Joan Didion Books

I am glad that I decided to borrow and not purchase The Year of Magical Thinking. While it is fresh and original in its presentation of the facts and the author's reactions to a tragic personal experience (sudden loss of her husband followed by equally unexpected illness and loss of their only daughter), it is also surprisingly hollow. With all due respect to the indisputably talented Joan, if she'd gone back to the basics for this one, I might have appreciated it more. #1, journaling if for one's journal, not one's memoir. #2, that something is "true" does not alone make it interesting. Why does this truth matter? What does it mean? What is the purpose of the tale? Perhaps Joan was rushed by publishers. I'm nearly certain that if she had waited a few years before finishing and publishing a memoir about her astonishing experiences with death and loss, The Year of Magical Thinking would be an entirely different (and better) book.

TYOMT started out very well written, but quickly turned tedious and repetitive. Didion treats grief as if it is unique to her and no one else in the world could possibly know how she feels. Such a shame that the book was probably only published because of the author's status in the literary world.

It is rare that a title conveys so much meaning. And I guess it takes as strong a personality as Joan Didion to say it is OK to have self pity - although she managed to function at a high level when her daughter was in danger, making herself knowledgeable enough to talk to the doctors almost as an equal. It must have hurt knowing that the airplane ride to California could possibly have caused her daughter's death.

As a Didion fan, I was disappointed at first at the absence of her familiar rhythms, but they soon appeared. I wish I had read this excerpt from the book before reading her novels (p.7, paperback): " As a writer,.......I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish." Didion was thrilled at the heartfelt complement of her writing received from her husband shortly before his death.

I noticed John was apparently reading, it was at the top of his stack, "Five Days in London: May 1940" when he had 5 days left to live, (p.216-217), but Didion doesn't make a point of this. I guess the year of magical thinking was over. This was a memorable, interesting book, but if you are not a Didion fan, I can see why you might find parts dull.

I couldn't get through it. It starts on the night they had dinner: she made the fire, she set the table, she prepared dinner, she mixed the salad, she got him a scotch, she got him another scotch. Is this from another era? When she quoted etiquette from 1922 it seemed appropriate, although that actually was kind of interesting. Then she said she often got the same grief stricken feeling on those days she woke up after they had a fight. It's just too old fashioned for me, wanting to please her husband so much.

Joan Didion has captured the very quiet and lonely side of surviving the loss of a spouse. Her tone is somewhat dry and even, yet underneath you can hear her trembling. Yes, the year after is probably the hardest and her title appropriate. When faced with unexpected loss, due to trauma or sudden death, there is always a sense of disbelief. Magical thinking is necessary to carry you through the initial shock and grief. Her detailed portrayal of the first year marked by the last year of her husband's death is so grounded and painfully real. I read the book in one evening and couldn't put it down. I don't believe Mrs. Didion wrote this book to help anyone cope with their own losses, but rather to share the experience she had so that others who also have their own year of magical thinking would know they were not alone. Waiting for Odysseus

I bought this novel since it was listed on Time Magazine's list of the Best 100 Novels written in English since 1923. I have no idea why Time Magazine selected it for that esteemed honor. It was mercifully short (easily finished in a couple of hours, if that), but otherwise provided modest rewards for those looking for high-quality literature. Proving a sketch of the morally-bankrupt Los Angeles drug and sex scene of the 1960s, primarily through the internal mental narrative of 31-year-old would-be actress Maria Wyeth, Play It As It Lays doesn't seem to plow any new ground in 20th century literature. Its description of Maria's poorly-performed illegal abortion is the most memorable scene in an otherwise forgettable pastiche of characters and settings. Being on Time's 100 List sets a burden of expectations, and this book certainly fell far short on that score.

I agree with the criticism about the bleakness of "Play it," and that the story and its characters are painfully flat, but at the same time it is important to remember that the book is meant to be subversive. The dullness is a mode of irony, one that comes through similarly in other writers like John Cheever or Bret Ellis. And like Ellis' "Less Than Zero" (which is like this book in too many ways), it can be difficult to want to keep reading. After a while the story becomes obvious anyway, and even if your intuition about what comes next is wrong it doesn't matter much because nothing really seems to matter. The merit of the book is its indictment of hollywood and celebritism, but, as someone else pointed out in another review, it isn't hard to indict hollywood of emptiness anymore. so it goes.

this book can be easily read in a few hours and is still worth the experiance, at least for the sake of sampling this flavor of American prose.

Play It As It Lays is a book that stays with you after you read it. It's also a book that you will probably want to read more than once. I read it for the first time back in November and I've already gone back and re-read it to pick up on subtleties that I missed the first time. The storyline is very sad and depressing, but quite realistic, I think. I can feel Maria's (the main character) pain and the emptiness of the life she lives. Masterful writing here.

If you want something to lift your spirits, this isn't it. And yet, I still found myself turning the pages to see what happens to Maria.

I have now read two books by Didion - this and the Pulitzer Prize winning "The World of Magical Thinking." Each is devilishly depressing.

The similarities do not end there. The main character of this book, Maria Wyeth, physically resembles the author. Her roots are similar. And, she is an actress in the Hollywood that the author wrote and wrote more for.

But, there are differences too. This is fiction, "Year" is nonfiction. This book revolves around a plundered marriage. Her own was good until it ended with her husband's unfortunate death as explained in "Year." This book delves with reproaching nothingness - Didion's continued works evidence her life was well beyond the expanse of void. Didion survived in a world beyond Maria's nullity.

