Word: didion
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...Didion's novels (Play It As It Lays, A Book of Common Prayer) are less interesting than her collections of magazine pieces; paradoxically, the novels do not exert the dramatic force of her journalistic essays. Didion is best when the literary transaction is personal and direct, when she is a live character reporting her own wanderings through the splendidly strange California of the late '60s and the '70s, a California that elaborately belongs to her because it is in part her own invention, like the persona that describes...
There are moments when Didion overdoes her performance of journalism-as-nervous-breakdown. "I was in fact as sick as I have ever been when I was writing 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem,' " she wrote about the title piece of her brilliant 1968 collection. "The pain kept me awake at night and so for twenty and twenty-one hours a day I drank gin-and-hot-water to blunt the pain and took Dexedrine to blunt the gin and wrote the piece." Her new collection of magazine articles, The White Album, contains a disagreeably calculated column she wrote for LIFE...
...Didion as a rule uses her self-dramatizations with an artist's instinctive discretion. She is an alert and subtle observer, with a mordant intelligence and a sense of humor with touches of Evelyn Waugh in it. She offers a lethal description of fatuous Hollywood political chatter. " 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,' some one said to me at dinner not long ago, and before we had finished our fraises des bois, he had advised me as well that 'no man is an island.' " The White Album is full...
...Didion's pieces, the players of the late '60s and the '70s come back in their vivid dementia: Hell's Angels, Jim Morrison and the Doors, Huey Newton, Bishop James Pike. Charles Manson peers in at the window. Linda Kasabian, the star prosecution witness against Manson, recruited Didion at one point to go to I. Magnin in Beverly Hills and buy her a dress for court: "Size 9 Petite. Mini but not extremely mini. In velvet if possible." Didion and Roman Polanski turn out to be godparents to the same child...
...White Album is mellower than Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Didion ranges more widely. A libertarian with a trace of Goldwater in her, an individualistic Westerner, Didion writes witheringly of bureaucrats who would tie up the Santa Monica Freeway (an eccentric passion of the woman in the yellow Corvette) by installing the restrictive "Diamond Lane." Didion, a sometime screenwriter, gives a wonderful insider's analysis of Hollywood as "the last extant stable society." She dismisses the women's movement with some hauteur: "To those of us who remain committed mainly to the ex ploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities...