Word: didions
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...Joan Didion...
...Joan Didion's fourth novel carries a few unnecessary burdens. There is the silly pink book jacket, the pompous flap copy ("a precise and pitiless exploration of lives lived in the harsh glare of public scrutiny") and, worst of all, the title, which is as ostentatious as that of the author's last novel, A Book of Common Prayer. Nor is the reader reassured when this most confident of stylists lodges herself as an extraneous character in the book, discussing narrative ploys that she has considered and rejected and alerting the reader to real or imagined difficulties ahead...
...Democracy is a flawed novel-sometimes portentous, sometimes over-directed by the author-it is also very fast and shrewd, one of the funniest books of the year. Much of the time, Didion seems to be laughing at her own romantic yearnings. Her heroine resembles a paper cutout Jackie Kennedy. Inez Christian Victor is the daughter of a rich, mercantile Hawaiian clan and the wife of a dashing Democratic Senator who wants to be President. In her daily life, Inez must contend with a randy husband, his groupies ("Girls like that come with the life") and standard-issue disaffected children...
...lush settings, its febrile descriptions and its search for lost connections, Democracy is a fictional echo of Didion's White Album, essays written between 1968 and 1978. Those were the years when the author spent "what seemed to many people I knew an eccentric amount of time in Honolulu," and when she published "In the Islands," a breathtaking meditation on depression and fragmentation that became an emblem of the late '60s. Those were also the years when Didion did some chilly observing of Nancy Reagan in the uncomfortable role of the perfect Governor's wife. Although...
...firmly under control that only a few strokes-Frances Landau's "slightly hyperthyroid face," Paul Christian's saying, "Sorry, I've made other plans" to people wishing him a nice day-are needed to fill out a character. One is left to ponder why Didion nudges the reader so, insisting that her story keeps getting away from her. The truth may be that she is reluctant to let go of it, and of times that were full of imaginative and moral possibilities for a novelist. An odd case of nostalgia but a sympathetic one. -By Martha Duffy