THE WHITE ALBUM

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O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before. – Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) In the years after World War I my mother had put pennies for Grace [Episcopal Cathedral] in her mite box but Grace would never be finished. In the years after World War II I would put pennies for Grace in my mite box but Grace would never be finished The book is divided into several sections including The California Republic where Didion explores the J. Paul Getty Museum built above the Pacific Coast Highway to house his antiques and paintings as well as the social discomfort it raises. Didion also explores the massive governor's mansion built by Ronald and Nancy Reagan. It stands on eleven acres of oaks and olives overlooking the American River outside Sacramento and has remained abandoned since the day construction stopped in 1975.

A tiny, unnerved and unnerving figure behind vast dark glasses, Didion was derisive of lax language and dismissive of unformed thought on both the left and right.’ Photograph: Gary Gershoff/WireImage I like her excitability, her habit of sudden absorption. Of late ‘60s biker grindhouse she writes, “I saw nine of them recently, saw the first one almost by accident and the rest of them with a notebook.” The book’s keynote, right there. Didion takes the stuff of recondite hobbies and autistic fixation—irrigation infrastructure, the Governors’ mansions of California—and finds the grandeur, the lyric, the idea. When five people were murdered at Sharon Tate’s house on the night of August 8-9, 1969, the reverberations went far beyond the elite Hollywood community of which she was part. They were felt far beyond Los Angeles, too. By that fall, when police connected the murders (and those of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca the following night) to Charles Manson and his cult-like “family,” Manson was well on his way to infamy, becoming a murderous icon and a symbol of an age. As I was making my way through this one it once more occurred to me (I had thought it again during the reading of Slouching Towards Bethlehem) that it’s rather unfair that Joan Didion will perhaps be mostly remembered as a High-Priestess-of-Grieving (on account of The Year of Magical Thinking) instead of the Cool-Bitch-Chic author she was for the larger part of her writing career.They say that sometimes depression is the logical response of depressing circumstances, so I don't judge Didion for her lens. It's through perhaps no fault of her own that she has chosen to present almost everything as so empty of meaning--but that seems to me at complete odds with the traditional purpose of writing. I've always thought that the very act of writing something was fundamentally in the spirit of crafting meaning and seeking connection. Therefore I can't believe Didion's argument completely, because she wrote it down. Say I did believe her anyway: what am I supposed to do with that info?

I had trouble graduating from Berkeley, not because of this inability to deal with ideas – I was majoring in English, and I could locate the house-and-garden imagery in The Portrait of a Lady as well as the next person, “imagery” being by definition the kind of specific that got my attention –but simply because I had neglected to take a course in Milton. For reasons which now sound baroque I needed a degree by the end of that summer, and the English department finally agreed, if I would come down from Sacramento every Friday and talk about the cosmology of Paradise Lost, to certify me proficient in Milton. I did this. Some Fridays I took the Greyhound bus, other Fridays I caught the Southern Pacific’s City of San Francisco on the last leg of its transcontinental trip. I can no longer tell you whether Milton put the sun or the earth at the center of his universe in Paradise Lost, the central question of at least one century and a topic about which I wrote ten thousand words that summer, but I can still recall the exact rancidity of the butter in the City of San Francisco’s dining car, and the way the tinted windows on the Greyhound bus cast the oil refineries around Carquinez Strait into a grayed and obscurely sinister light. In short my attention was always on the periphery, on what I could see and taste and touch, on the butter, and the Greyhound bus. During those years I was traveling on what I knew to be a very shaky passport, forged papers: I knew that I was no legitimate resident in any world of ideas. I knew I couldn’t think. All I knew then was what I couldn’t do. All I knew then was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was.C’è chi trova lo stile di Joan Didion irritante e artificioso, e la accusa di prendersi troppo sul serio, di mettersi sempre al centro della narrazione. It is as though she feels deeply that all human effort is foredoomed to failure, a conviction which seems to push her further into a dependent, passive withdrawal. In her view she lives in a world of people moved by strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended, and, above all, devious motivations which commit them inevitably to conflict and failure.