Ernest Hemingway to avoid abstraction and to particularize events. Her editor in chief atVogue reinforced this hard focus, requiring exact language. Didion’s essay “On Keeping a Notebook” (reprinted in Slouching Towards Bethlehem) explains that the accuracy of a factual record has never been quite as important to her as ambience, the associations resurgent in her mind as she rediscovers what otherwise passing moments have meant to her. Details are important, most of all, as clues to insights.

Didion’s novels have particularly acknowledged the limitations of her narrators, the tenuousness of their hold on others’ reality, and the often-interrupted continuity of their lives. Nevertheless, it is just such limited but sensitive narrators whom she respects and even admires. Although her novels are compact, they convey an intensity often lacking in longer novels by her contemporaries. The inner lives of her female characters are troubled, sometimes by their very “innocence.” The greater menace, however, in Didion’s eyes, lies in the complacent, self-congratulatory outer worlds in which moral ambiguities go largely unrecognized. She prefers outsiders who—like herself—struggle to survive society’s losses of memory and of meaning.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

First published: 1968

Type of work: Essays

The anarchy of the 1960’s in the United States must be recognized and confronted, although perhaps it cannot be fully survived.

Didion rejected, but found that she could not ignore, the negative aspects of the drug culture associated with the anti-Establishment movements that grew out of the Beat Generation. Because it was threatening California’s frontier traditions of responsible self-reliance, she decided to put aside her preference for privacy and describe the disorder. She discovered that in many ways the so-called counterculture mirrored the shallowness of the Establishment against which it purported to take its stand. The dropouts shared the same self-centeredness, indifference, and casual relationships that marked large corporations.

Many of Didion’s articles from this period (including those on the hippies of the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco) first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post. She believed she was describing the nature of love and death in a “golden land,” as revealed in sensational murder cases, or the limited realities of splinter groups of communists, drug addicts, such pacifists as singer Joan Baez and her disciples in Carmel Valley, or the Diggers, who tried to feed society’s dropouts. Didion’s descriptions are so accurate in their particulars that they seem impersonal; her anxiety over the slow erosion of solid citizenship can only be inferred from behind a mask of gentle representation. She had so successfully learned to distance herself through concreteness and compression—practiced by imitating Hemingway and that earlier journalist and writer of fiction, Katherine Anne Porter—that individually the first essays hardly seem to warrant the warning implicit in her choosing William Butler Yeats’s foreboding poem “The Second Coming” as an epigraph to her book. Yet they are crucial to her indictment of a decaying society.

The later sections, subtitled “Personals” and “Seven Places of the Mind,” proceed with equally quiet portraits, which tend to provide the positive values that she is remembering and, through memory, defending. “On Keeping a Notebook,” for example, makes clear her invisible but close involvement in all that she describes—indeed, how each fragment is more essentially a clue to her feelings about herself than about the person or circumstance being reported. “On Self Respect” speaks of having the same courage to admit one’s mistakes as one’s disciplined ancestors had. “Notes from a Native Daughter” explains what it was about California in her childhood that brought her back to it from New York (whose own portrait is provided in “Goodbye to All That”). The code of conduct, an ethic of conscience that she associates with her California, is rendered somewhat abstractly in the essay “On Morality,” but its basis in family closeness is explicitly dramatized in “On Going Home.” Without such positive affirmations, Didion’s critique of her contemporaries’ negative outlook would have made her seem supercilious: a mere rebel against rebels without a cause.

The two aspects of American culture—the destructively artificial and the compassionately profound—are brought together in “Letter from Paradise, 21 19 N., 157 52 W.,” a study of Hawaii. Those islands can be a state of mind, a place for tourists to enjoy their fantasies, or, as it was for Didion, visiting the sunken Arizona with all of its memorialized dead still submerged, a place of profound meditation on infamous betrayals and the death of innocence.

Play It as It Lays

First published: 1970

Type of work: Novel

Maria is more authentic and more substantial than Hollywood people, including her director husband and her “best friend,” can ever realize.

The eighty-three brief scenes in this short novel at first appear to symbolize protagonist Maria Wyeth’s anxious sense of being a displaced, discontinuous person. However, their interrupted continuity also comes to represent the failure of the film industry to comprehend her complexity and her needs. Maria’s husband, Carter, never gets beyond his first image of her as an East Coast model; it is this superficial image that he prefers in the films which he makes of her. He is equally narrow in his attitude toward their daughter, Kate, born disabled. Carter has her institutionalized and attempts to prevent Maria from visiting her.

