The Importance of Being Joan, Part 1
 by William D. Sheldon

AMERICA IS A STRANGE PLACE, ONE I'M IN NO WAY READY TO LEAVE. Whether you're a political junkie (leaning left or right or smack in the middle) or an unrepentant English major for life, there's always more in print than you can master. There's also television, a good thing to many people and for many reasons, but for me primarily a hypnotic sedative. A couple of years ago I got married and gained not only a partner and two very cool step kids, but a television. Having lived without a TV for many years, I had no idea how quickly it would turn me into a lump on the couch. This column is my rebellion -- not against marriage or even necessarily television, but against the mental passivity and bland acceptance of mediocrity that comes with lots of watching.

I'm a Joan Didion fan. Have been for more than 20 years. Fell in love with the art of the personal essay reading Slouching Towards Bethlehem. My second read was her third novel, The Book Of Common Prayer. Over the years I've come to trust her judgements and look forward to her essays and book reviews in the New York Review of Books, her most frequent forum. She pinioned the soul sickness of the '60s and '70s without caving in to easy moral pot-shots and without pandering to celebrities. Didion's commentaries on the Reagan years during the Reagan years were like steaks in an era of famine.

Recently I've reread a number of her books, and read a couple for the first time. While I still believe her early works hold up quite well, I'm captivated by some of the newer works. In this article I'll open the door to discussion of Didion's themes and techniques. Here in Part I I'll start with the novels; there are four. In Part II (to be published in the next installment of Kill Your TV) I'll address her three books of short essays, and the two longer non-fiction works, Salvador and Miami.

One essayist has complained that rereading all of Didion's novels was a painful experience she would not repeat. I have to admit that I have come to prefer a more crisp, informative prose style. But perhaps that misses the point. Didion's fiction prose is spare. She creates a voice of brooding menace.

In The Last Thing He Wanted and The Book of Common Prayer, the menace is a combination of the incredibly poor choices of the leading characters and the Central American political disasters into which these characters drift. In the California novels (Run River and Play It As It Lays), the menace is a life led without self-direction. The women in those two novels are defined by their response to men. They are repeatedly told what to do, what they do and don't want, where to be and how to live. They respond with a progression from innocent acceptance to bitter, resentful, powerless obedience and secret infidelity.

There are passages in all of her novels that are reminiscent of the tone and moral quandaries of Graham Greene's fiction. There is the sense that the world has recently changed, shifted without the knowledge or consent of the protagonist. Changed into a world where order and ethical judgments are less important, less valued, and missed by only some. Play It As It Lays and Run River read side by side with the essays in The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem reveals the early, angry, frightened, emerging Didion. This is the author who was choosing to write rather than lose control in the face of a stultifyingly irrational world. This is an author for whom the '60s and early '70s appeared as a political, moral, ethical and social kaleidoscope.

Play It As It Lays is the story of Maria Wyeth, an actress with only two movies to her credit, her relationship with her husband (the only director she's worked with) and the aftermath of her abortion. It has three gears: (1) a low speed where Maria experiences the pathetic, unintentionally cruel ironies of California life in the '60s; (2) a middle speed of intentional, often self-conscious blundering cruelties committed by friends and strangers alike; (3) a high speed engaged only occasionally, in which Maria's flight from irony runs smack into a wall painted to look like a highway.

The symbols are thick. First, Maria's frequent need to drive for hours at a time, usually with no destination in mind, or, if heading somewhere, abandoning the notion. The two films Maria has starred in -- one about a girl who survives gang rape, the other merely a long portrait of her day-to-day banal activities (hailed as an artistic masterpiece by film-school types). For days after her abortion, visions of rattlesnakes, nightmares about plumbing that turns menacing create a powerful, drug-like atmosphere. The abortion itself serves both as a catalyst for her accelerating depression and as a symbol of her marriage, her career, possibly her life.

In feel, direction and underlying philosophy, this novel is an updated version of Camus' The Stranger. Maria's abortion is as central to the novel as the pointless murder is in The Stranger. But Maria's haplessness is of a different character. It is bound up in her role as a woman in her culture, a sexual plaything, an unequal partner, a being defined by the men in her life. The final third of this extremely brief novel is Maria's nightmarish decline.

Run River is set in the Sacramento Valley. It begins in 1959 with the discovery of a murder; it ends in 1959, a few minutes after that discovery. The time frame in between those two instants is from 1938 to 1959, encompassing the lives of two prominent families.

