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Gordon's Republic

The Year of Magical Thinking

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"At first I thought it was a demographic thing, baby boomers reaching an age where they're dealing with the deaths of their own parents and looking at their potential mortality. But a lot of people who come to events are much younger," says Joan Didion.Joan Didion has long been one of my favourite authors although too few people seem to read her, which is odd as her prose style, Norman Mailer has said, may be the finest since Hemingway.

She's just won the US National Book Award (non-fiction) for her moving recently published memoir on the death of her husband and fellow writer John Gregory Dunne - 'The Year of Magical Thinking'. It seemed a good time to acquaint people, you know, for the unacquainted among you.

Best known for her journalism with books such as 'The White Album' and 'Slouching towards Bethlehem' and her novels 'Play it as it lays' and 'Democracy', this latest book, published at the age of 70, has been her most successful. Incredibly when she has published so many well crafted sentences, so many stories that linger long after the last page has been turned, it is this, and her own personal tragedy that brings so much attention.

She writes sparse beautiful, short clipped prose, that flows off of the page and into the reader. In all of her work, fiction and non fiction alike, 'I' always takes centre stage. Didion above all else is all about 'I':

"In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind."

So really one for bloggers, among others, to read. So often the vein that she mines is nihilism, so when she tells you in 'Play it as it lays', her story of a model turned actress turned emptied-out woman that "I know what 'nothing' means" you tend to believe her. That book might not have won a prize, but it is one of Time's All Time Top 100 novels. Besides it's also the basis of the Lloyd Cole & the Commotions song 'Rattle Snakes', that unborn child haunting her as she speeds down the freeway.

"What makes Iago evil?" some people ask. I never ask.

"Another example, one which springs to mind because Mrs. Burstein saw a pygmy rattler in the artichoke garden this morning and has been intractable since: I never ask about snakes. Why should Shalimar attract kraits. Why should a coral snake need two glands of neurotoxic poison to survive while a king snake, so similarly marked, needs none. Where is the Darwinian logic there. You might ask that. I never would, not any more. I recall an incident reported no long ago in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner: two honeymooners, natives of Detroit, found dead in their Scout camper near Boca Raton, a coral snake still coiled in the thermal blanket. Why? Unless you are prepared to take the long view, there is no satisfactory "answer" to such questions."

'The Year of Magical Thinking' is a slim volume, as are most of Didion's books, and this one was published against another tragic loss, her only child, Quintana Roo Dunne, died at age 39 shortly before the book's publication. In contemporary American literature, there are few bigger deals. Time to get reading.

Published Nov 29 2006, 10:20 AM by Gordon Macmillan

Filed under: Joan Didion, New Journalism, Norman Mailer

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