Some characteristics may or may not have been Didion's own - and the reader really cannot care. Maria sleeps around more than she probably should, drinks too much, may smoke more pot than she should, and experiences a horrible emotional scarring with an unwanted abortion.

The intense emotional depiction is painted evenly and simply by Dideon's masterful use of language. The first chapter biographically recites Maria's entire life in a Valley-girl way, with each sentence appearing to be disjunctive from the previous - but actually all tie together magnificently and very intentionally.

Portions of this book reminded me of the angst experienced by the dipsomaniacal protagonist in Malcolm Lowry's "Under the Volcano." Each book crawls under your skin as you feel the emotion -- the pain and strain experienced by the respective characters who fall into deep funks in their apparent inevitable demise.

This is a quick read, unlike "Volcano." If you wonder if your psyche is strong enough for such literature, read this first as it is shorter and much less intense.

A very centered approach to both parties through the election cycles, Didion has produced another masterpiece.

Fed up for years and years with the fiction that Reagan's and the GOP's fantasts have spun about him, Joan Didion gives us the truth about that airhead. Yes, this book is worth buying just for the chapter on him, in my opinion. I'll never foget watching as his fans named buildings and freeways after him across the country, as if he were a founding father! Thanks, Joan, for breaking the mold!

What can I say I might be biased since I consider the discovery of Joan Didion one of the highlights of my lifelong passion for reading. Still this is her best effort in years and the chapter on the obsequious power lunch journalism of the likes of Bob Woodward alone is worth the price of the Hardcover.Other lovelies are the spit out loud funny reading list of that misunderstood" historian and intellectual"(pun fully intended) Newt Gingrich which reads like the Who's Who list of the Bible Belt conspiracy crowd and as well as the beautifully constructed and persuasively argued" God's County" which clearly states that the bias in power is neither liberal nor conservative but lily livered and infantile and forever catering to the constituancy that sees the Virgin Mary on a pancake in a drive- in and thinks curlicues on Hallmark cards will bring family values and a spirit of gentleness back to our errand ways. The fifth star is for the purity of her language and the sheer beauty of her complex but always rational thought patterns.

I hope what Joan Didion, essayist extraordinary, learned from this adventure in pol land Americana (that her husband, John Gregory Dunne, "already knew," as she notes on the dedication page) is that there is not a dime's worth of difference between Republicans ... and Democrats ... in this democracy by capitalism. Well, maybe fifteen cents. How terribly, terribly impatient I got with Bill Clinton and the demos, that is until George W. took office and then I began to feel some nostalgia for good old fashion sexual malfeasance in lieu of the Incredible Shrinking Bill of Rights and a return to foreign policy as conceived by the CIA.

I think Miss Didion did indeed notice the similarities between the parties in this collection of political essays and journalisms, 1988-2000, most of which were first published in The New York Review of Books. She seems to find Dukakis, Clinton and Gore just as lame as George and George W., although in different ways. (Of course one does sense that overall there is just the barest leftward lean!) Sometimes however it is difficult to tell whether she is just observing the madness or satirizing it, so exquisitely sharp is her rapier. But take a hint from some of the titles, e.g., "The West Wing of Oz," "Newt Gingrich, Superstar," "Political Pornography," "Vichy Washington," "God's Country," etc.

Let's take especially the chapter on the one-time Speaker of the House of Representatives, the Republican congressman from Georgia ... to see what Miss Didion is up to. The chapter starts out innocently enough with a 213-word sentence (no semicolons!) detailing the "personalities and books and events" that helped shape the one-time presidential hopeful. Didion uses a technique here that might be called "damning by bizarre association." Thus one reads that Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, etc., influenced the Honorable Mr. Gingrich, but so did Tom Clancy, "Zen in the Art of Archery," and the 1913 Girl Scout Handbook. One senses where Didion is going when a page later she describes Gingrich's method of developing "an intellectual base" by "collecting quotes and ideas on scraps of paper stored in shoeboxes" (quoting Dick Williams, author of "Newt!" on page 169). The cat is completely out of the bag when Didion notes some of Gingrich's publications, including the novel "1945," which Didion describes as "a fairly primitive example of the kind of speculative fiction known as alternative history." Didion goes on to give capsule reviews of "1945" and "To Renew America," taking some delight in Newt's fixation on numbers and outline forms, "seven steps necessary to solve the drug problem," "eight areas of necessary change in our health care system," etc. ending with the observation on page 179 that "we have here a man who once estimated the odds on the survival of his second marriage at 53 to 47." Didion calls this an "inclination toward the pointlessly specific...coupled with a tic to inflate what is actually specific into a general principle, a big concept." By the time Didion is through with Professor Gingrich, one sees that the epithet, "Superstar" is sarcastic and a delusion of the mind of a nerd fully grown.

Well, is this fair? I don't know, but it is kind of fun. However I recommend that you read this not for fun or for the edification that you might get from the material. Instead I recommend Joan Didion's political pieces as a study in style, as an education in how to slice finely and well, how to discredit and lampoon with class. Didion, when she writes about politics, is like Gore Vidal or Mark Twain being well-behaved at tea with a pinky aimed directly and unmistakably at the hostess.

Comparing this book to her now classic Slouching Towards Bethlehem (circa 1961) which includes the famous self-revelatory essay, "On Going Home," one notices that the novelistic and "affecting" style has disappeared. In its place we have a hard-nosed, but fancy, street journalism with the author somewhere in the background discreetly washing her hands.

