I will try not to judge Joan Didion’s nonfiction so harshly after reading her new book, South and West. My instinct is that her longer books, such as Slouching Towards Bethlehem, the book which she is most known for and her most recent memoir Blue Nights are better and a better look into her writing than this book, which reads like a notebook full of ironic musings with little need or want for coherence. My only other experience with Didion is not through her nonfiction but through her fiction, having read her most famous novel and second most famous book Play It as It Lays. That book’s style is very similar to this one, although (most) of the setting is different. I didn’t really like it then, with its brief chapters making for easy reading but little in the way of emotional attachment, and I can’t say it has aged will in this even smaller and even quicker 126-page read. The book is really two essays, the first one being the longer and the better of the two, “Notes on the South”, cataloging the trip Didion and her late husband John Gregory Dunne took in 1970 across the Southern states with little in the way of direction. The essay is amusing at times in the descriptions of vibrant Southern life through a rather fatalistic eye. A cool motif throughout is how wherever small town they are visiting, the movie The Losers always seems to playing on a double bill at the local theater. The second essay, “California Notes” seems like a hopeless add on that should have been published somewhere else, with the details of the Patty Hearst case being excised for more less charming musings. What gets me about this book is its utter detachment from the events, which can be done well in the hands of a funny writer, but here I struggled to figure out if Didion cared at all. Again, I won’t write her off quite yet, and hope her big books live up to the hype.
Rating: 3/5
No comments:
Post a Comment