Word: didions
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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WHEN HARPER'S MAGAZINE published a segment of Joan Didion's novel, A Book of Common Prayer,it seemed that here was another normally-incisive writer succumbing to just one more California fetish. While the National Enquirer alone had been interested in investigating Henry Kissinger's trash, everybody--and we're talking here about the well-established publishing world--wanted to know about Patricia Hearst's closet sex life and continual menstrual cycle. (The California papers followed this latter issue quite closely and the ever-staid New York Times devoted several columns in its Sunday magazine to the constant period...
...there is a point shortly after beginning A Book of Common Prayer when it becomes obvious that, notwithstanding Harper's excerpt, this is not just another Patricia Hearst fixation. Indeed, Harper's selection from the book does not do Didion's novel justice. The book centers on a wealthy family--a radical chic lawyer, with a Warhol silk screen of Mao in the living room, rather than a newspaper magnate--and their newly-converted revolutionary daughter, whose rhetoric makes little sense and at best serves to separate her from her wealthy background, the FBI and a steamy, dull, white-washed...
...memory by memory. The repeated staccato phrases throughout A Book of Common Prayer, like the responsive readings in a hymn book, form the kernels of the emerging past for Charlotte. Like a slightly too-intense light, which reveals the dinginess of a tenement corridor, Didion effectively uses these chorus-like chants and staccato phrases to amplify the thoughts Charlotte is trying to block. They are echoes of the past that climb up into the present. In much the same way that Marin uses revolutionary rhetoric a deny her past, Charlotte uses a process of selective remembering: it is unsurprising then...
...EFFECTIVENESS of this Greek chorus of thoughts is indicative of the whole of Didion's novel. Written with an exceptional ease and remarkable eye for detail A Book of Common Prayer is, like almost everything Didion writes, greater than its many parts. Didion is a journalist as well as novelist; through simple descriptions she conveys an image and a mood surrounding each character and Boca Grande that is sarcastically humorous--often bitingly so, in a gratifying way--without making the entire novel seem frivolous or lightweight. Although there are problems with A Book of Common Prayer--perhaps...
...chronicled by both writers in magazine pieces-has not interfered with a creative collaboration. Their most recent effort, the script for A Star Is Born, earned them $150,000 plus a percentage of the gross profits. "It should make us a lot of money," predicts Dunne. "In fact," says Didion, "we saw it basically as a picture about money...