The fact that Maria’s own mother died horribly, alone in the desert and attacked by coyotes, has reinforced her maternal feelings. She identifies with her rejected child; both are marginal, considered outside the “in group” of the “beautiful people.” Starved for simple assurances that she is really alive and lovable, Maria has an affair with scriptwriter Les Goodwin. When she becomes pregnant, Carter declares that she must either have an abortion or never again see Kate. The fact that Les is already married drastically limits Maria’s options. Forced to choose between her two children, both wholly helpless, Maria agrees to the abortion; as a result of her guilt, however, she suffers recurring nightmares, including those of children being led to gas chambers.

Helene, who has always played the part of her closest friend, can provide neither understanding nor consolation. Instead she offers a partnership in a sadomasochistic ménage à trois with her producer husband, BZ. Eventually, however, even BZ realizes the emptiness of his lifestyle and invites Maria to join him in a final overdose of drugs. She resists, still loyal instinctively to finding a purpose for herself and for Kate through a relationship whose pathetic aspects are offset by the desperation of her love, an obsessive need to be needed.

Didion takes enormous risks of misguiding the reader with several techniques. She allows Carter and Helene to pass judgment on Maria before turning the novel over exclusively to her key character. Then Maria’s experience is narrated largely in a nonrational, often disconnected, seeming disorder. The author’s faith lies with the reader’s ability to contrast the strong feelings of attachment and resilience in Maria, despite all of her hardships, with the overripe and rotten opportunists for whom the American Dream (and its counterpart, the Western Dream) has reduced an imaginative vision to an imaginary delusion. Carter and Helene are captives, and BZ is a victim of the void concealed behind the spectacular pageantry of motion pictures. Play It as It Lays enacts much of the wisdom inherited by Didion from her idea of old California’s high regard for commitment and courage.

Hollywood comes to stand for negative aspects in American society at large as it becomes less and less productive in a postindustrial age and more and more directed toward services and entertainment designed to fill increasing leisure hours with stimulation. Didion sees in a self-satisfied, developed nation such dangerous attributes as impermanence of human relationships and spiritual values; she sees either a lack of comprehension of, or an indifference to, the consequences of irresponsible behavior. It is a society out of control.

Maria thinks that she is a born loser, but it is the culture around her, not Maria herself, that is mindless and insensitive. The distinctions between her immediate world and her inner self are so subtle that many critics complained about the novel’s nihilistic theme. Even though Didion and Dunne wrote the screenplay for this novel, the 1972 film version could not convey all the necessary nuances. Nevertheless, Play It as It Lays records the struggle of one woman for meaning in a society which, far from commending her, can only hold her in contempt for not adapting to its capricious ways.

A Book of Common Prayer

First published: 1977

Type of work: Novel

Biochemist Grace Strasser-Mendana recovers an interest in intimate human affairs through symbolic sisterhood with fellow expatriate and agonizing mother Charlotte Douglas.

Concerned that readers had difficulty perceiving the admirable qualities of Maria in Play It as It Lays, Didion, in A Book of Common Prayer, creates Charlotte Douglas, Maria’s equivalent, observed and analyzed by an older, scientifically trained American woman. Grace Strasser-Mendana, orphaned at a young age in the United States, is the widow of a Latin American president who was probably killed by his brother in a struggle for power. What principally keeps Grace overseas, in fictional Boca Grande, is her desire to be close to her son, Gerardo, though he too is toying with political violence. At first she is merely distracted by the antics of Charlotte Douglas, a newcomer, until she perceives parallels between their values and their lives as “outsiders” in a world trained for irresponsibility—and therefore for destruction.

Charlotte, having been raised in an overprotected, middle-class environment, cannot cope with either Warren Bogart, her first husband, who tries to compensate for his inadequacies through physically abusing others; or with Leonard Douglas, her current husband, who pretends to be a liberal lawyer but is covertly a gunrunner. She turns all of her frustrated affection on her daughter, Marin, who has become a mindless revolutionary involved in bombing buildings. Charlotte believes that Marin may surface in Boca Grande. On part of her journey south, Charlotte brings with her a premature newborn who dies of complications. Leonard, the baby’s father who cannot accept imperfection, wanted to let it die in a clinic. Charlotte, in contrast, writes on her visa application “Occupation: mother.”

Gradually Grace comes to understand Charlotte’s innocence and goodwill, to empathize with this woman in shock, and to recover her own capacity for the compassion that helps define human purpose. The two women become, in effect, a substitute family. When Grace’s brothers-in-law engage once again in coup and counter-coup, and refugees flee, Charlotte remains behind to tend the sick and wounded. She is slain. Dying, she cries out not for herself but for Marin. Grace is also dying, of cancer, yet is the only person other than Charlotte devoted to life. Therefore, as principal narrator of A Book of Common Prayer, she memorializes this other woman who, though considered comic by society, struggled so heroically to rise above circumstances. It is Charlotte’s resilience, not her victimization, that Grace is celebrating.