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More than seventy years ago H.L. Mencken satirized the politicians of his day by counseling the American people that we had the best Congress money could buy. Even then many observers seemed to understand that power politics served the needs of the elite, not the man in the street. Yet gradually this trend toward a polity more and more exclusively organized and perpetuated for the sole purpose of benefiting a small upper class has become noticeably more decadent and extreme, and it is this trend toward extremism that noted social commentator Joan Didion takes issues with in this absorbing series of essays centering on the dangerous drift toward an elitist polity. Miss Didion is an author with an incredibly diverse background, and while she is primarily known for her works of fiction, she has also delivered some provocative and thoughtful best-selling non-fiction works such as "Slouching Toward Bethlehem". Here, with her set of essays, "Political Fictions", she demonstrates her wry and sardonic insight into the political machinations and creative politics that characterize the American polity. While the reading is enjoyable and edifying, her protestations sometimes get to be a bit much.

For Didion literally nothing is holy or sacrosanct, and she savagely lambastes the cynical manipulations she attributes to the political elite in this country, who she pictures as systematically and ruthlessly engaging and using their power in the act of exploiting current events in inventing what they then characterize as the political drama of democracy in action. And, to Didion's credit, she understands that nothing is really quite as simple as it seems on the surface. Thus she describes a cynical manipulation of a national yearning for a nostalgic view of America in what is a mind-boggling juggling of the truth. What she discovers in this search through the highs and lows of the political landscape is a solipsistic political view, engendered by an almost comically vapid attempt to pander to the public in an attempt to perpetuate their vulnerabilities in order to maintain power and control. It is difficult not to empathize with her observations, and to subscribe to most of what she says, especially her pointed observations of how much worse, i.e. how much more extreme and more vicious the political process seems to have become. Yet I have to admit to a bit of surprise at the level of shock she professes at finding the political process, especially as represented by the two political parties, to be a patently self-serving enterprise that both individuals and groups engage in to serve their own selfish interests.

Thus, in tracing the plethora of ways in which such themes as a imagined American past are manipulated in order to further the aims of the political powers that be, she expresses horror to find that the two major parties, in concert with the electronic media, have consciously worked to deliberately narrow the forces within the electorate to a small but manageable cadre. Finally, in disgust she explore the ways in which this state of affairs winds up spawning a ruling class that is oblivious to, and unconscious of, the needs and wants of the general electorate. This leaves the reader to wonder whether her expressed rage is a creative tool, or if, on the other hand, she really was so naïve that all of this genuinely surprises her. Perhaps she was on Holiday from Smith the semester they taught about H.L Mencken and his celebrated works regarding the American political system. Yet this truly is a worthwhile book and one I recommend, because it is entertaining and very well written. Ms. Didion has a unique way with turning a phrase on its ear and making the thought she is making most unforgettable in the process. Just be sure you understand before doing so that much of what she says seems a bit disingenuous given her reputation for considerable street smarts and basic common sense. Enjoy

I always enjoy reading Joan Didion, but this observation about Thomas Kinkade kinda bugged me:

"This "Kinkade Glow" could be seen as derived in spirit from the "lustrous, pearly mist" that Mark Twain had derided in the Bierstadt paintings, and, the level of execution to one side, there are certain unsettling simi­larities between the two painters. "After completing my recent plein air study of Yosemite Valley, the mountains' majesty refused to leave me," Kinkade wrote in June 2000 on his web site. "When my family wandered through the national park visitor center, I discovered a key to my fan­tasy-a recreation of a Miwok Indian Village. When I returned to my studio, I began work on The Mountains Declare His Glory, a poetic expression of what I felt at that transforming moment of inspiration. As a final touch, I even added a Miwok Indian Camp along the river as an affirmation that man has his place, even in a setting touched by God's glory."

Affirming that man has his place in the Sierra Nevada by reproducing the Yosemite National Park Visitor Cen­ter's recreation of a Miwok Indian Village is identifiable as a doubtful enterprise on many levels (not the least of which being that the Yosemite Miwok were forcibly run onto a reservation near Fresno during the Gold Rush...."

Sorry, but the original Indians of Yosemite were actually Paiutes and not Miwoks. It is one of those big injustices in the world. You see the Miwoks were the ones who were the scouts and guides for the Mariposa Battalion who ran down and captured the original Yosemite Indians. Those were Mono Paiutes.

[...]

You can see by reading this book by Bunnell. It is very great book. But I always enjoy reading Joan's work.

In her section about Lakewood, the author tries to create a connection between Lakewood, the spur posse, and the military-industrial complex that does not exist. She regards Lakewood as a breeder town, built to supply human labor for the aerospace industry. Here are the facts: 1. Lakewood was created in 1948 by real estate investors to provide housing for returning WW2 veterans. 2. The LB Naval Shipyard, Douglas Aircraft, Lockheed, Northrop, and North American Aviation were all in operation long before Lakewood was built. 3. The spur posse was given way too much publicity by the tabloid TV vultures to a National audience. I emphasize the word National. The market for those kind of unhealty tv shows goes beyond southern Calif.

Lakewood home values are very good, and the neighborhood infrasturcture is a lot more organized than most southern Calif housing projects built in the same era. If she wants to bash a southern Calif. neighborhood, Long Beach would be an easier target. There, you have many nice one-home lots that were destroyed by investors who built 8-unit apartments on a one-home lot.

Anyone who has not actually lived in Lakewood might believe her essay...but it is not reality. In the end, she thinks So. Calif is headed over the cliff. I would say the idyllic "Calif. Golden Fantasy" is no more...but whatever changes that occur here will have to be dealt with in a positive manner, instead of just being given an obituary.

