Joan Didion

Didion is one of my favorite journalists and stylists, but I've long suspected she hasn't read a novel since the sixties.

I think her position is "if I've already got Henry James and Joseph Conrad what do I need with other authors"

my gf takes that line. it's kind of infuriating but also kind of impossible to argue with

A positive thing to do with Didion would be just to quote lines she's written that one thinks are good.

― the pinefox, Tuesday, March 8, 2011 11:37 AM Bookmark

"I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition, but one I found troubling." (The White Album)

"I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends."
(Slouching Towards Bethlehem)

seems like that one is the standard go-to quotation for Didion, but it's still so great.

yeah that would be mine, too

I don't especially remember it. Surely the go-to qns (ie the most famous) would be

'we tell ourselves stories in order to live'

and the first para or so of the 'slouching towards B' essay which really is striking, even to a sceptic like me.

I like bits of 'on the morning after the sixties' and 'goodbye to all that' also.

I find her most interesting in chunks. I mean, I know that's exactly what the publishers have always been shooting for -- but 'The White Album', e.g., does gain a lot of interest from being 'Didion does the 70s'. I think, too, that read with some mind to the fact of her mental state the thoughts, sentiments, expressed therein make more sense to a reader than if one tries to consider them the feelings of a vast, dispassionate brain -- I'm not entirely sure what I mean by that, now, having written it.

I'm not sure I don't get more out of John McPhee or Ellen Willis, say, as guides to the culture. But Didion's stuff maybe has more to do with the interplay of 'trying to be a guide to the culture' and 'trying to maintain your own individual psyche'.

curious about what you meant aactually by "feelings of a vast dispassionate brain".
Some of the more topical stuff can be so so, but I have a place in my heart for her languid writing on hotels in Hawaii or growing flowers in Malibu

The great strength of her later nonfiction is her iron stomach & unblinking gaze when she uses quotations - I attribute this to her lifelong admiration of Hemingway, her desire for the words to do 100% of the work when possible. From "God's Country," about Bush, which ran during the 2000 election:

This was a man who, when the Texas economy went belly-up in the mid-1980s, joined a group of Midland businessmen who met once a week under the guidance of a national group called Community Bible Study, the class format of which includes the twelve-step technique of personal testimony, in this case "seeing the truths of the Bible lived out in the lives of leaders and class members." The participants in Bush's class were "baby boomers, men with young families," a former member told Hanna Rosin of The Washington Post. "And we suddenly found ourselves in free fall. So we began to search for an explanation. Maybe we had been too involved with money. Maybe we needed to look inwardly and find new meaning in life."

She is quite good at that, I agree - but doesn't it largely rely on the daftness and inaptness of the things the stupid or wicked people say?

but her juxtapositions are done with perfect timing

btw her Reagan essay "In the Court of the Fisher King" is LOL funny.

She is quite good at that, I agree - but doesn't it largely rely on the daftness and inaptness of the things the stupid or wicked people say?

Sure but it's the way she frames it - her skill for decorating the frame within which the pre-existing horror will be displayed is remarkable. "the class format of which includes the twelve-step technique of personal testimony, in this case " and then the quote: it's like she's knotted the most economical noose. She also has (and whether this is a virtue or not depends on your outlook) a gift for the very subtle sneer - I can't say just how "the class format of which includes the twelve-step technique of personal testimony, in this case" manages to convey ridicule/disbelief, but it does

As I've said before (probably way upthread several times, years ago), I have often found a weakness of her writing to be the unsubtlety of the sneers (albeit done in this blank-looking style).

But that would be mainly in relation to the earlier work, I think. If she uses her time and ability to attack very nasty right-wing US politicians - something she seems to have done much more of in the last 2 decades or so - then that's fine by me, really.

She attacks lots of Democrats too: I remember one devastating paragraph about Bill Clinton in her (masterful) essay on the impeachment.

I've never understood what's so special about joan didion

like whenever I read her work I'm like ok this is alright what else

We've just two days explaining it!

I will now scroll up

But that would be mainly in relation to the earlier work, I think. If she uses her time and ability to attack very nasty right-wing US politicians - something she seems to have done much more of in the last 2 decades or so - then that's fine by me, really.

You might read "Political Fictions," a collection of her political essays. It does include her attacks on right-wing politicians, including Bill Clinton.

^^^ you beat me to that crack

not trying to troll here but when the pinefox said that her prose was unadventurous, yeah, I agree with that, that's probably the biggest stumbling block in me getting into her work, that's just my thing though, like, I look at it, and just think, yeah ok this is pretty american, these are some thoughts some people have

love this:

these are some thoughts some people have

just so we have our parameters defined, whose prose is "adventurous," and how?

