Joan Didion

I know it's late but you can read that WA piece - and a lot of the older NYRB articles in general - by putting the URL in the Internet Archive and going to the earlier incarnations. It's actually quite short by NYRB standards.

Didion writes with the plainness, and / or carefulness, that we expect from her. I quickly come to realise, again, that one of her typical effects is to report what people say, within this flat style, and thus make them look silly or vainglorious. I ask myself why this effect is achieved and I think: well, it's a bit like letting them speak, then, rather than responding, applauding or reflecting, just leaving silence, and thus making them appear to "fall flat". This, roughly, seems to me one of the characteristic strategies of her whole career.

This is a great observation! Something that's annoyed me that I haven't seen put into words before. Didion's not the only writer who does this. And obviously it's a staple of reality show editing.

What annoys you about it? Curious.

Thanks, poster Chuck Tatum. I had to think a bit before I could articulate this small observation.

xpost

Perhaps it's the unprocessed need for the writer to seem smarter than the people they're observing. I guess there's a line between allowing someone the space to damn themselves (which is fine) and unfairly making someone seem like a phoney (which might say more about the author than the subject).

Imagine someone (not) reacting to you like that in real life and it’s clear why it’s annoying.

the style referred to entered journalism (or anyway this is my under-informed guess) via the younger new yorker style-switch from a youthful over-admiration of henry james to the golden-bowl guilt phase of absorbing imitating and parodying hemingway and his mentor gertrude stein: whose combined shtick was (a) less is more, let the subtext sing in the air stripped of any DO-YOU-SEE-style announcement* plus in particular stein's penchant for repetition as a device for variation of mode

*where "not saying it" is a mark of shared sensibility: we needn't comment-explain bcz we all already get it (which narrowing of the "we" -- as chuck above suggests -- is actually kind of a betrayal of journalism i guess, certainly a super-complex ethical-aesthetical line that the NYer created and then made its early home in )

yes i am meant to be cleaning my kitchen floor and not at all on this thread, yell at me next time i post plz

"less is more" = leaving out the (b) = stein's use of repetition as a forensic device

I'm relieved to see that I broadly agree with Mark S, though without knowing enough about New Yorker magazine history.

I like his reference to a "betrayal of journalism".

Perhaps it's the unprocessed need for the writer to seem smarter than the people they're observing. I guess there's a line between allowing someone the space to damn themselves (which is fine) and unfairly making someone seem like a phoney (which might say more about the author than the subject).

― Chuck_Tatum

This is true, but this approach starts to ebb around the 1980s. It's why I admire Miami and the later work over the more famous early stuff.

I think it's important for the writer of features and reviews to know when to let the quote have some space around it, for the reader to fill, having established context. The writer also has to be choosy about quotes, not just pick the best or worst lines, but also not just stringing a lot of lines together, beyond just enough of the latter to give the idea, if that's what the artiste mainly does. I've had some hard times with that kind of writing, but it's worth doing, I think--of course some readers, incl. some editors want every damn thing spelled out. I even had one editor who told me to "spoonfeed," in so many words. I don't go around that joint no more.

As a reader, I find it offputting to have the writer jumping in there to explain everything, unless I'm reading an instruction manual or dispatch from a country/situation I've barely heard of etc.

I'm not talking about leaving space in "hard journalism," that is. The harder it is the more I want to be told about it.

anticipation: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/06/arts/design/joan-didion-hammer-museum-hilton-als.html

Who cares if she staged the photo in the article for a Williams Sonoma photo op? She tried to write.

betrayal of journalism my ass---in all the things I've read, some of her later writing, she provided the context, and so do the better New Yorker writers, rather jump in there with commentary, lecture points, that Gopnik Thurman etc "polymath" ponderosa

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