This book of essays by Joan Didion, entitled "Where I Was From," gained my attention from the start, and later also gained my respect. Loved all the detail, the overlapping, the apparent extensive amount of research--the compulsive force of it all. Much like one of her ancester, the one who stitched (and over-stitched) the quilt amidst all the turmoil while crossing the Sierra Nevada. Didion writes with an intensity of meaning, her prose also seems to have a rhythm behind all the words. In my opinion, she truly is a masterful writer, who seems to allude towards a type of idealism; a discourse on the way California could or should be but is not. Then there is the deadpan prose, the insight with an edge, which adds to the overall context of her subject. Her perception in this book is exceptional; this women truly is an artist. (And as an artist, she is not a historian, nor an anthropologist or scientist).

The insight she provides here in this book on her native California, its past and fairly recent history, had an affect on me personally like no other writing on the subject. She incorporates writers from the past, such as Jack London and Frank Norris (among others), along with more recent writers such as Jane Hollister, with Poets, Politicians, Bohemians, Artists, Farmers, Professors, and the Spur Posse, the motel people, the "fake" middle class.... in order to paint a picture of California and its history, with its changing ideals, while alluding to the ambiquity, to the role of the Federal Government and Aerospace industry, to the elusive ideas and dreams of its people, to the physical beauty, and overall to the allure of the place. This is not, in my opinion, a negative account of California, there is more truth than negativity in this book.

"A good deal about California does not, on its own preferred terms, add up." This sentence, which opens Didion's third chapter in Where I Was From, is characteristic of the sort of pummeling understatement and reserve that characterizes all of Didion's work - humble, free of ostentation, profound in implication. No, the California Didion presents does not add up - a place defined by a jettisoning pioneer spirit "destroyed" by its own sense of development, a place defined equally by class as it is by people who say sentences like "we don't discuss class here," a place , Didion's Sacramento specifically, both defined by and existing in spite of its geography. Her contradictions of place and identity take Didion from one heavily scrutinized example to another - the Spur Posse, Boeing, Douglas, pioneers on the Sierra Nevadas, prisons, insane asylums - and if Didion's argument of conflicted identity doesn't always connect in thinking later about her specifics, the reading is as fluid, as full-bodied in argument and fact, as merciless an investigation as anything she's ever written. Didion has long been defined by her identity to California, something that comes up in all of her writings, whether in New York or El Salvador, so to see her tackle it so specifically - at one point even deconstructing (with fascinating effect) her own first novel, Run River - is a thrill. What will be of most fascination, undoubtedly, will be the 4th section of the book, the short, devastating section detailing the death of Didion's mother, yet what makes this piece so compelling is the grand scale of Didion's research and work - her California becomes a grand exercise in characterization. Her description in this section is some of the most agonizingly evoked, rich, and understated work of her career, and if the sections preceding it - highly descriptive, full of research often much fuller and drier than expected - can seem aimless when thinking about them, the finest compliment I can give Where I Was From is that, in the effortless and moving reading of the book, it evokes exactly what Didion wants of California, of her, and of her mother, and no more.

So much of this book was just a cut and paste from her previous articles.

The Lakewood scandal was already covered by her in 1995's New Yorker Magazine.

She has page long quotes from her previous novels "Run River"...which were good; but "Where I Was From" was supposed to be all new material.

She skewers much of California life and society. Unfortunately the people she picks on are the least worthy. Little Leaguers, middle-class, fans of Thomas Kincade....

In a book about California, why didn't she go after the show biz industry, or Politicians......they are the one making the big bucks....not suburbia.

She is a good writer, and I'd read more of her....but not too soon. She comes off as angry, and she isn't someone you want to spend everyday with.

Hers is the kind of writing that is good for every now and then.

In all fairness, maybe with her latest "The Year Of Magical Thinking" .......she's not so angry.

But this one is very insulting, and feels very phoned-in what with all the pages and pages of endless quotes from other/old material.

Exiled Cubans in Miami up to 1987. This is real old stuff. I wonder why this book is still being published. Felt like a collection of shorter magazine--newspaper articles compiled to look like a real book. Many long, disjointed sentences. Could use an updating. There must be better books out there about this topic.

Didion produces a masterful detailing of Miami history through Cuban immigration and their rise to power in the city. Highly recommended.

This is a complex and detailed history chiefly of Cuban exiles in South Florida and the influence they have been able to wield regionally and internationally with and without the help of various U.S. administrations. In that sense, it is the story of two cities - Miami and Washington - and two peoples - Americans and Cubans.

I have an objection, though, with the stone-hard style in which this volume is so meticulously, even gorgeously at times, written. Didion strives to be so achingly academic that there is little real heart to this book and, worse, the result is a cold, humorless, colorless story that is at times an unappealing example of ideological abstractions and alphabet soup.

The author, in her conspicuously clean and parenthetical prose, apparently is so charged by the subject of her research that she has forgotten there are people on the other end - readers. It is, in that sense, a boring little disaster of a book.

I read this book so many years ago, but I just now realized I had never shared my opnions about it. I had lived in Miami for about eight years, and I think I was in my 5th year or so when I finally heard about "Miami" by Joan Didion. It was only after I had finally moved to the Beach that I happened upon it, at Kafka's. At any rate, it is an excellent book. I think about it every time I hear on the news about the bumbling CIA or news of Castro makes the NYTimes. Incidentally, 1987 also saw the publication of "The Corpse Had a Familiar Face," by Edna Buchanan, another equally excellent non-fiction book about this city. I also highly recommend "A Book of Common Prayer" by Ms. Didion.

