Word: didions
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
PERHAPS IT IS this hesitancy to generalize, to offer weighty and solemn judgments, that makes Didion's writing so evocative. Instead of pronouncements, she offers reportage. She focuses on an incident and notes every detail in uncluttered, harsh prose. Didion also has the reporter's curiosity about how things work. She investigates how orchids are tended, how freeways are monitored, how lifeguards live, how dams work, the philosophy and history of shopping malls. She is always honest in her examination of a setting or person. She damns through accuracy, not forceful moral argument. In "Bureaucrats," for example, she perfectly captures...
...genuinely puzzled by the furor around them. Why don't students want a Jaycee group on campus? Why can't the girl who takes a full page ad in Daily Variety to advertise her availability as a star realize her dream? Why do bikers gangbang women, trash stores? Didion answers...
...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 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...
...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 big 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 written, perceptive book...