But she also uses silence more aggressively. After a party at which her husband passes off empty, stale rhetoric she has heard him use "a number of times before" to cover lack of knowledge, she drives fast and says nothing until he finally notices and gets the point. Defensively, he taunts her for her "quite palpable unhappiness." They go to bed in silence. On another occasion, seeing her husband condoning what she regarded as specious activities by their son, she again spoke tersely and then "said nothing." Again Harry gets the point: "'Very eloquent. Your silence,' he says."

Inez Victor, like other women in Didion' s novels, and like Didion as narrator, manages to say more than she says and to speak by not speaking. This, of course, is a time-honored way with women—women writers and women generally. Inez Victor speaks out of the frustration of feminine roles that inhibit her self-realization and interfere with her freedom of action. When she tries to assert her own judgment, as a free and intelligent adult, she is muffled and manipulated and her sexual relations with her husband deteriorate: they "had gone to bed in silence, and, the next morning, ... Harry left ... without speaking"; they had "slept in the same room but not in the same bed." The marital relation hinges on her being constrained in her self-assertion, on her foregoing a lifelong love relation with another man even though she had repressed her own reactions to her husband's succession of affairs because "girls like that come with the life." Her achievement of communication with "Joan Didion," the narrative persona, despite all the negative constraints of a lifetime of resisting honest personal communication and honest public statements, has to be regarded as a victory—like her victory in asserting her right to pursue the social service work to which she feels drawn. The end of the book, with Inez still in Kuala Lumpur, speaking to whomever she wants to when she wants to, stating her reasons in her own terms and with an edge of mockery (asked by Billy Dillon for "one fucking reason" why she is there, she writes back tersely, "Colors, moisture, heat, enough blue in the air. Four fucking reasons"), is thus, in a limited way, a happy ending, despite its solemnity.

As in the other novels, the frustrating and repressed nature of the central character's life is not hers alone, but a condition she shares with other women ...

The narrator, too, "Joan Didion," shares the frustrations of being a woman in what continues to be a man's world, and a disordered world as well. Because of the unusual narrative strategy, with the author's real self represented in a fictive world that includes events, people, and places we also recognize from the daily newspaper, the figure of "Joan Didion" ("call me the author," the narrator says, but particularizes herself by quoting textbook comments on Didion) becomes a bridge between fiction and fact. Naturally, by the creation of venstmilitude in her fictive world, the author invites (as do authors generally in realistic fiction) a sense of identification which generalizes the import of the story. To the extent that we recognize aspects of the characters' lives as resembling our own, we say that the story represents general experience. Accordingly, women readers will recognize the silences in the marriage bed, the conversational slightings, and other experiences of the fictional Inez and will validate the representational character of her story. But the bridging effect of "Joan Didion" accomplishes such generalizing in a much more direct way.

Clearly, the narrator objects to aspects of her world that are not gender-related. Her difficulty in telling her story does not stem simply from the fact that she is a woman, writing about a woman. The main burden of the story is a stringent objection to the ebbing of traditional values, family values, and a moral horror at the spectacle of America's role in Vietnam. It is an objection to dishonesty. Didion affirms the importance of what we must consider traditional values and traditional sources of satisfaction for women as well—stable relationships with men and with extended family, motherhood. Whether there has ever been a time when these roles alone did in fact provide adequate sources of fulfillment is a question she does not address. At the same time, Didion does not ignore the need for other satisfactions as well, means of achieving personal autonomy and self-definition. At any rate, the uncentered state of American society that undermines public and private honor also makes traditional role-fulfillment impossible. Gender problems are implicated in Didion's broad social criticism, even when they are not specified.

