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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
In her extraordinary memoir, Joan Didion grieves for her family and connects with her past -- and us.
Oct 18, 2005 | If I could stick my pen in my heart
Spill it all over the stage
Would it satisfy you? Would it slide on by you?
-- Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, 1974
Joan Didion has opened her veins on the page, as we pretty much knew she would. Her only choices, given what has befallen her, were to die herself or to write about it.
The world -- and you know what I mean, in this case, by "the world" -- has responded accordingly. In the last four weeks, the New York Times alone has reviewed Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking" twice (one of the reviews was by the former poet laureate of the United States, and it was just as tedious as that sounds, if not more so), published an interview/profile piece by Rachel Donadio (quite a good one), and run a lengthy excerpt from the book itself, complete with color photographs of the bone-thin Didion and her personal Ground Zero, the rambling Upper East Side apartment where her husband, John Gregory Dunne, died suddenly in December 2003.
How has the personal tragedy of a famous writer become a sort of public ritual, a media event in its own right? If Salman Rushdie or Don DeLillo or Joyce Carol Oates were to publish an account of surviving the sudden death of a spouse and the lingering fatal illness of an adult child, would we be reading about it at such length and in such depth? I hope they and we don't have to discover the answer, but I don't think so. The ingredients of Joan Didion's current media moment are various, but they all have to do with her unique symbolic importance in American culture.
It's one thing to say that Didion is the greatest living writer of American prose, or that "The Year of Magical Thinking" is an unusual book. Viewed through the fishy eye of the literary critic, it's one of the best and most adventurous things she has written. Those are judgments to which I would subscribe, but they tell us only so much. Most of the response to this book is not in fact a response to the book but to the life situation that occasioned it, and perhaps to the fact that it exists at all. A cynical, and not entirely wrongheaded, thing to say here is that our culture is obsessed with "real" events because we hardly experience any, and that the private deaths of Didion's husband and daughter, along with her own private suffering, are in danger of being transformed by endless publicity into spectacles or pseudo-events.
There's more to it than that. Our response is fed by an all too human river of emotions, some of it fast and shallow and some of it deep and black and swollen. Some of it is compassion for a human being many of us imagine we know, and with whom we feel perhaps too strong a sense of identification; some is horrified fascination, even schadenfreude; some of it -- a fair bit, I think -- is hearing the bell toll. It has not wholly escaped our attention that some version of what has befallen Joan Didion and her family will befall us too. Sooner or later people we love will die and if we are what is considered lucky, if we keep living after that happens, we will be left alone waiting for our own appointment.
In her work Didion has sometimes seemed to be the conscience of journalism, while in her life she has enacted its most grandiose dreams about itself. Whether this is a contradiction or just a fact is not clear to me, but in either case it's the source of her symbolic power. She is a piercing intelligence in a field that values rapid response, savvy framework and an ability to regurgitate familiar narratives in clever language, but has almost no patience for actual intellectual activity. Her sharply analytical cast of mind and her evisceration of piety and bullshit -- whether found in the '60s counterculture, the Reagan White House or, as in her new book, the mist-occluded temples of medicine -- have reached us in a muscular but elegant prose style that owes as much to Emily Dickinson as to Hemingway.
Perhaps even more important, Didion framed her intelligence in a persona that was distinctly female, often vulnerable, sometimes neurotic. She was a well-bred California WASP who lived through the epochal experiences of the '60s but never imbibed their mythological essence -- when I interviewed her in 2003, she described herself as a sorority girl during her undergraduate years at Berkeley in the mid-'50s. This voice of self-aware entitlement and breeding, of the skeptical and observant outsider, an acerbic observer of her own foibles as much as those of her society, provoked a profound identification among two or three generations of upper-middle-class readers. In describing her own progress through troubled times, Didion seemed to be describing ours as well.
