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Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion (1970)

August 6, 2010 Book Reviews
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Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion (1970)On the surface Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays looks like yet another story of a beautiful, privileged woman suffering a nervous breakdown. Maria Wyeth, an actress, is going through the breakdown of her marriage to director Carter Lang. Yet, Didion’s writing avoids the typical hysteria. Her technique is sparse, the restraint she shows is purposely alienating, intent at keeping the reader at a distance from the true horror of Maria’s suffering. It protects us from the oblivion of nothingness that Maria feels, and forces us to confront it ourselves.

She could remember it all but none of it seemed to come to anything. She a sense the dream had ended and she had slept on.

To recount the plot seems futile, the narrative is built from key events seen through Maria’s eyes. Maria has been committed to some form of institution, and looks back over what happened in the lead up to, during, and after the breakdown of her marriage. There is no clear linear progression, but events, signs, symbols gradually do fall in to place. Maria has an abortion. Maria visits her ex-husband on a movie set in the desert. Maria watches her close friend commit suicide. Something as simple as a stilted telephone conversation, as momentous as an arrest in the desert, or the nightmarish hallucination of the contents of blocked drains are all told in a brutally dispassionate third-person voice.

One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what “nothing” means, and keep on playing.
Why, BZ would say.
Why not, I say.

The structure of the novel is interesting too, opening with single chapters told in the first person from major characters – Maria’s manic, compelling voice, Helene reflecting on her conflicted relationship with Maria, and Carter trying to pinpoint where things started going wrong. From there, most of the novel is told in this distant third-person narration, until the end where Maria’s voice is heard again. This seems to mirror the state of Maria’s internal self, beginning with rampant self-obsession, turning to looking at herself from a disconnected and distant viewpoint and finally, we hope, gaining a stronger sense of her own identity by the end. It’s bleak, but Didion’s writing is so controlled that the emotional effect of these events, and of Maria’s perception of them, doesn’t hit until after. Play It As It Lays is a novel that lingers, becoming all the more powerful as time passes.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion (1968)

February 12, 2010 Book Reviews
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Joan Didion‘s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, much like her other writing of the same era, captures the turbulence of a culture in upheaval. The rapid social and cultural changes of the 1960s are unflinchingly reported by Didion, and she manages to write about her own experience of these events, with these people, in these places, without coming across as narcissistic or overbearing. The presence of her strong journalistic persona gives the issues a sense of urgency and realism.

The strongest pieces in Slouching Towards Bethlehem are the exclusively personal essays, “On Keeping a Notebook” and “On Self-Respect” were both resonant. “On Keeping a Notebook” ruminates on the notebooks of our lives, the snippets of conversations, places and times we choose to report and remember representing a definition of the self created from personal memories; basically that we create our own histories with what we record. Perhaps, removing the romantic notion associated with the writer’s notebook, can we use this way of thinking to look how we use twitter, tumblr, and so on as similar records of self? “On Self-Respect” is a call to reinstate the importance of a sense of self; it sounds trite as I write it, but Didion makes the possession of a sense of self, and the self-respect that comes along with that, as something exciting and powerful. I’m going to quote it at length here, because I found it inspiring:

In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. [...] Nonetheless, character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.
[...] To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out — since our self-image is untenable — their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. [...] At the mercy of those we cannot but hold in contempt, we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the urgency of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.

Even typing that out now instills me with the strength to hold my head up high, as well as realize past mistakes as being exemplary of what she is talking about. Reading “On Self-Respect” will encourage you to stand a little taller, demand what you deserve and refuse to settle for less than you are worth, I think it is an essay which I will be returning to time and time again.

Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.

Other essays, while not as powerfully effective on me as this one, are just as clearly elucidated. From masculine camaraderie on a John Wayne film set, to Joan Baez’s peace and non-violence school, to the title essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” in which Didion captures the hippie movement in San Francisco with an unforgiving eye. Refusing to wholly buy into the peace, love, tune in drop out mentality, Didion instead shows us another side of the hippies without condemning them. Slouching Towards Bethlehem at once captures the 1960s cultural zeitgeist without the retrospective nostalgia, encourages a sense of place and feels, at times, like an intensely personal insight into the life and thoughts of a young Joan Didion.

Book Loot: Week Ending January 3rd, 2009

January 3, 2010 Book Loot
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Now that the abominable 2009 (did anyone have a good year in 2009?) is behind us, it’s time to start anew with fresh resolutions to stick to, goals and challenges to work toward and a new layout for Start Narrative Here. Here is to 2010, a year which is destined to offer more sparkle than the last. Only a few days in and it seems to already be delivering. And, just to keep the ch-ch-ch-changes happening for 2010, I’ve finally succumbed to the twitterbug.