Within the novel, "Joan Didion" is drawn to the story of Inez Victor largely by her own need. Obviously it is, in a journalistic sense, a good story, with interesting social trappings and an odor of scandal. But it is not those aspects that keep the novelist working to find the right narrative approach to what is "a hard story to tell." Those externals are aspects of the story that she has "abandoned," "scuttled," "jettisoned" in favor of a focus on Inez's feelings and on her achievement of a personal value perspective on a world falling apart. That "Joan Didion" shares the need for such a perspective is clear from her account of the genesis of the novel: "I began thinking about Inez Victor and Jack Lovett at a point in my life when I lacked certainty, lacked even that minimum level of ego which all writers recognize as essential to the writing of novels, lacked conviction, lacked patience with the past and interest in memory; lacked faith even in my own technique." She focuses, in the early part of the novel, on the powerful emotional pull of a daughter's feelings toward a mother who has abandoned her and on the liminal position of looking with regret at a disappearing world, giving the "last look through more than one door." If she finds it a "hard story to tell" because of its complexity, occupying as it does the intersection of many issues, she also finds it hard to tell because its emotional impact evokes her own shared feelings.

The narrator's feelings are apparent in her hovering, circling style, with its tone of stiff-upper-lip compression. Her own experience of the breakup of American pretenses and the revelation of the hollowness at the core, epitomized in the fall of Vietnam, leads her to reinterpret the behavior of Inez Victor, also experiencing that breakup in a very direct way, so as to see it as a coping mechanism. "After the events which occurred in the spring and summer of 1975, I thought of it differently. I thought of it as the essential mechanism for living a life in which the major cost was memory. Drop fuel. Jettison cargo. Eject crew." In the same way as Inez jettisons the troubling cargo of memory, "Joan Didion" jettisons the cargo of superficial approaches to the story and Didion jettisons the cargo of excess verbiage. She retains only the words that epitomize emotional states and qualities of experience, not elaborated descriptions of those states and qualities, and the terse sarcasms that pronounce her judgment in the shortest possible fashion. The quickness of her verbal step shows her distaste for the moral muck These few summary phrases she sets off as significant units ("drop fuel" and the parallel phrases quoted above) and repeats in meditative litanies. Her sense of the preciousness of Inez's long love for Jack Lovett, for instance, is conveyed in the sequence,
to keep the idea of it quick.

Quick, alive.
Something to think about late at night.
Something private
She always looked for him

The reader's sense of such a sequence encompasses not only its realization of Inez's emotion but its evidence of the narrator's involvement. The selection of the few emphasized phrases conveys a correspondence of feeling which goes far to explain the powerful emotional hold of the story of "Joan Didion," evidenced by her "examining this picture for some years now" to understand Inez's motivation, including Inez's motivation for first concealing and then revealing her memories to the writer "Joan Didion."

We may conjecture that the answer to that puzzle, the puzzle of why Inez finally shares her memories after long concealment, lies in her final achievement of an autonomous personal space. Released from the confusions and trivialization imposed on her by others, notably by both her natal family and her husband, she can at last achieve emotional balance and pursue work that she herself finds important. Only the sense of security gained by achieving that space allows her to communicate freely with "the author." "Didion," too, needs to find such a space, and does find it vicariously in her relationship to Inez—thus becoming enabled to write her novel. "Didion's" relation to Inez, then, becomes a kind of daughter-to-mother relation, a version of the relation that had first drawn her into the story. Inez, through her suffering and her eventual achievement, gives birth to and nurtures the eventual achievement of "the author."

Joan Didion represents a very different achievement in using strategies of reticence than the achievement we see in Austen, Porter, or Cather. Her strategy is more directly aggressive than theirs, employing sarcastic barbs to undermine the dishonesty and specious values that are her target. Conversational sarcasm, too, is often, of course, conveyed in brief phrases and monosyllables. Didion's interrupted style lends itself to our "hearing" a voice of sarcastic stringency, with anger and grief seething in the interstices. At the same time, sarcasm does not attack its object directly, but obliquely. It is another means of saying without saying, of speaking—virulently—by indirection or by not speaking. Didion's acerbic voice is a radical transformation of the traditional female reticence we see brought to fullness in Austen. It is also a continuation of that female strategy.

Source: Janis P. Stout, "Joan Didion and the Presence of Absence," in The Critical Response to Joan Didion, edited by Sharon Felton, Greenwood Press, 1994, pp. 147-87.