The central character, again, is a woman, Lily. Her marriage to the heir of the ranch next door is the center of her life. Her husband, however, discovers during his brief military career that he doesn't have much use for women or the farm or anything that brings disorder into his life. Lily bears him a son and a daughter prior to the war and aborts the bastard child of her adulteries upon his return. But his return to the ranch neither resolves his inattention to the family nor thwarts her sexual adventures outside the home.

A second woman figures prominently in the novel: Lily's sister-in-law, Martha, who moves back into the family home after dropping out of college during her brother's army stint. Martha's character adds a dimension to the discussion of what women do and don't become, a central theme in Didion's novels. Martha never picks a career; she is used by a shiftless, manipulative man; her one job ends in its second week because she is too frightened and too uninformed to handle its duties. She doesn't even call to say she's quitting, doesn't ever open the letter from her employer with her one paycheck. She just returns to the family ranch and resumes the life of a dependent child in an adult body. She drinks, rages, snipes sarcastically at the family and appears to love her brother so much that his having a wife robs her of her one chance at a meaningful life. She can't truly love anyone else. Her life ends because she did things that "she knew better" than to do. She "knew better" than to expect Ryder Channing would someday marry her. She "knew better" than to take a boat out on the river at night.

But in truth, these people don't "know better." They are babes in the woods. They have no connection to the local political scene despite living just outside of the state's capital and have an enormous stake in the development of land and agriculture going on around them. As adults they can handle neither business nor sexual relations nor rearing children with any degree of competence. Lily's husband, Everett, was happy only once in his life -- in the military. Ironically, he served during World War II but never went overseas; he was happy at, where else, Ft. Bliss. In his absence, the properties deteriorate without interference from either woman. Lily pleads with Everett to come home because "things are falling apart," but he ignores her pleas. It is only the death of his father that forces him, grudgingly and without any haste, to seek a discharge from the Army and come home. No one seems to seriously wonder why Lily and Martha did not take charge of the family business during those years.

The vast wealth to be made and the enormous changes coming to California after the war seem to these characters to be a movement in bad taste, one that may go away if they ignore it. In Joan Didion (1981), critical biographer Katherine Usher Henderson commented that Didion may have been describing in Lily's character who she might have become had she not discovered literature at age 12.

Fans of Hemingway and Fitzgerald will like Run River. There are flashes of The Sun Also Rises and The Great Gatsby in the novel's characters, and this is a far more developed set of characters than in Play It As It Lays. At the risk of sounding sexist, it is also an important novel for women to read -- not just in the 1960s, but now. It is the antidote to romance novels, to moral and intellectual passivity, to the unconscious acceptance of male dominance in a woman's life choices.

It is also the antidote to anyone, male or female, living in a family myth, living blind to the political and economic realities of his or her time. The myth is that to be descended from the early settlers and cultivators of that lush land is to be destined for a great, or at least meaningful, life. The truth is that meaning and greatness require a level of awareness and action that eludes these characters, and the result is disillusionment and tragedy.

In Didion, Henderson makes an observation about technique in this novel that, as it turns out, holds true for all of Didions novels. Didion "uses narrative technique to produce certain special effects: to suspend the action temporarily in order to let the reader see scenes from the past, to balance and juxtapose contrasting scenes, and to create here and there a satirical portrait."

The women in the California novels have lives half-formed because they have allowed circumstances and men to keep them in neutral for years. They have been essentially passive. They are exactly what the women's movement rebelled against. They are Didion's exploration of what she did not have to be, if for no other reason than that she had writing talent and the courage to turn her own observations into essays and fiction. She imposed meaning on her own life, imposed the structure of being a writer over the looming menace of a life in neutral.

Her fascination with the water transfer system in California ("Holy Water" and "At The Dam" in The White Album) is also reflected in Maria Wyeth's brief fantasy about the Hoover Dam when her own life is entirely unraveling. The theme is the same, but Wyeth is on the losing end of the emotional stick, while the Didion of The White Album is on the way up. Maria has no control or will take no control. Didion recognizes that everyone's "control" or sense of control is limited, tenuous, possibly contingent, but essential.

In Run River and Book of Common Prayer, Didion's prose style becomes temporarily more expansive. Her descriptive passages are longer, her characters interact with greater frequency and complexity. The latter is probably her best known and best selling novel. It is also where her view of narrative begins to evolve. In Run River and Play it As It Lays she shifted point of view from one character to another, briefly, skillfully adding portions of other accounts to the narrative. It was so brief in Play it As It Lays as to be easily missed (constituting only a few paragraphs spread out through the book), but expanded seamlessly in Run River. In Book Of Common Prayer, the narrator is also a character, though not the primary subject of the book. However, she is an active participant in significant portions of the narrative.

