Word: albums
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...White Album is Didion's latest collection of these images--20 essays written from 1968 to 1978. It is a brilliant albeit occasionally disjointed collage of impressions, written with her customary journalistic eye for detail and infused with emotion. The essays discuss the '60's, portray Didion and others, and sketch California life with and deadly accuracy...
Although many of these essays demonstrate her obsession with control, The White Album's one major flaw is an interior disorder. Each individual essay is superbly crafted, but together they leave no one, coherent impression, no sense of decision about the subjects she treats...
...same sensitivity and emotional impetuosity that defeat her make her writing so effective. The book's disjointedness is at times a very deliberate reflection of Didion's own reactions to the years she describes. Her first essay, "The White Album," breaks into 15 vignettes; she cuts from image to image, splicing and assembling them. She views the '60's themselves as a series of improvisations on a discarded, script, in a passage that reflects the tone of both the era and her book...
...cinematic organization is perhaps most effective in "The White Album," and most strained in "In the Islands," where she leaps from a resort hotel to a graveyard for Vietnamese soldiers to James Jones, with no clear direction. In this first essay, she describes a Doors recording session, a college protest, a dress she bought for the star witness in the Sharon Tate murder trials, and creates a whirling kaleidoscope. She draws no conclusion because she cannot--her memories are too vivid to allow a comforting generality...
Didion is drawn to these people because she too is dispossessed--far more profoundly alienated than many of those she writes about. In "The White Album" she includes a wildly amusing, verbose but acute psychoanalytic profile of herself. The psychiatrist tags her as deeply alienated and fatalistic. Didion herself confirms this analysis in "In the Islands." She introduces herself to the reader, noting...