Joan Didion is one of those writers—Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy, and Gore Vidal are others—who are so good at the higher journalism that their status as novelists may sometimes seem insecure. Do they, we may wonder, keep writing fiction out of professional pride, as if only the novel could truly certify their literary talent and seriousness? Are not their novels, however fine, shadowed by a suspicion, however baseless, that the form is not quite the best form for such powers?

Certainly Democracy, Didion's new novel, opens with an ominously awkward display of self-consciousness about the basic moves of fictional narrative:

The light at dawn during those Pacific tests was something to see

Something to behold

Something that could almost make you think you saw God, he said

He said to her

Jack Lovett said to Inez Victor.

Inez Victor who was born Inez Christian.

This self-revising fumbling with the identity cards that novels are supposed to slip quietly under the door seems a little like having a magician confess that the rabbit came not from the empty hat but from inside his vest. "This is a hard story to tell," complains the last sentence of this first chapter, and the manner of this opening makes one wonder if for Didion the old game is still good enough to play.

But what we have here is clearly a "chapter"—it began with a "1," and after some blank space and the turn of a page we find a new block of text headed "2." Despite the authorial shufflings, a story begins to get told, as if impelled by the stubborn conventions of narrative itself, the odd necessity of continuing once you have, for whatever reason, started. The devices of anti-fiction don't disappear. "Call me the author," the second chapter begins, followed by a glimpse of a writer named "Joan Didion" (done in the manner not of Melville but, of all people, Trollope) who is struggling to get her story started: "Consider any of these things long enough and you will see that they tend to deny the relevance not only of personality but of narrative, which makes them less than ideal images with which to begin a novel, but we go with what we have."

So indeed we do, but counter-illusion has begun to generate its own, second-order kind of credence—if this narrator is the Joan Didion who went to Berkeley, worked for Vogue in 1960, now lives in Los Angeles but travels to far-off places as a reporter, and so on, then Inez Christian Victor and Jack Lovett and the other people in this book may be real after all, since Joan Didion says she knew them. Maybe she does have nothing up her sleeve.

For a critic this is good material, but most readers of novels want the puppets to come to life, and in Democracy they blessedly do so before long, despite the continuing maneuverings of the author. Inez Christian, we learn, is a child of privilege. She was born in 1935, in Hawaii, to a mainland girl from Stockton who, while modeling at Magnin's in San Francisco, was swept off her feet and over the seas by Paul Christian, the footloose and increasingly odd son of one of those rich old families whose economic conquest of the Islands was an early, if relatively benign, instance of Yankee colonialism. As Didion pieces together Inez's story, we learn that she went to Sarah Lawrence, married (two months' pregnant) an ambitious young lawyer named Harry Victor, had twins, worked in New York with Joan Didion, and then settled, uncomfortably, into the quasi-public role of political wife.

Harry Victor, who has a keen eye for the main chance, became an activist lawyer in the 1960s, got elected to Congress and then the Senate, came close to winning a presidential nomination in 1972, and now devotes himself to something called the Alliance for Democratic Institutions. He is an odious man, full of a liberal self-importance that views the world and himself in it as "incorporeal extensions of policy," over-responsive to the young women who swarm around him and his causes (one of them, a pop singer, is winningly modest about her talents—"I just do two lines of coke and scream"), deeply attracted to his own untested slogans and the joys of radical chic. He is, in fact, almost a cartoon, but Didion allows him just enough semblance of humanity to suggest, in case we hadn't noticed, how really cartoon-like are the politics manufactured by television and the press.

Harry is less successful as paterfamilias than as public image. His son, the marvelously named Adlai, is a pompous lunkhead who barely gets into an obscure college near Boston but likes to talk grandly about what's what in "Cambridge." Adlai's twin, Jessie, equally dumb but somewhat sweeter, becomes a heroin addict in prep school, not out of rebellion against her parents or society but simply as a "consumer decision." Sent off to Seattle for methadone and work-therapy, she, perhaps too neatly, makes her way to Saigon just as the last Americans are being evacuated, because someone told her you could find interesting jobs there.

