Word: woman
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This capacity is the secret of Didion's power. It works again in A Book of Common Prayer, a novel whose unreal made real includes a Central American country called Boca Grande. Once more the author writes about a distressed California woman. Charlotte Douglas is the victim of a romantic idealism so hermetic that self-knowledge is impossible. The currents of revolution and privilege scarcely ruffle her hair. Incapable of reflection, Charlotte moves, therefore she is. This unexamined life is filtered through the tough mind of Grace Strasser-Mendana, Colorado-born widow of a Boca Grande plutocrat...
...There is, after all, some Charlotte Douglas lurking in most of us. How often have we felt vaguely paralyzed by the high beams of an onrushing history that does not brake for small game? When she began her column for LIFE in 1969, Didion announced: "You are getting a woman who for some time now has felt radically separated from ... the ideas that seem to interest other people ... I have felt myself a sleepwalker, alert only to the stuff of bad dreams...
...Your mother is a remarkable woman, the bravest person I know," Leland told Brooke. "But she can't tolerate what she can't understand." For his part, Leland was an absentee father, too rigid in his own way to come to terms with marriage and children. The divorce was amicable enough for the parents, but devastating to the three kids...
Dexter's task was equally difficult. Lulu is a walking, talking bundle of erotic radioactivity. Known in other places as Woman, Femme Fatale, the Temptress, she is a rough operatic equivalent of Don Giovanni. She consumes the men-and one lesbian-who love her, then is consumed by them and destroyed. She ends up as a streetwalker, and the final slash of the knife is delivered by none other than Jack the Ripper. Some stage directors choose to play up the trampy side of Lulu. Dexter has made her an innocent, totally unaware of the evil effect...
...does not. At least one short is a real gem: "Bach to Bach," with the voices of Mike Nichols and Elaine May. While the camera takes you on a guided tour of the ornaments in a New York apartment, you hear a man and a woman who have picked each other up in a bar and are now trading a series of cocktail party inanities to ward off their nervousness about the whole affair. ("You know," Nichols says, "In the last two hours I can't tell you how my anxieties have been allayed.") Perhaps the comparative brilliance of "Bach...