That voice begins to split off from the action in Democracy and becomes further removed in The Last Thing He Wanted. The narrator in each is a journalist (specifically Joan Didion in the first), self-conscious of her role, her distance from the characters (although she knows them) and of the shortcomings that are the nature of turning gathered facts into an omniscient narrative.

In contrast to the women of the first two novels is Inez Victor, the ostensible protagonist of Democracy (1984). Ostensible, because Didion herself is present as a character, a journalist, "reporting" the novel. Or because Jack Lovett and Billy Dillon carry the majority of the action in the novel. They are the fixers, the men with knowledge and power. Lovett is some kind of government operative (the acronym CIA is never used) working behind the scenes in a variety of Asian settings, from Jakarta in 1969 to Saigon in 1975. Dillon is Congressman Victor's assistant, whose life seems to be devoted to "managing" situations, reporters, lawyers, politicians and even the Victor family to avoid public embarrassments for the congressman. Dillon is the only character in the novel with a sense of humor.

Inez stands apart from the principal women of the California novels because she does make decisions, eventually. She is married to a congressman whose unsuccessful bid for the Democratic nomination for president is part of the background, along with her bizarre family, most of whom are still in Hawaii. Didion uses the locations of this novel -- Hawaii, Washington, Seattle, Hong Kong, Saigon -- effectively to demonstrate that no matter how global or local a character is, the ultimate question is whether she or he acts from conscience or convenience. The story's suspense comes from the announcement of a murder at the beginning, with no attempt to hide the murderer's identity, but a long, roundabout way of getting back to the crime. The "satirical" element of Didion's skill at characterization is, by this time, well developed.

This is an odd novel, not the least because Didion reveals herself as the author and a minor character in it. She even quotes passages from other pieces about herself. She discusses the concept of narrative within the context of her own attempt to maintain it. She refers to the book, near the end, as "a novel of fitful glimpses." The blend of fact and fiction is successful in its deliberate use of a self-conscious author. "[T]he heart of narrative is a certain calculated ellipsis, a tacit contract between writer and reader to surprise and be surprised, how not to tell you what you do not yet want to know," Didion the character tells us. She reveals so much and so little as the novel (not the narrative) progresses. She tells us who committed a murder, but for the longest time we have no idea why. She takes us on a tour of characters whose interactions are abrasive, whose views of each situation are hopelessly disparate, and whose truly startling actions are more or less successfully smoothed over for the press by Billy Dillon. But in the end, Inez chooses a life for herself. Didion says in the novel that "human behavior seems to me essentially circumstantial" and she certainly offers a great deal of evidence for this -- but with frequent contrast in the moral choices (or failure to choose) of these same characters.

There is a quote on the cover of the paperback copy I have of the novel from a reviewer at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner: "A love story for our time." I find this blurb utterly silly. There is a love connection between two people, Inez and the much older Jack Lovett. Their ability to connect is derived from their respective solitariness, aloofness, emotional unavailability. Their lives are extremes and their "love" works in the novel more as a vague form of gravity than as a romance, although ultimately that attraction provides Inez with the means to escape her failed marriage and, arguably, save her daughter's life during the fall of Saigon.

There is an unbelievably frustrating quality to Maria's passivity and her mental decline in Play It As It Lays, but Democracy's Inez refuses to become mentally insufficient, even when Billy Dillon and Congressman Victor (her husband) begin suggesting that she is "overwrought" because of her sister's murder (by their father) and not responsible for her actions. Late in the novel she chooses to take on a lifestyle and occupation very much in line with the beliefs she held when she was young, beliefs that were set aside by her husband's handler because they were too controversial for the wife of a presidential candidate.

Would she have made such a choice had she not wound up in Indonesia with the CIA operative? Would she have chosen from self-knowledge and conscience rather than as a result of circumstance? This is where the fictional author may depart from the real Didion. Going back to the issue of control and finding meaning in life, Didion has made it clear that her own depression and emotional instability were ultimately shed in favor of sitting in front of the typewriter for several hours a day, getting at least a little work done. Funny as it is to say, she found meaning in writing about the meaninglessness of the lives of many of her characters. Being a writer, an observer, an extremely cautious commentator gave her an identity. Eventually her comments became less cautious. Success will do that.