^ im wonderin

I'd read an interview of Bret Easton Ellis where he sings Joan Didion's praises, and so I read a few passages, and I was a little shocked at how much he just wholesale appropriated her style, and why not? It's a pretty effective style. People should steal it more often.

these are some thoughts some people have

yeah sure, and that's actually a good way of putting it. hell, she certainly doesn't beat you over the head with any grand authorial voice. her prose is usually very unshowy, and she has a way of articulating the intuitive and even the banal but makes those thoughts fresh in a way that makes it seem like you are both in your head and out of it (or in the head of someone else that has these kind of banal though/connections and at the same time out of of that person's head). Her style is very Hemmingway (and by extension, Carver-esque) but she updates it in that the style reflects this condition that we all feel like we are living in a fiction/ dream that somehow doesn't line up with the fiction/dream that we see all around us, but still kind of does, or maybe we just still wish it did ... and this all makes us alienated from ourselves yadda yadda yadda .... so we "tell ourselves stories in order to live" in order to pinch ourselves and gain control and understanding and order but it never totally works so we keep doing it.

(And if Joan Didion were saying the above yammer she would do it much more effectively obv)

And her viewpoint is very American, very West Coast and I wonder how may people that are not so into her are not American and/or whether that makes a difference.

And for everyone who hasn't read her fiction, I would say pick up "Play It As It Lays" (very short and reads quickly too). Her fiction-writing style is also very cool and minimal and even reporterly, but also looser and plays up the dreamy haziness and it even has its experimental moments (one of her main things is switching between 1st and 3rd person).

in that "yeah I get it, so what the hell is so great a bout this" kind of way, but to me it's much more feminine

And maybe it is an American thing.

ha ha ... didn't mean to post those last two sentences

That is an interesting, suggestive-looking defence of Didion. Your sense of 'we are living in a fiction/ dream that somehow doesn't line up with the fiction/dream that we see all around us' seems to be quite true to an element of her work.

The idea that she is very American etc is interesting too, though I would like to hear what 'very West Coast' means in a writer. Perhaps English people say 'very Northern' and others don't know what it is supposed to mean; or perhaps they do know.

I didn't know I'd said she was unadventurous, but then it turned out I had. Of course the word doesn't matter much, or could be less precise than I wanted. Romeo says she's unshowy. That might be getting at the same thing. Certainly there are lots of ways of being a good writer. So, can a prose writer really be adventurous at all?

I thought about it, and I think I can name three who have been: James Joyce, Roland Barthes, Paul Morley -- all of whose writing has thrilled and moved me a good deal.

[btw I am English and on reflection I don't think I know what would be meant by 'very Northern', beyond differences in accents.

Probably only Stuart Maconie understands or credits this ontological divide]

I think that there's often an adventurousness to "unadventurousness," to prose characterized by its economy and seeming simplicity. Pinefox, stuff that you consider adventurous seems to be more maximal vs. the minimalness of Didion/Carver/Hemmingway (and his iceberg theory). Well, maximal certainly applies to Joyce and Pynchon (who you mention upthread). Barthes is pretty minimal for a cultural critic but I don't think he can be compared to Didion so well; two different projects. (I haven't read Morley, so no comment there). Funny that the 3 minimal authors I mention are all American (and even all-American .. ha). I don't think this style is necessarily American but it's probably more American than European and I really can't think of any British minimalists off the top of my head. Camus and Peter Handke would qualify as European minimalists I think.

As far as my "west coast" comment is concerned. There's definitely a kind of US west/east coast binary. It's really hard to get into that without making a lot of cringeworthy generalizations. And, unfortunately, California, and particularly LA/Hollywood are the big West Coast metonyms, and East Coast is often reduced to New York City and New England and the rest of both coasts are kind of different things that get left out and/or placed elsewhere. But anyways, West Coast ... long days, big vistas, highways, cars, movies, Manifest Destiny, gold rush and get-rich-quick, American Dream, the (obv bullshit) idea of American Utopia, deserts, sunshine, sexual freedom and transgression, anonymity (and making oneself new), and, later, counterculture and drugs ... that kind of thing ... and there's a disillusionment/aftermath to all that and it informs Didion's work. And, and this is I think what I was getting at really, I find Didion's style to be particularly West Coast in its spareness and imagery. I'm thinking mostly here of "Play It As It Lays" which is a Hollywood novel and has a lot of restless and purposeless highway driving and the alienation-from-self and fiction/dream thing I was talking about, and all of that isreflected in the style.

Of course, Pynchon is West Coast too ... so West Coast doesn't necessarily equal minimal.

And I think I only have a really vague idea of what "Northern" means, btw. I mean I guess there's, historically, the industrial and working-class-ness of some Northern cities, right? I dunno. Maybe someone can enlighten.