The story of the Cuban exiles in Miami deserves to be told with drama and passion because that is what it has been. In this page-turner, Joan Didion captures the rejection and racism that the Cuban exiles first encountered in Miami when they emigrated from Cuba after Castro assumed power. She shows how some of the Cubans became successful businesspersons, political powerbrokers, shapers of local culture, renowned humanitarians and philanthropists, expert propagandists, able diplomats, drug runners, muggers, and internationally renowned terrorists.

We see the close relationship the Cuban exiles formed with the USA government, especially its clandestine agencies. We learn that in the 1960s Miami essentially became a CIA recruiting and operational-staging center. Didion tells us that the CIA had as much as 120,000 "regular agents" (full and part-time) stationed in south Florida. It had a flotilla of small boats (often used for terrorist raids on Cuba), making it the third largest navy in the western hemisphere at the time. It owned airline companies in the Miami area and holding companies that lent itself loans for covert operations. "There were [also] hundreds of pieces of Miami real estate, residential bungalows maintained as safe houses, waterfront properties maintained as safe harbors" as well as "fifty five other front businesses" and "CIA boat shops," "guns shops," real-estate, travel and detective agencies (pp. 90-91).

Yet the relationship between the Cuban Americans and the USA has been a troubled one. Although the Cuban Americans find themselves dependent on the USA for maintaining their struggle against Castro, they also don't trust the government, blaming it for their loss at the Bay of Pigs and for adopting policies soft on Castro. Likewise, the USA finds some Cuban Americans helpful in its secret foreign adventures (Chile, Nicaragua, Angola, etc.) as well as a nuisance when these terrorist elements assassinate foreign diplomats, blow up airplanes and banks, and murder USA citizens.

Particularly poignant is Didion's description of the Cuban Americans' personal and often internecine struggle over understanding themselves as immigrants or exiles. These struggles have resulted in broken friendships, shunning, public ridicule, financial loss, bodily harm and death.

The book only covers Miami until 1987. I wish Didion would update the book, although it might be dangerous for her to do so.

This is a great read and well worth the purchase.

I have just finished reading this book as a selection by my book club. I've only read Didion's "A Year of Magical Thinking" and a few essays prior to this "novel". Joan should stick to essays and first person accounts. Democracy, as another reviewer stated, is a compliation of glimpses. Everything is glimpses and in order to fill it out to novel length, Didion puffs it up by adding herself as the novelist to the mix.
The novel is utterly pointless, the characters are thinly developed, even the heroine, the plot is aimless, and the timeline is staggeringly difficult to keep up with. Read something else by Joan Didion - not this.

Joan Didion's "Democracy" is worth reading for the style alone. There's nothing to match Didion at the top of her form, as in "A Book of Common Prayer" or "Salvador", and "Democracy" is as good as anything she's ever written: austere, pitiless, unblinking, tinged with irony dry as the finest gin. Here we are in Hawaii in 1975 as Saigon falls and the American Century unravels, and Didion moves back and forth between a tropic lushness and the chaos in Vietnam, telling a love story that reaches back to the days when Honolulu was still a dreamy colonial outpost and outward to the ugly side of American electoral politics. She sums up her characters-- and her countrymen --near the end: believers in the "American exemption", believers in the idea that individual wishes and efforts can change a world shaped by too much history and too many faceless forces. She gives us Jack Lovett, too, her central male figure-- player and fixer in the clandestine games of the Cold War in Asia, lover of the teenaged Inez Victor, rescuer of Inez's drug-addled daughter, who runs off in April 1975 to be a waitress in Saigon. "Democracy" should be paired with Didion's "The Last Thing He Wanted"--- both letter-perfect treatments of love and family and the frayed edges of empire.

Joan Didion's novel "Democracy," is one about American Politics and the Vietnam War, public and private live, the media, and to an extent image management. The story, however, focuses mostly on Inez Victor, the daughter of a powerful Hawaiian congressman. I personally found the book to be quite a bore, as there simply weren't many "jolts" to keep a teenager like me interested. This being said, I did enjoy a couple of things about the novel. The first would be the way that Didion inserts herself into her novels. She puts herself into the novel as a character narrating the events and inserting her own thoughts as if she was there, in the novel. I also enjoyed reading about the mysterious Jack Lovett. I felt that this character was a brilliant creation by Didion. This is simply because, although he is very close to Inez, no one ever knows what he actually does. He is described as an army officer, a man who sets up export credit programs and AID funding, and an aircraft executive. He refers to himself as a "business man." Those were probably the only two things I really enjoyed about this novel. I wouldn't recommend it as a summer reading, but if you choose to defy my wishes, then read it for stylistic analysis of Didion's writing, if anything.

Didion's style in this book is truly arresting. At points, the reader is just stopped, in consideration of what the author has just revealed. Her book is interesting in its style. She does in fact talk to the reader several times through the book. She develops the characters in glimpses and the plot as well; as she moves through the story of her protagonist's life. She describes a prior attempt at Democracy, that did not come to fruition. And she mixes in a dash of American Democracy and its elections and nominations.

Set in circa 1975 mostly, it speaks about the end of the Viet Nam war, but through the side long glances of people who were involved, but not talking about the fighting. Her depiction of the era and the locales is very precise, despite its exposition in little bits and pieces. The story is gripping, although not suspenseful. The book surely does exhibit Didion in one of her best written fictional books.

As a journalistically styled piece the book does a very fine job of helping people start to understand the ephemeral attitude of the people and the country in the days of the war. Disillusionment abounds. Death and destruction and human suffering are implied, but not explicitly discussed. And the message, that of one who is always trying to find oneself, but may be lost in her own mind, is universal.

The book is especially recommended for readers who are interested in the late `60's early `70's era in America. The book is truly a fine piece of literature, surrounded by events and scenery, much more than driven by the plot. But the statement is well worth reading.

