Word: albums
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
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...
...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 '60s 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...
...novels reflect this fatalism, but she is nonetheless alive to others' sorrows and enthusiasms. The destruction of Amado's orchids in "Quiet Days in Malibu" by a flash fire confirms Didion's view of life as an unpredictable but inevitable series of large and small tragedies. In "The White Album," Didion notes that neither she nor her friends was surprised at the news of the Sharon Tate murders. She walks through her days anticipating horror, sporadically paralyzed by migraines, dreaming of "the children burning in the locked car in the supermarket parking lot...the freeway sniper who feels 'real...