Didion's Where I Was From explicitly & at length explains how she is west coast. The character of California, the formation of what she'd call its character (I agree with her that there is a specifically Californian culture, an outlook; not that all who live there share it, necessarily, but that there is such a thing that informs and drives life there), has long obsessed her, and is almost always in play in her fiction. It has to do with property & water rights & a desire for comfort, an elevation of comfort as a sort of indication of grace -- it also has to do with a sort of preemptive alienation. That's like only a little of it, though - I went and got the book off the shelf, but I haven't read it in a while, and it's complex & elegant, I wouldn't want to just grab a good pull-quote. If the question "how is Didion a west coast writer?" is of interest to you, you should pick it up, anyway.

whenever I hear this chick's name I think she's actually a folk singer... man who am i thinking of...

preemptive alienation is exactly the vibe of didion's writing

Did she ever write horror? She has a good stylistic fit for it. (Maybe writing about the west coast is de facto horror ha!)

The bit I just read about seeing a Newport Beach high school team play against Costa Mesa in the 80s and getting beaten & the Newport kids chanting "Hey hey, that's OK, you're gonna work for us one day" counts as horror I think

I wish instead of a camera crew, MTV sent her and David Foster Wallace to document those "my super sweet 16" things.

Philip, I love you.

In general, I like her hundred-word sentences more than her five-word ones.

I've read *where I was from*. I was somewhat disappointed by it. I like the picture on the front of my copy.

I thought *play as it lays* was very poor, probably the worst Didion I've read.

I agree that adventure / unadventure looks like it plays out as maximal / minimal but I was somewhat trying to avoid that. Joyce is adventurous cos his style is (at times) flamboyant and expansive, yes, but also cos it changed so many times - that's truly an adventure, the Odyssey of style. Barthes also remade himself time and again - and his prose changed with it - but there is also a sense of reaching out in his prose, walking out on the tightrope if you like - which I suppose Morley shares. Morley also has daftness and namedropping, lots of things compacted together into a mix that people continually attack. (Another word that one wants to use is 'risk' in the writing, though again it might be approximate or even less helpful; none of these people was actually going to get hurt on account of their writing, save perhaps Joyce in a turbulent Europe.)

(reflection: when you set up any kind of principle ['I like un / adventurous writing'] it quickly becomes problematic in one way or another. In some ways I have come to suspect that the judgements we make are often about one writer at a time, sometimes even just one text, and not generalizable in the way we might think or want.)

It does seem that I am saying or concluding that writing in a minimal or plain way is likely to be relatively unadventurous, at the level of style. I think that's probably true. But it's true that plain writing can be good, for various purposes.

To corroborate that I don't like 'maxmimal' writing as such, I can recall that (to open another can of exploding sardines) I am largely on James Wood's side in the old hysterical realism debate. I don't think Pynchon's expansiveness necessarily makes for good fiction; Rushdie's makes for what feels to me like actively bad or at least deeply tiresome fiction.

Princess Tam Tam: Joan Baez? whose sister married Pynchon's best buddy at a wedding attended by Dylan?

(Joyce's first book of fiction was relatively very plain, indeed a model for plainness in the short story; moving beyond that was part of the adventure.)

(as I recollect it now, the effect of Didion's style in the *fiction* is not so much of plainness but more of mannerism - one which didn't come off for me. Perhaps there is a more genuine plainness in the non-fiction; which as I've often said, I think is better than the fiction of hers that I've read. But then perhaps I am the only one using the word 'plain' anyway.)

(Actually I come to think that 'mannerism' is a key word here, ie in some writers, sometimes, minimalism is not plain [as we might tend to assume it is] but mannered.

But talk of mannerism then I think raises the meta-question: why is mannerism bad? Some of us like some mannerisms in art. So again, articulating a general principle possibly doesn't get you very far.)

Ambrosia for Didion fans:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n06/david-thomson/what-does-a-snake-know-or-intend

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3144/2671216059_f49c822c86.jpg

I thought *play as it lays* was very poor, probably the worst Didion I've read.

Ha, well, yes, I think we're going to want to shake hands and agree that men of society are often found to differ in their tastes - I consider Play It As It Lays one of the definitive works of modern fiction, on par with any of the finest novels of the 20th century

yeah, nothing beats play it as it lays for me -- i read part of it years ago and didn't get it and finally went through the whole thing in one sitting during a horrible, much-delayed, overnight flight a few months ago and it left me feeling a bit like i'd just witnessed a murder or something.

among other things, it's maybe the best description of what it's like to be clinically depressed that i've ever read.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5145/5561062104_fcabc806cd.jpg

mmm pizza

whoa that book-bench thing is sick as hell! i hate like... holding pages... down...

She did warn people not to forget she's in the room (as they tended to because she was so small and quiet, she said), because she's there to getcha (that was earlier though, I may never get back that far)

LOA wrapping up the trilogy this fall:

https://www.loa.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/9781598537871-185x300.jpg

I am excited to read the stage version of Magical Thinking