Didion has a unique, powerful style. It reminds me of Joseph Heller's Catch 22 in its irony and suppressed rage, but Didion's prose is just so elegant. "Democracy" is both a romantic and a political novel, with both themes beautifully intertwined. This is an exceptional work. Didion's heroine reminds one of several of her other heroines, coming from a background where she is expected to be an adornment and where the strains of playing that role take a psychological toll. In Democracy, the heroine is psychologically stronger than in some of the other novels, plays on a larger canvas, and is ultimately able to more successfully express her inner strengths and morality. Interestingly, Didion injects herself into the novel as the narrator, and yes, Didion did work briefly at Vogue, and of course was both a reporter and a novelist. My guess is that the conceit of starting to write one novel, and ultimately writing a different one, was probably accurate.

"Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11," by Joan Didion, features a preface by Frank Rich. The title page notes that the text is "as published in The New York Review of Books of January 16, 2003." The copyright page notes further that the book is based on a lecture given by the author at the New York Public Library on Nov. 13, 2002. It's a short book (44 plus xiv pages).

The book is an attempt to look critically at the "national pieties," or fixed opinions that seem to have gripped the U.S. national psyche since the terrorist attacks of 2001. Didion discusses the "death of irony," conflicting ideas and attitudes since 9/11, the "New American Unilateralism," etc. She also tries to put "the inevitability of going to war with Iraq" in historical context.

Didion's intentions strike me as admirable, but in the end I found the book to be lacking in profound new insight. Although she raises some intriguing issues, the text is oddly inert and ends abruptly. Still, it's worth reading if you're interested in the cultural debates spawned in the aftermath of 9/11.

As anyone looks back on the quagmire in Iraq, and increasingly so in Afghanistan, this book becomes ever more valuable as an example of the pre-war intelligence that challenged the rush to war.

Everyone knows of the "intelligence" failures about the "weapons of mass destruction" and the like. This slim book, well worth the new or used price, offers the other "intelligence". It is concisely the good intelligence of a prescient writer who cautioned against a headlong plunge into war based on foolish assumptions and the fatuous dreams of President George Bush and the neocons ("neocons" is short for "neo conservatives" and not for "new con artists" as rational readers might assume).

It's foolish to assert what President Al Gore would have done in the aftermath of a 9-11 attack; however, one element is certain: he would have paid heed to the voices of intellectual ability, as typified by Didion in this book. Vigorous and free-ranging debate was the policy during the Clinton administration, rather than ignoring the advice of senior military leaders and recklessly plunging into war to satisfy an ideological whim.

That's what makes this book so disturbing. War wasn't the only option in 2003; it isn't the only option now. In retrospect, any other choice than war would have been preferable. In retrospect, only a madman would send more than 3,000 Americans to their deaths, mostly at the hands of Iraqis who want all foreigners out of their country, but with some help from al Qaeda.

'Fixed Ideas' is really a misnomer; the reality, as Didion makes clear, is that "ideas" in America changed very dramatically after 9-11 to the detriment of democracy, free speech and rational debate. A few people retained the courage to speak out, or "write out" as in this book; for most, minds slammed shut and were locked with the hatred of revenge. She is absolutely right the new 'fixed ideas' were for war and against all dissent or rational questioning.

Didion presents a reminder that freedom is a value, one that should not be lost even when people face unknowable threats and fears. The neocon crushing of dissent is as dangerous to America as the Taliban crushing of free thought. New or used, borrowed or bought, 'Fixed Ideas' is as valuable today as in 2003; perhaps more so, because it is a cogent reminder of what we must rebuild.

I'm not sure why this essay from The New York Review of Books of January 16, 2003 was made into a book. It's more like a pamphlet, and a short one at that. Of course Joan Didion is an icon of the American left and a prose stylist deluxe as well as a trenchant social and political critic. Perhaps what Didion has to say is of great importance and perhaps she says it very well. Clearly the unstated assumption of the essay--that we would in fact bring about a regime change in Iraq (that is, we would invade Iraq) has proven prescient.

Didion's essay is in three parts. The first part is mostly an observation on how the Bush administration is attempting to preempt criticism of its policies by labeling critics as somehow unpatriotic or worse. One of the nice points she makes is that the "war on terror" is a misnomer since terror is not a state but a technique. (p. 8)

In the second part she identifies the first "fixed idea." She is talking about the government of Israel. She writes, "Whether the actions taken by that government constitute self-defense or a particularly inclusive form of self-immolation remains an open question." She goes on to say that almost no one in the US dare challenge the fixed idea that we must support the actions of the Israeli government. She says that the question is seldom discussed rationally or at all (in her circle, it would seem) because "few of us are willing to see our evenings turn toxic." ( p. 23) That she herself has to bury this assertion into the very middle of her essay and to express it so obliquely reinforces her point perhaps more strongly than she might have imagined.

In the third part she reveals the second fixed idea, which she identifies as the "theory" behind the "regime change in Iraq" pronouncements made in 2002 by President Bush. "I made up my mind [the President had said in April] that Saddam needs to go." (p. 36) The "theory" that Didion is talking about is sometimes called "The Bush Doctrine" or "The New American Unilateralism" or more bluntly, "The American Empire." The second fixed idea then is that "with the collapse of the Soviet Union" we have an opportunity and an obligation to move unilaterally and preemptively against our enemies as an imperial power might.

I'm not going to evaluate Didion's argument here--that is something you will want to do yourself--except to say that:

1) In reference to the rather high-handed attempt at managing the press and public opinion by the Bush administration, had the Democrats been in the White House post 9/11 they would have done something similar.