The Book of Common Prayer (1977) contains the female character with the most (if not only) sense of humor in all of her novels. Grace Strasser-Mendana tells the story of the Central American country that has become her home, much of it in fact her property, and the story of the ill-fated visitor Charlotte Douglas. Charlotte is clearly a wound-up, delusional North American too far from home with too much time on her hands. The story of her daughter (candy-striper turned terrorist) and her life with and without her ex-husbands has that quality of satire identified in biographer Katherine Usher Henderson's comments. It is a sad and tragic novel with touches of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Charlotte Douglas' last five years of life are the substance of the story. The choices she made (and the passivity that at times overtook her) with her two ex-husbands are, again, the defining moments. But the definition of her life would be found in a dictionary under "insanity." Charlotte is simply the most bizarre character in all of Didion's novels. She passes from disappointed wife to victim of a truly creepy romantic re-attachment (to her first ex-husband). She goes from wife of an established, successful leftist California criminal defense lawyer to international vagabond. She does not have an abortion (setting her apart from Lily and Maria of the first two novels) but does bear a child with a non-functioning liver, a child she carries around for weeks waiting for its death. The theme of the "lost child" is present again, both in the sick and dying infant and in her criminal daughter. But there are levels of self-delusion explored in this novel that exceed Didion's prior ventures in this direction. Grace remarks on it frequently, retelling the parody of a life that was Charlotte's -- a life Grace tried in vain to save.

The background of portions of the novel is the unstable Central American dictatorship in which Grace's family members play various roles in the political coups. Charlotte wanders into this tropical bad dream and stays too long. With shades of El Salvador, this country goes quietly about its business, sheltering few tourists and allowing politically motivated murders to become an unexceptional fact of life. The reader, like Charlotte, experiences a false sense of safety in Boca Grande throughout much of the novel. There can be no mistake that Boca Grande of the time in question does not become the haven of daily disappearances and body dumps of the real El Salvador. Didion knows that world, too, and sets it out in graphic detail in her book-length essay, Salvador.

The Last Thing He Wanted (1996), Didion's newest novel, resembles Democracy in subject matter and tone. The feeling of a Graham Greene novel returns, together with a heightened suspense. Again Didion's female protagonist, humorless and neurotic as she may be, is cast in a role chosen for her by at least one of the men in her life. This is a strange novel of intrigue, with a plot resembling "The Passenger," a film by Michelangelo Antonioni. As in "The Passenger," an innocent person assumes the identity of an arms dealer, wanders far from safety and is decidedly in over her head. Unlike in the film's plot, however, Didion's innocent is the daughter of the real arms dealer. The "deal" takes her deep into Central America, where she is abandoned with no more than a false passport and a promise of the payoff. She discovers, whether accidentally or not, that shadowy figures in her new world consider her father (mysteriously dead on the same day a false passport is issued for her -- in her absence) to be "no longer a problem."

This is a novel of political double talk and murder. As in Democracy, the only romance in the book is the mutual attraction of two equally remote people. In a time and place where she was not likely to survive, a love affair is the last thing she wanted. The he in the novel is a powerful Washington insider, a State Department big shot, a fixer. He does not meet, let alone fall in love with, his equally remote female counterpart until the very end of the book. As in Democracy, Didion narrates from the point of view of a journalist who happened to have encountered both of these people at different times, and who reviewed the official record, interviewed the man and pieced the story together. It works perhaps better here than in Democracy, and could be said to help carve out a sub-genre for Didion's understated, dry, political-intrigue novels. It cannot be said to take the liberation of her female protagonist further than earlier novels. In fact, it may be the first of her novels to have outgrown the question.

Its weakness is reliance on numerous political references, some obscure, that are needed to place much of the conflict of the novel. I read it in tandem with her non-fiction works Salvador and Miami. I recommend the grouping.

Stylistically, The Last Thing He Wanted returns to the spare, almost minimalist, prose style of Didion's first novel. The chapters are short, some just a few lines. The characters are seen from a greater distance and their interactions are brief. It lacks the depth of emotional detail achieved in Run River and Book of Common Prayer, but perhaps that is the point. Didion tells us in one essay in After Henry that she had come to believe that narrative was "sentimental." In Democracy she made her discussion of what narrative means a part of the novel. The abandonment of any unnecessary detail or emotion in her latest novel can be seen as a natural progression in the development of this theme.

[ Copyright © 2000 William D. Sheldon. All rights reserved. ]

William D. Sheldon, TW3's Articles Editor, is a lawyer, an avid reader and a writer who makes his home in Flagstaff, Arizona.

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