Inez herself deals with her marriage by becoming more and more numb to what happens to her. She comes to consider "most occasions as photo opportunities"; she works dutifully for good causes and is rumored to have a drinking problem; she reflects that she has been "most happy in borrowed houses, and at lunch." Asked by an AP reporter what the greatest cost of public life is, she answers "memory, mainly," and when urged to explain, she simply says, "you lose track." This seems an acute comment on the plight of politicians and others in public life—having to say and do so much just to hold your audience, you cease to care about, and then even to remember, what really happened. That may be why presidential advisers and others close to power seem so genuinely surprised that discrepancies in the record bother other people.

The devastating personal and public consequences of the loss of history are Didion's theme. The significant relations of events wash away in a flood of facts, those equally circumstantial details that news reporting democratically represents as being about equal in import:

I would skim the stones on policy and fix instead on details, the cost of a visa to leave Cambodia in the weeks before Phnom Penh closed was five hundred dollars American. The colors of the landing lights for the helicopters on the roof of the American embassy in Saigon were red, white, and blue. The code names for the American evacuations of Cambodia and Vietnam respectively were EAGLE PULL and FREQUENT WIND. The amount of cash burned in the courtyard of the DAO in Saigon before the last helicopter left was three-and-a-half million dollars American and eighty-five million piastres. The code name for this operation was MONEY BURN. The number of Vietnamese soldiers who managed to get aboard the last American 727 to leave Da Nang was three hundred and thirty. The number of Vietnamese soldiers to drop from the wheel wells of the 727 was one. The 727 was operated by World Airways. The name of the pilot was Ken Healy.

The voice heard here is Joan Didion's, not Inez Victor's, but the malady it reflects is also Inez's and of course our own. Vietnam is the most dramatic recent evidence of where an appetite for imperium can lead democracy; but the larger subject must be the evanescence of thought and moral judgment in a world of ceaselessly unsortable information.

It is the reading of this particular news story, on March 26, 1975, that leads Joan Didion to another story, a report of what becomes the crucial event of Inez's life. This is the murder in Honolulu, by Inez's now-insane father, of her sister Janet and Wendell Omura, a local anti-war congressman who may have been Janet's lover. This violent mixing of domestic self-destruction and racial chauvinism leads Inez toward something like moral freedom; and it gives the novel some justification of its intricate method in what seems to me its most daring and impressive stroke of political imagination.

The temporal circlings of Didion's narrative began, if just barely, with the conversation between Inez and Jack Lovett about the H-bomb tests in the Pacific in the early 1950s. That conversation, we later learn, took place in 1975, after the murders. Jack Lovett, a considerably older man, met Inez in Honolulu in 1952, before she left for college; they then had a brief affair which both remember fondly but do not continue when they occasionally meet in later years. Lovett is the anti-type of Harry Victor, not a theorist and rhetorician but a sometime army officer and nominal diplomat who works in the demimonde where the CIA, private corporations, and plain criminals consort together for obscure purposes of profit and national policy. He has "access to airplanes"; when Joan Didion meets him in New York in 1960, he is "running a little coup somewhere"; wherever he goes (and he goes everywhere) he strikes up conversations and asks questions, treating "information as an end in itself."

According to one version—a cartoon version, no doubt—of the world of power, Jack Lovett ought to be a bad man. He is certainly a tough man, whose arms deals and insurrections Joan Didion rather gently sees as expressing an interesting and almost admirable "emotional solitude, a detachment that extended to questions of national or political loyalty." Compared to the ungrounded ideological sparking of loose wires like Harry Victor, Lovett's illusionless concern for how to do things, what combinations of people and materials will have the needed result, is in a way refreshing. Though Lovett isn't made immune to the obvious objections, Didion breathtakingly elects him to be the one who cares and remembers, the one in whom information becomes knowledge, understanding, and even love.