2) The actions of Hamas and the other Palestinian suicide/murder organizations make it difficult to take any side other than Israel's. If the Palestinian people had better leadership that would pursue their goals in the spirit and manner of, say, Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr., they would find widespread (although not majority) support in the US; indeed, I believe, given world opinion, they would be successful.

3) Yes, we are indeed seeing the emergence of an American Empire. Whether we will have the wisdom to use our power so that we do not go the way of Rome in a relatively quick manner will depend on our ability to work with other nations for the betterment of the entire planet. This is something the Bush administration is not doing very well, but there is hope that the next administration will be wiser.

I'm confused by the tone of the reviews. Perhaps it has to do with my not being the type of person who self-describes as "patrician" or the type who'd give a Joan Rivers' "book" on Jewelry five stars?
Or maybe it's because I don't bulk buy at Sam's Club?
I certainly don't purchase a book based on page numbers.
Didion's concise essay has all the hallmarks that have made her one of our finer written voices. Yes, the text is "only" forty-four pages. (And the price is "only" $7.95.) If you're attempting to fill the trunk of your car, this isn't your cup of "patrician" tea.
But if you're wanting to read what one of our foremost writers makes of a situation that shook the country and the official response that followed then this is a read you won't want to miss.
For those who might carp of the "length," it's worth noting that Didion can do more with one carefully crafted sentence than most authors can do with a lengthy chapter.
Quality isn't measured by page count and those who can grasp that and those who enjoy strong writing will enjoy this book.

What has happened to freedom of speech in America? Why are we not publicly and openly debating the self-serving and undeomocratic policies of the Bush administration? Didion, in another fine essay on American life, asks these questions and tries to answer them. This is a fine book for anyone who worries about our nation proceeding out of control in its war for oil and corporate interests. Didion is clear in her concerns about why we have lost our powers of free speech and citizenship. A must read for anyone who cares about this nation.

Henry Robbins was a New York editor. He died in 1979. There was a memorial service for him at the Society of Ethical Culture. He was hurt when his authors got bad reviews. The editor gives the writer the idea of himself.

Joan Didion writes of the expectation the Ronald Reagans had that other people would take care of their needs. A presidential campaign is a set. It is moved at considerable expense from location to location. A campaign can be an isolating experience. Didion is hilarious about ball-playing on the tarmac.

We learn of the generations of Hearsts preceding Patricia Campbell Hearst. The original Wyntoon was a creation of the architect Bernard Maybeck. It burned down. Patty attended school at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Menlo Park. Patricia Hearst wrote of her experience of being kidnapped. Life with the SLA had the distorted logic of dreams.

Living in Los Angeles requires the driving of great distances. There is an absence of narrative. Didion decides that narrative is sentimental anyway.

Joan Didion describes Vietnamese refugee camps in Hong Kong. The residents of the camps put their lives on hold waiting for the consular interview, hoping to achieve relocation.

In California movies are the industry. It is believed that writers can always be replaced.

Los Angeles was literally invented by the Los Angeles Times and its owners. To oppose the Chandlers was to oppose the perfection of Los Angeles.

This first novel by one of modern America's prose-writing treasures is set in a part of California no one associates with the Golden State: the Sacramento Delta. The emotional and physical geography of the book blend seamlessly. Didion has since critiqued this book herself, in her much later prose reflection on California, "Where I Was From." She's a bit hard on her former self. This is a lucid, hard etched short novel on the same general theme as Tolstoi's "Anna Karenina": that is, how a uniquely unhappy family got that way. Didion is of an old California family. She takes no false pride in that, here or elsewhere. There is not a useless or spongy sentence in the whole book. Writers will be reminded of what they're supposed to be doing when they pick up a pen.

This first fiction story by Didion surely catches her at the beginning of her career as a fiction writer. Copyrighted 1961, it is her first fiction novel. The Didion reader will recognize it as an early work. It is meandering, difficult to follow and in fact, in some points, downright boring.

However, the seeds of a brilliant writer and observer of human behavior still shine through. The book is about human interactions, set in early California between about 1920 and 1959, the story traces a family and their quest for land ownership in the young State of California.

Her concentration is on the manner in which love is expressed in the family. She concentrates on the strengths of the loves and on the incredible weaknesses. Her depiction of a family in emotional shambles is clear. Her elucidation of a family in every type of crisis except financial, is stark. And her characterization of the intense philandering of both the men and the women in the family is revealing and unexpected to some extent; yet fully expected in another.

The book is recommended to Didion readers and is of interest in seeing how her style was refined and honed as she went on in her writing career.

As a longtime Didion fan I was mildly disappointed with this text. It's cumbersome, swishy, and sloppy. It hints at phrases, and the sort of language she eventually uses later in her writing, but this early novel is exactly that...early. It shows promise, and is not entirely without wit, but it's weak and cumbersome plot, it's overwrought prose, and it's harlequin voice were a disappointment given her profound later works.