Didion, a lapsed Episcopalian, still retains respect for rituals from her childhood, and she considers this novel the equivalent of Grace’s prayer for the essential goodness in Charlotte. If Boca Grande symbolizes the danger of failing to come to terms with history (that is, the consequences of human actions) and therefore of being doomed to repeat its mistakes, the novel’s reliance on psalms and litanies implies a divinely orchestrated design to life, epitomized by the connection between Grace and Charlotte. The novel also functions as Grace’s prayer of thanksgiving for Charlotte’s inadvertent restoration of Grace to a faith in humankind, in spite of all its errors and horrors.

That appeal to something eternal is paralleled by the time structure in this novel. The chronicle of events is only rarely linear. Instead, distant past, present, and near future tend to be looped together. At first this seeming disorder of cause and effect, as well as of chronology, conveys both the instability of Latin politics and the disconnectedness between Charlotte and reality. Eventually, however, what is conveyed is a kind of continuous present, with history the sum of all coexistent times. The loops become a sequence of knots, implying an eternal realization of what temporarily seems confused. The technique is moralist Didion’s way of warning Americans that no one is immune from human events, from effects that he or she partially has caused.

The White Album

First published: 1979

Type of work: Essays

This five-part book comprises twenty essays on topics ranging from motorcycle films to Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings and from Charles Manson’s murders to Didion’s own migraines.

With a title echoing the unofficial title of an album that the Beatles recorded in 1968, The White Album comprises mainly essays previously published in some form in various magazines, with each essay showing Didion’s insight, precise diction, and ability to create powerful images.

The first part of The White Album is also called “The White Album” and includes only one essay, again called “The White Album” (1968-1978). That long essay is Didion’s fifteen-section, associational consideration of why she could not tell herself the stories she needed to survive, why she could not find a “narrative” to connect the images confronting her when she lived in Hollywood and pondered such events as the Manson gang’s murders, a recording session by the Doors, visits to Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, and a student strike at San Francisco State.

The second part, “California Republic,” consists of seven shorter essays. The first of them, “James Pike, American” (1976), presents the late Episcopal bishop of California as a man of “mindless fervor” whose idea of reinventing the world was typical of the 1960’s in the United States. “Holy Water” (1977), the second of the essays, is Didion’s account of her fascination with the mass movement of water, especially in California. Among the other essays in this part, particularly notable is “Many Mansions” (1977), contrasting the new, sprawling, unoccupied governor’s mansion, which Didion regards as blandly conformist, with the previous one, which she regards as delightfully individual.

In the third part, “Women,” Didion praises Georgia O’Keeffe but attacks Doris Lessing for her “torrent of fiction that increasingly seems conceived in a stubborn rage against the very idea of fiction.” In “The Women’s Movement” (1972), Didion takes on a bigger target by claiming that American feminism is essentially a kind of Marxism mixed oddly with New England transcendentalism, that feminist criticism fails because fiction is “in most ways hostile to ideology,” and that many feminists seem averse to “adult sexual life itself” and would prefer “to stay forever children.”

Of the seven essays in the fourth part, titled “Sojourns,” the longest is “In the Islands” (1969-1977), in which, among other places in Hawaii, Didion presents Punchbowl, the military cemetery where the reports of the number of Americans killed weekly in Vietnam become real as she watches the graveside service for one of them. A much shorter but also memorable essay in this part is “At the Dam” (1970), in which Didion ponders why the image of Hoover Dam has haunted her.

The last part, “On the Morning After the Sixties,” comprises an essay with that title and a second essay, “Quiet Days in Malibu” (1976-1978), in which Didion gives a favorable account of the famous suburb where she lived for seven years. She closes that essay and the book, however, with scenes of ruin and a sense of being dispossessed.

Democracy

First published: 1984

Type of work: Novel

Democracy, which can hardly exist without a well-informed citizenry, has to take its primary example from open communication within the family.

While Democracy was still a work in progress, Didion referred to it as “Angel Visits,” a Victorian term meaning brief encounters. Closely attached to her own ancestry and her immediate family, she might have been expected to offer the Christian family as a shining example for others; instead, the opposite is true. Paul Christian, the father, represents the overbearing baronial class that ruled his native Hawaii’s agribusinesses. Worse, he has the same imperious relationship with his own wife and daughters. Although he is free to wander across the world, the other Christians are expected to remain in place, anticipating his unregulated return.

Paul’s wife, Carol, who expected a fuller life and greater stability through marriage, never is allowed any degree of self-worth. Finally, after their daughter Janet’s wedding, Carol disappears on a cruise, never to return. Janet’s husband, Dick Ziegler, invests the modest fortune which he made in Hong Kong housing in Oahu’s windward real estate. Janet, however, conspires with her uncle, Dwight Christian, to circumvent Dick’s plans. She is shot to death at her home, along with Congressman Wendell Omura, by her father late in March, 1975.

