Metro Pulse/Pulp

Comment
on this story

California and the Didion form of 'its' expression

by Jeanne McDonald

Joan Didion has fallen out of love, not with a person, but with a huge piece of American real estate—California.

Didion, a California native who lives in New York, has for decades shrewdly read the pulse of this country, measuring the attitude of its people and recording the effects of its politics, institutions, landscapes and economics. Now, with the publication of Where I Was From (Knopf, $23), she withdraws her earlier opinion of her home state as a land of milk and honey and portrays it as a repository for fruits and nuts.

In her rambling but intense history/memoir, she concludes that the early settlers of the final frontier were faithless and reckless, that they used it and abused it, setting the state up for the pitiful condition it finds itself in today—a place of shallow values, mired in debt by turns to the railroad, the aerospace industry, and ultimately, to the federal government.

For a woman who early on longed for the home place whenever she was away, Didion has executed a sharp about-face in what she calls an "exploration into my own confusions." Thomas Mallon, in The New York Times Book Review, says "The individualists and buccaneers who used to excite this author's attentive admiration now seem more like a weary succession of itinerants on the public dole.... It now appears to Didion that Californians never really practiced the sort of personal responsibility, the 'wagon train morality' that she extolled almost 40 years ago...," arguing that "California has always been a republic of buck-passers..." or of people who sell "the future of the place we lived to the highest bidder...."

Now, abandoning the romantic attachment of her youth, the author avows that "such was the power of the story on which I had grown up that this thought came to me as a kind of revelation: the settlement of the west, however inevitable, had not uniformly tended to the greater good, nor had it on every level benefited even those who reaped its most obvious rewards."

After a trip with her mother and daughter to Old Sacramento, Didion concludes, "Later it seemed to me that this had been the moment when all of it—the crossing, the redemption, the abandoned rosewood chests, the lost flatware, the rivers I had written to replace the rivers I had left, the 12 generations of circuit riders and county sheriffs and Indian fighters and country lawyers and Bible readers, the two 200 years of clearings in Virginia and Kentucky and Tennessee and then the break, the dream of America, the entire enchantment under which I had lived my life—began to seem remote."

These are pretty heavy losses. Indeed, there are so many negative conclusions in this book that Didion begins to seem merely exhausted and depressed. Time and time again she repeats, "What difference does it make" (the absence of a question mark making the judgment even more hopeless), "I prefer not to know" or "Nothing applies" or "None of it mattered" or "The answer is 'nothing.'" Her simplistic attitude sometimes seems more like the easy dismissal of an argument than a reconsideration of her youthful enthusiasm.

Yet her literary style is indeed seductive and, yes, often brilliant, which is not to say that she doesn't have some vociferous detractors. The most vocal has to be Barbara Grizzutti Harrison, who wrote in Off Center that regardless of her themes, Didion's subject is always herself. Furthermore, says Ms. Harrison, "Didion's style� is a bag of tricks. Some of the effects she produces are quite pretty, even momentarily beautiful. But make no mistake: these are tricks—techniques—that can be learned (I don't know why they have evoked so much wonder)." Ms. Harrison then proceeds to furnish an example of Didion's tricks of juxtaposition: "In the years after Luis was shot water hyacinths clogged the culverts at Progreso."

"What makes those sentences work? I ask," Ms. Harrison retorts. "Cadence, I answer. What do those sentences mean? you may ask. Don't." Didion, she claims, uses style as argument. And, she adds, "Anyone whose love is reserved almost entirely for the past can have only disdain for the present. And can consequently not be trusted to tell us the truth."

Still, one of the most elemental rules of writing is to tell not necessarily the truth, but a truth, and for Joan Didion, perhaps such blasé dismissals of questions she herself has broached represent her particular brands of truth. Furthermore, her insinuation of herself into her essays, including her personal history of the state of California, can be dismissed as one of the looser techniques of the New Journalism which she has long espoused.

Thus, even with all its idiosyncrasies of style and the inexplicable infidelities to memory and experience, it's still a fascinating and informative read, despite the reader's occasional tendency to ask, "What just happened here?"