There's a wealth of evidence in Run River (Didion's first book, published in 1963) that the world was to get one of its great writers, but it gets lost a bit in the story. Using a sort of end-of-the-golden era view of Sacramento land booms as its backdrop, it follows Lily and Everett, holdouts of the wealthy Knight and McClellan pioneer families that struck it rich in Northern California, an era described by Didion as "the cutting clean which was to have redeemed them all." Didion's sense of location and the specifics of the era is remarkable, so it takes little effort to be interested in the events, but set up as it is a framed story revolving around a murder, 20 years of backstory, and then the conclusion of the murder, she seems far too willing to make Run River an act of condemnation. I picked up Run River as a fervent reader of Didion's astonishing nonfiction works, and felt a little dismayed at first at my willingness to avoid reading the book. It's a feeling that goes away - the middle section of the book is filled with flawed, impish characters rendered in empathetic specifics, and is full of the humanely observed understatments that make Didion's best work so accessible (I am convinced no writer can devastate more with a seemingly average sentence - perfectly interrupted, of course). Still, returning to the murder at the end of the book, my reluctance returned, and I realized Didion's failure is to make the book a declaration of decay, to turn her events "tragic" (or, really, the stuff of nighttime soaps) in an attempt to critique the California pioneer identity. All this winds up doing is rendering the fates of her characters not all that important. Still, the book should be read for that glimmering center of the book, a time when its characters flaws are rendered rich with empathy - its chapters detailing Martha, Everett's sister, as she (miserably) attempts to conquer heartbreak with pioneering audacity shows Didion's characters as fascinating idealists, endearing in their quixotic fucntionlessness.

This novel is early Didion, wonderfully lyrical and dark, passionate without sentimentality, and beyond conclusions. It is homage to James Jones, to William Faulkner, perhaps a little to John Steinbeck, but mostly to a California now almost vanished. That California is mostly the settlers' California, but it is also a California felt and known aboriginally. She writes, as always, poignantly about things dying away: but the heirs live on and the Californian sun and hills, rivers and floods, carry on- the part of eternity we can know a little of. I liked this book very much, but the reader should be warned it is not a light read and not written as completely in Joan Didion's famously sharp style as her later works.

Perhaps Didion has done as much as she can with her distinctive prose style, maybe she has gotten a little bored with it, and should have attempted something different. The protagonist is very familiar, as is her "almost" lover, and the narrator. The result is a book I can only recommend for those who have loved her previous novels - I fit in that category. It helps that the plot is actually pretty good. And whenever I am reluctant to let something go, I will remember Treat Morrison commenting "I mean you could add it up, but where does it get you". As good as anything in "Casablanca".

In general I am an admirer of Joan Didion's work, especially the essay collections Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album (and more recently her memoirs Where I Was From and The Year of Magical Thinking). In these, she observes with a clear eye and her writing is exactly to the point. Her novels are consistently rather less convincing: Her fiction always seems to willfully highlight writing style at the expense of everything else, e.g., narrative and character delineation.

This is partly understandable because of Ms. Didion's skepticism towards the very idea of narrative as imposed ("We tell ourselves stories in order to live") and ultimately arbitrary (what the story is depends entirely upon who's telling it). In her late essay "Pacific Distances" (in the collection titled After Henry) she announced that she has come to view narrative as "sentimental."

Yet (for reasons unclear to this reader) she has continued to write novels. And each successive work has increasingly relied upon sheer or mere prose style to sustain its interest.

In The Last Thing He Wanted, the prose mannerisms have taken over entirely. Simple sentences and fragments, arranged like decorative lacework, endlessly try to take the place of a simple story thread: "Somebody had her lined up, somebody had her jacked in the headlights. Had her in the scope. Had her in the crosshairs." Or this: "A,B,C. One two three. Night follows day. Not rocket science." And so forth.

And Ms. Didion's own insistent skepticism, irony, emotional distance, and lack of affect eat away at any sense of her characters as living, breathing people. "Elena McMahon" and "Treat Morrison" here are uninvolving cardboard figures, even more bloodless and washed-out than "Inez Victor" and "Jack Lovett," their predecessors in Ms. Didion's novel Democracy.

As a novel, The Last Thing He Wanted is a sunken ship, embedded on the ocean floor and encrusted with barnacles. The ship doesn't float, let alone sail anywhere. You can explore it like an artifact, if you wish, but there is zero narrative drive, no sense of "What happens next?" as one turns the pages. My eyes glazed over.

I have read several of Didion's non-fiction essay collections and this was the second of the writer's novels for me, after "Play It As It Lays." Reading "The Last Thing" made me feel stupid, and thus I was relieved to see that it averaged only three stars and that I was not the only one who found the prose somewhat irritating and the non-linear narrative quite confusing (for me, this was compounded by the fact that after putting it down I was generally not in a hurry to pick it up again). While I cared about the heroine, Elena, I gave up caring when it was revealed that so-and-so was really someone else, chiefly because these revelations were usually delivered much after the fact and in a way that seemed airless. Similar to "Play It As It Lays" (which is told in a generally linear fashion), Didion is masterful at instilling a sense of profound dread in the reader as the main character's world unravels and foreshadows her ultimate fate. However, Didion's usual bag of tricks, such as beginning a series of sentences with the same clause, repeating a quote/thought almost obsessively ("We used to have a real life and just because I'm your daughter I'm supposed to like it and I don't"), and cryptic sentences didn't seem to work here. One wants her to just get to the point. If you have never read Didion fiction I would recommend you start with the classic "Play It As It Lays." If you read "Last Thing" first you may never read another Didion anything, and that would be a damn shame.

This book was absolutely not good! It never made any sense and skipped around that by the time it got back to a certain person, you had already forgotten who they were and why they were significant! I just read a review and they said it was a romeo and juliet book, i had no idea the main character was even in love, much less there was a second main character! If you have nothing to do for days, and time to write down every character and their significance, read this book, otherwise, really don't waste your time!

This book has a great story to tell, but through the stalling and back-telling the powerfulness of the message is lost. I found that I had to force myself to finish hoping to be swept away by the ending, but was instead left wondering what I had missed. The narrative is confusing and lacks any passion on the subject at hand. However I believe this could be an intriguing movie.