Lovett remembers those bomb tests, not as horrifying displays of technique but as occasions of beauty:

He said: the sky was this pink no painter could approximate, one of the detonation theorists used to try, a pretty fair Sunday painter, he never got it. Just never captured it, never came close. The sky was this pink and the air was wet from the night rain, soft and wet and smelling like flowers, smelling like those flowers you used to pin in your hair when you drove out to Schofield, gardenias never mind there were not too many flowers around those shot islands.

His memory of the tests gets entangled with his memories of loving Inez at about the same time, but he does remember her; and when her life goes fully to pieces after the murders in 1975, Lovett is there to help her escape the obligations to her corrupt husband and family that—or so we are to gather from Didion's cool observation—have been visibly destroying her.

I doubt that Didion means to suggest some comprehensive typology of character in making the otherwise rather sinister Jack Lovett a man of genuine sentiment in a political world where nominal good guys like Harry Victor have trouble feeling anything. She seems to have a weakness for male realists, however—Lovett has in effect a double in Billy Dillon, Victor's tough and amusingly cynical advisor, who understands Inez's feelings, takes care of her when her family flounders, and has secretly loved her all along. If there is a point to Lovett's combination of qualities, it may simply be that public performances don't reliably fit the contours of the private self inside. Lovett's self comes to an abrupt end before Democracy is over, but only after he has led Inez to about as much freedom as she can hope to manage. She remains in Asia, quietly looking after Vietnamese refugees, a choice people like Harry Victor would have difficulty understanding.

Democracy is absorbing, immensely intelligent, and witty, and it finally earns its complexity of form. It is indeed "a hard story to tell," and the presence in it of "Joan Didion" trying to tell it is an essential part of its subject. Throughout one senses the author struggling with the moral difficulty that makes the story hard to tell—how to stop claiming what Inez finally relinquishes, "the American exemption" from having to recognize that history records not the victory of personal wills over reality (as people like Harry Victor want to suppose), but the "undertow of having and not having, the convulsions of a world largely unaffected by the individual efforts of anyone in it."

This grim message supports the assumption that a novel by another American pessimist, Henry Adams's Democracy, is somewhere in Didion's mind. (She in fact quotes from the Education, and Adams's ambitious, venal, magnetic, and illusionless Senator Silas P. Ratcliffe may vaguely foreshadow both Harry Victor and Jack Lovett.) Both novels deal with the perilous maturing of a political culture which the national rhetoric ceaselessly represents as vigorous and young. Adams put a slightly different formulation of "the American exemption" into the mouth of a European diplomat unable to tolerate that rhetoric any longer:

"You Americans believe yourselves to be excepted from the operation of general laws. You care not for experience I have lived seventy-five years, and all that time in the midst of corruption I am corrupt myself, only I do have the courage to proclaim it ... Well, I declare to you that in all my experience I have found no society which has had elements of corruption like the United States ... I do much regret that I have not yet one hundred years to live. If I then could come back to this city, I should find myself very much content ... ma parole d'honneur!" broke out the old man with fire and gesture, "the United States will then be more corrupt than Rome under Caligula; more corrupt than the Church under Leo X; more corrupt than France under the Regent!"

Now, 104 years later, this seems a fairly chilling forecast, and the America of Joan Didion's Democracy seems amply to confirm it. Our decline has reached the Pacific—a name of consummate irony—and across it Inez Victor's businessmen relatives are still making big money in construction around the Persian Gulf, but back home in the Islands their real-estate developments are going bankrupt, and it is Wendell Omura's relatives who run things in Honolulu. And of course farther west, past the test-blast atolls, Southeast Asia produces its refugees. Like Henry Adams, we gave up on Washington long ago.

With due allowance for the distances between Quincy and Sacramento, Henry Adams and Joan Didion may have something in common. In both of them, irony and subtlety confront a chaotic new reality that shatters the orderings of simpler, older ways. Both face such a world with an essentially aristocratic weapon, the power to dispose language and thought, at least, against those empowered to dispose just about everything else. And both, I suppose, understand that such a weapon is only defensive, and that it may not suffice.

Source: Thomas R. Edwards, "An American Education," in The New York Review of Books, Vol XXXI, No 8, May 10, 1984, pp. 23-24.