Among instances of the “supermarket” metaphor in American writing, the third section of Joan Didion's “Los Angeles Notebook”—a slight, self-contained narrative that may perplex at first reading—is probably the densest and most richly suggestive of them all.

This 198-word vignette links its modern characters and setting to a theme at least as old as that of Bunyan's Vanity Fair: tension between the earthly gratifications of the marketplace and those spiritual, presumably more rewarding values offered by submission to God's will. Most likely, Didion's little tone-poem-in-prose also takes some inspiration from John Updike's elaboration of that theme in his 1961 short story, “A & P.” For Didion （as for Updike, and others）, the supermarket had, by the late 1960s, usurped the church's socio-spiritual role in America and become our primary house of worship—a worship rooted in modern materialism.

Key to this reading, I think, is the “loud but strangled” refrain of the large woman in the cotton muumuu, who repeatedly upbraids the bikini-clad narrator: “What a thing to wear to the market. … What a thing to wear to Ralph's” （one of southern California's largest supermarket chainstores）. Such censure is, of course, incongruous, far less appropriate on the floor of a supermarket （especially in Hollywood, where bikinis, as the narrator tells us, are not “an unusual costume”） than it would be in church. The angry woman's proprietary impulse—and her sense of propriety—have been displaced from church to the market. This much is easily recognizable.

Less obvious is the symbolic movement through the brief story of the victimized narrator （presumably Didion herself, the vignette being ostensibly “nonfictional”）. She journeys out from a private world redolent with Christian symbolism: It is a stifling “Sunday afternoon” （the sabbath, but well beyond time for church）. It is “three o'clock” （the hour that Christ's suffering on the Cross was complete）. “＼T］he air ＼is］ so thick with smog” （like incense in the Catholic sanctuary） “that the dusty palm trees” （symbols of Christ's triumphal entry into Jerusalem, here covered with the residue of time and decay） “loom up” for the narrator, a “rather attractive mystery.” In this symbolic context, the image of her “playing in the sprinklers with the baby” ＼italics mine］ is unmistakably baptismal. With the child, she is about to undergo initiation in a new and very different church.

From her private refuge, the narrator, in her bikini, ventures into the public world of “Ralph's Market on the corner of Sunset and Fuller.” She refers again in the following sentence to that same intersection, the refrain clearly suggesting its symbolic importance to the vignette. In fact, that market and its frontal parking lot are still located, as they were in the sixties when the piece was written, at the corner of Sunset and Poinsettia, in Hollywood. Fuller Street is more than a half a block away to the east. But though Poinsettia might itself have brought connotations of Christmas and the Christchild to the narrative, the story by this point has moved into its more forbidding, public realm, where the geographically less accurate Fuller, with its implications of glut and satiation, is more appropriate to Didion's pessimism. Sunset, an obvious archetype for the end of things, is therefore a nearly perfect complement to Fuller for the author's metaphor on our post-Christian condition: Having left our spiritual roots behind, we who now worship largely in the new temple of consumerism are both sated and finished. （Remember, too, that “Los Angeles Notebook,” the essay in which the supermarket vignette appears, is itself a part of Didion's book-length homage to Yeats's apocalyptic vision in “The Second Coming.”

With incisive irony, Didion makes clear that the crass antagonist in the latterday temple is dressed no less informally than the narrator—only less scantily. Sexual repression, long a puritan concomitant, continues to energize devotees of the new, consumer-oriented worship place. The large woman is a paradigm of what we would now call the “religious right.” Her “cotton muumuu” serves, moreover, as a pseudo-vestment, the sleeve of which—in a sidelong jab at modern manhood—Didion depicts the woman's husband “pluck＼ing］ at,” like a timid acolyte.

The angry woman begins her shopping-basket assault, aptly, “at the butcher counter,” where the narrator, trying to ignore her, contemplates “a plastic package of rib lamb chops.” While a nineties sensibility might read intimations of abortion in the image, it seems to me more an ironic allusion to the Blood of the Lamb. In the modern temple, even that Blood in which Christians cleanse themselves of sin （Rev. 7:14） has been denatured under plastic wrapping.

The obnoxious woman then follows the narrator “all over the store, to the Junior Foods, to the Dairy Products, to the Mexican Delicacies” （as though through mock-Stations of the Cross）, “jamming ＼her］ cart whenever she can.” The intimidation ends only when the narrator of Christian origin （and modern mores） leaves the market, having been rudely initiated into the vacuous and self-righteous new post-Christian spirituality of St. Ralph's, the High Church of Modern Consumerism.

It is a supremely compressed and loaded little parable.