I didn’t know she had Parkinson’s but I probably should have known. The writer whose work has had more influence on me personally than any other in this country has passed away at the age of 87. The New York Times was, as usual, ready with her pre-written obituary so they could immediately go to print with the story; probably the Times’ account was written some five years ago and needed but little in terms of revision.
We are told that “She had no immediate survivors.” Those familiar with her later autobiographical work, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, know why that is: she lost her husband, writer and author John Gregory Dunne and their daughter, Quintana, in despairingly quick succession from late 2003 to 2005. Magical Thinking, a rumination on the sudden shock of death as experienced by those left in its wake was adapted to the Broadway stage, directed by David Hare and featuring Vanessa Redgrave in the role of Didion. That’s how many who did not study her work in college became familiar with her writing.
“Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”
But for those of us who tracked her career with our own lives (I remember at age 21, sending her some of my early reporting pieces and gushing that I relied on her for “word choice;” she sent me back a sweet handwritten thank-you memo from her desk, underscoring in blue ink: “Roget’s for word choice!”), what stood out with Didion was the sheer style, the impossibly terse, pitiless prose style whose paragraphs could carry you like an out-of-control roller coaster, leaving you breathless, only to stop short of going over the cliff itself with a startling bit of punctuation and a final, clipped phrase tacked on for good measure.
From The White Album:
We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
I tell you this not as aimless revelation but because I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am and where I am and what is on my mind. I want you to understand exactly what you are getting: you are getting a woman who for some time now has felt radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest people. You are getting a woman who somewhere along the line misplaced whatever slight faith she ever had in the social contract, in the meliorative principle, in the whole grand pattern of human endeavor.
or from Slouching Towards Bethlehem:
I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.
Didion was a 5th-generation native Californian (an experience she describes vividly in Where I Was From) and her best known work often involved some facet of the California experience. Like Yeats’ rough beast from which she scored her title to the collection of essays on the 1960’s counterculture that became Slouching Towards Bethlehem, there was no trace of sentimentality or pie-in-the-sky idealism in her approach to recording the vagaries that era. Her later fiction and analytical prose displayed a similarly unvarnished view of the machinations and hypocrisies of the Reagan (and George W. Bush) administrations, the inhuman outcome of right-wing ideology in places like El Salvador (Salvador), and the isolation of dispossessed souls from Hollywood to South America, in Play it As It Lays and A Book of Common Prayer. Didion saw and wrote about the decadence of American culture and its byproducts long before it became fashionable to do so.
The Times’ William Grimes:
Ms. Didion’s reporting reflected Norman Mailer’s prescription for “enormously personalized journalism in which the character of the narrator was one of the elements in the way the reader would finally assess the experience.”
Her attraction to trouble spots, disintegrating personalities and incipient chaos came naturally. In the title essay from “The White Album,” she included her own psychiatric evaluation after arriving at the outpatient clinic of St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica complaining of vertigo and nausea.
Harrison Smith of the Washington Post captures her overall approach to writing as well as anyone:
With an unwavering eye and piercing intellect, Ms. Didion revealed an America gripped by moral decadence and self-deception, in thrall to false narratives that offered little explanation about how the world worked.
Her trenchant, frequently contrarian opinions on subjects as varied as the films of Woody Allen and the traffic in Los Angeles were matched by a precise style that was nearly universally admired. “Try to rearrange one of her sentences,” New York Times critic John Leonard once wrote, “and you’ve realized that the sentence was inevitable, a hologram.”
For all its intensity, though, there is always something of a remove in Didion’s work, a drone’s eye view, separating the observed and the observer. Even when writing of her husband’s sudden heart attack and collapse in their home you are still held at a distance, because that is where she wants you to be: This close and no closer.
I read pretty much everything she wrote. For my money, there’s never been any writer in this country who surpasses her in terms of clarity, sentence structure and style.
And yes, in her choice of words.