Word: didion
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...White Album, Didion...
...White Album, Didion...
...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...
...essays and 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 live 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...
...DIDION'S SENSITIVITY--the very quality that powers her writing--defeats her in the end. She is mired in an emotional bog; the weight of her evocative detail does not allow her to stand back and assess the images she conjures. The White Album's collection of little insights does not add up to one bit one. Didion writes about an intensely debated, copiously documented period, but she doesn't try to impose any order on the chaos. Didion cannot ultimately discipline her own sensitivity, and therein lies the failure of this tightly