By that time, her sister Inez, the novel’s central character, is forty years old, apparently well-married but still exceedingly unhappy and unfulfilled. Her husband, Harry Victor, has a political career that seems to be endlessly rising. From a liberal lawyer once assigned to the Justice Department, in 1969 he rose to appointive senator, replacing an incumbent who had died. In 1972, however, he failed to win his party’s nomination for president. As his dream of a possible presidency wavers, his greater loss is to his sense of self. Making politics his career has required that Victor adopt so many positions on issues dear to lobbyists or constituents that his true identity is shredded. Inez, suffering from the same self-alienation, tells a reporter that loss of memory is the price of public life. Her twin children are also adrift: Adlai, a lazy student and an opponent of the Vietnam War, and Jessie, a drug addict out of touch with reality.

Consequently, Inez turns on occasion to Jack Lovett. Although he is a freelance covert agent, dealing with war and multinational businesses, and is no more readily available than members of her family, romantically she assumes that this mysterious, competent figure has a secret self that he knows and nurtures. When Jack rescues Jessie from Saigon just before it falls, Inez offers him her gratitude and love.

In her own way, Inez is as much a defective narrator as Charlotte in A Book of Common Prayer. Both, at best, can supply certain necessary facts but never an understanding of their implications. In Democracy, Didion offers herself as the sensitive equivalent of Grace Strasser-Mendana. The character “Joan Didion” knew Inez briefly when they both worked at Vogue. Later in California, she read of the double slaying of Janet and Omura, and as acquaintance and as professional reporter, she came when summoned by Inez, who needed someone with whom to communicate her pain and confusion. Eventually Inez and Jack flee to Jakarta, Indonesia, where he suddenly dies at the end of a long swim in the pool at the Hotel Borobudur. The only identity left Inez is that of displaced person, and she decides to work in Malaysia at the Kuala Lumpur refugee camp.

Didion, like Grace in the previous novel, recognizes that she is not the perfect witness to Inez’s life. The novel’s scenes are even more disjointed than those in Play It as It Lays. Though Didion withholds judgment of Inez, by implication she has indicted American politics, with its secret deals and obsession with appearances.

The Last Thing He Wanted

First published: 1996

Type of work: Novel

Becoming entangled in intrigue upon taking her father’s place on a secret mission, Elena McMahon finds companionship with Treat Morrison, but her life ends violently.

The Last Thing He Wanted demands its readers’ attention, starting with its ambiguous title and continuing through its complexly zigzagging plot, narrated by someone who does not give her name but reveals enough about herself to suggest she is a fictionalized version of Didion, with an ear for jargon that lets her suggest the truth behind the pretense.

The time of the main events is the summer of 1984, a year that suggests a dystopian society comparable to but not identical with the one in George Orwell’s 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The narrator, a journalist writing a story on the American diplomat Treat Morrison, eventually finds that this story involves her Los Angeles acquaintance Elena McMahon Janklow, whose daughter once attended a private school with the narrator’s daughter. Elena, upon leaving her rich husband and dropping his surname, moves to the East Coast, enrolls Catherine in a private school in Rhode Island, and takes a job reporting for The Washington Post. She is covering the California primary for the newspaper when she walks off her job, flies to Miami, and, finding her seventy-four-year-old father so confused that he cannot remember that Elena’s mother has died, substitutes for him in accompanying a clandestine planeload of land mines from south Florida to an airstrip in Costa Rica. This mission, the one Dick McMahon expects to bring the financial success that has eluded him, turns out to be a trap intended to lure the old man to a West Indian island where he will be tricked into appearing to assassinate the American ambassador stationed there and then be killed. The plot provides a pretext for a massive, open deployment of American forces on the island to deter communism in Caribbean and Latin American nations.

Awaiting the million dollars that never comes and submitting by near necessity to the manipulations of plotters who have stolen her passport and replaced it with one bearing the name “Elise Meyer,” Elena finds herself stranded on the island, where she learns from an old newspaper of her father’s death and, after hearing an offhand remark that a Salvadoran makes at an American embassy party, realizes her father was murdered and she herself is in danger, as even her daughter may be. The plot against her, however, does not work out as it was intended, because she does not go to the island airport as she was supposed to. Instead, she goes to a hotel, where she encounters Morrison, who has just arrived on the island and who is, according to the narrator, “the same person” that she is: “equally remote.” They begin a romance that ends violently, because he is now the American official to be assassinated, while Elena is still the person to be labeled the assassin. In fact, according to the narrator, the island police fatally wound Elena, but Morrison recovers from his gunshot wounds and lives another five years.

Apparently influenced by such events of the 1980’s as the politically motivated murders in El Salvador, the Iran-Contra affair, and the American invasion of Grenada, Didion presents in her novel a picture of a self-deluding man who finds brief happiness with a woman caught among sleazy operatives working for a government that, Didion implies, stoops to low means to reach its ends.