Book Loot: Week Ending 3rd January, 2010

Some of the books I ordered before Christmas – including some intended as Christmas gifts (no, really, thank you for striking at the busiest mailing time of year Australia Post workers) – have arrived this week, fresh from their bubble-wrapped jackets. A bookseller enthusiastically recommended the Bolaño to me, and he’s been spot on with all of his other recommendations.

I’ve been enjoying my time off from work and my reading has taken a prolific turn. In the next week I’ll be posting my reviews of a heartbreaking work about Hurricane Katrina, a salacious biography of a notorious figure from Melbourne’s seedy history and 2009′s most controversial novel.

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (2005)

December 24, 2009 Book Reviews
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The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (2005)

Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

After her husband is pronounced dead, the social worker assigned to Joan Didion reassures the doctor that she is “a real cool customer.” This coolness translates into her recollection and attempt to understand her loss, which sadly prevents the reader from forming any lasting emotional connection to her story. After their daughters hospitalization with pneumonia, Joan Didion and her husband John Gregory Dunne return home and prepare for dinner. Mid-conversation, Dunne suffers a fatal cardiac arrest. The Year of Magical Thinking is written in the year after his death, and follows Didion’s grieving process while her daughter is readmitted to hospital after collapsing.

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes.

Joan Didion, Quintana Roo Dunne and John Gregory Dunne

Didion attempts to understand her emotional reaction to her husbands death, an intensely personal and painful process. Throughout, however, she remains objectively detached, even in her description of her most intimate thoughts, fears and revelations. She remembers times spent together with Dunne, what that meant then and now, things that were said, the meaning of which have changed for her. At times Didion’s journalistic instincts take over the emotional impulse, she researches the psychological effects of grief, she buys impenetrable textbooks on neuroanatomy to try better understand her daughter’s condition. Information, she claims, is the key to control. She is continually seeking official documentation, learning the medical jargon to be able to locate some rational sense in her loss.

For a memoir which focuses solely on loss, death and mourning, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking is life affirming, but distanced. At the same time, I think my failure to really deeply connect with this is due to my not having experienced such a profound loss. I enjoyed Didion’s map of human consciousness, the bizarre and seemingly irrational paths our minds take, and her honesty about her relationship.

The White Album by Joan Didion (1979)

December 12, 2009 Book Reviews
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The White Album by Joan Didion (1979)As we hurtle toward the end of this decade, every media outlet in the world is attempting to pinpoint the defining moments, events, cultural and consumer products, celebrities, etc., of the past ten years. Though I understand that such lists and articles are always subjective and written in order to be contentious and to foster discussion, I feel that they don’t always adequately capture the increasing disorder and complexity of the milieu. We still haven’t decided on what the last decade was called – the noughties, aughts, whatever – let alone to be able to describe the lasting cultural impact it will have. The increasing amount of choice in regards to what we read, watch or listen to, to how we inform ourselves via aggregated feeds, the proliferation of distinct niches means that the idea of cultural zeitgeist is almost obsolete. So, what better way to round out the decade with Joan Didion’s eloquent record of her own confusion over the meaning of the 1960s in The White Album.

Written in the late 1960s and early to mid 1970s, Didion reflects upon an American culture in turmoil, its understanding of itself torn apart by an unpopular war, mass murders, social discord, and a culture in upheaval. Though Didion herself manages to maintain her productivity, she is unable to reconcile this personal cohesion with the disruption of the era. This collection is strongest as Didion explores the complicated narratives of the time, the Manson murders, the civil rights movement and the music of the age.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. […] We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Didion also takes the time to investigate lesser known yet equally important aspects of culture and society – her ability to make the intricacies of the highway traffic system and water infrastructure engaging and enlightening way is astounding. She manages to impose on them a narrative of utter import to the structure of life. Her essay on Hollywood cinema is eye-opening, if I had read it while I was studying film theory at university I’m sure I would have dropped out or changed courses almost immediately. She logically undoes all of the prestige and glamour associated with the art:

Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lecture fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place. A finished picture defies all attempts to analyze what makes it work or not work: the responsibility for its every frame is clouded not only in the accidents and compromises of production but in the clauses of its financing.

Didion’s understanding of the uncertainty and vagueness of a rapidly changing socio-cultural world is a timely reflection which offers a stark, though not entirely disheartening, way of looking upon our contemporary era as we too approach the close of a tumultuous decade.