Word: joans
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...just Play It As It Lays. Which is the title of Joan Didion's new novel. In which she follows the conscience ( conscience? try consciousness, a better word it seems, though not one she would use) that leads her to rip open, ever so neatly, ever so tellingly, a world whose center no longer holds, America in its southwestern and Californian apocalypse, the source for most of her essays in her brilliant collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and now the setting for the new novel...
Similarly, Joan Didion's prose is as insidiously effective as the painless touch of the anesthetist's needle she herself describes. Her sentences, pared down bone clean, are chilling in their authority. She tells her story so quickly, so mercilessly, there is simply no disputing what she finds. Her prose almost seems a function of the desert of which she writes-every superfluous gesture, as if in deference to the overwhelming heat, the sun and shifting sands, eliminated. And although the novel's action takes place in L. A., and a good deal of the rest in Vegas, there...
Which is out there on the desert looking east with Marion Faye, for BZ is Joan Didion's updated version of Norman Mailer's Marion. Like Marion, BZ is homosexual. Yet he has all the accouterments to make it in the world Maria can no longer handle: he's a film producer; his body is fine and tan; and his mother, Carlotta, twice divorced and $35 million to her name, even sees fit to keep him provided with a present, if rarely loving, wife. But perhaps just because he knows he has made it, just as Maria knows...
...result, Oh! Sex Education! (Praeger; $7.95), is a small journalistic masterpiece of rueful perception. With her first book, Mary Breasted takes her place among the Joan Didions, Gloria Steinems, Gail Sheehys-the journalists of grace-note disillusionment, all those sharp young women who look at their fellow Americans with the sad-eyed vision of little girls whose dolls were broken at an early...
...film is directed with great sympathy by three young film makers working out of Cambridge, Mass.: Christopher G. Knight, Robert Jones and James Coyne. Their work is at its straightforward best in depicting the relationship between the Harrises. When Joan meets David at the jail after the high school rally, there is a scene of extraordinary intimacy. David comes smiling out of the station door; Joan and some friends crowd around him. She takes his arm, smiles back at him, and they walk away together. That is all; yet the sequence and her simple gesture express a strong and lasting...