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Joan Didion: The 1980s & 90s

door Joan Didion

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"In the 1980s and 1990s, even as successive administrations hailed "morning in America" and "a thousand points of light," Joan Didion brought her brilliant and impeccably stylish prose to bear on the darker truths of American empire. Gathered here for the first time in this second volume of Library of America's definitive edition are her masterful novels and nonfiction from this period, five complete book-length works. "Terror," Didion writes in Salvador (1983) at the height of that country's civil war, "is the given of the place. . . . Bodies turn up in the brush of vacant lots, in the garbage thrown down ravines in the richest districts, in public rest rooms, in bus stations." Her powerful and incisive reporting measures the perverse distance between such abstractions as Communism, human rights, and democracy in Central America and the senseless violence she is witness to. Often considered Didion's finest novel, Democracy (1984) tells a story of Inez Victor, daughter of an old money Honolulu dynasty, glamorous wife of a prominent politician, and sometime lover of a hardboiled intelligence officer, who is roused from a listless life of drinking and photo opportunities by her father's murderous insanity and her daughter's heroin addiction. Into this mix steps a narrator, "Joan Didion," who pieces Inez's story together with a sharp and often comic eye. More than an urban portrait, Miami (1987) is a deep dive into the violent heart of the Magic City's unwritten history. The "underwater narratives" Didion pursues take her not only through diverse and vibrant neighborhoods but into the clandestine operations and internecine rivalries of organized crime bosses, cocaine traffickers, CIA operatives, exiled Cuban counterrevolutionaries, and White House insiders. The essays in After Henry (1992) capture the zeitgeist of the 1980s and early '90s as surely as Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album did for the 1960s and '70s. Alongside signature reflections on life in California, including a trenchant account of the scourge of wildfires, are provocative examinations of the 1988 presidential campaign and an in-depth look at New York City and the notorious case of the Central Park Five. The Last Thing He Wanted (1996) turns Didion's fascination with the Iran-Contra affair into a tense, intricately plotted, inimitably atmospheric thriller. In the middle of the 1984 presidential campaign, Elena McMahon leaves her job as a reporter for The Washington Post to care for her ailing but secretive father--only to find herself on a late-night flight to Costa Rica, bound for a morally compromised world "on the far frontiers of the Monroe Doctrine," full of spies, ideologues, mercenaries, and assassins."… (meer)
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Writing this as I'm about to start THE LAST THING HE WANTED.

Frankly, I feel like Ms. Didion is a writer only as good as her editor. Not in terms of the visceral beauty of the prose itself but her ability to communicate with clarity. Much of the writing in this volume feels obtuse, like it's not quite meant to be understood by anybody other than Ms. Didion herself, and I think this is in stark contrast to her earlier work, which was constructed seemingly in order to be comprehensible to as large an audience as possible. I image (though of course, I cannot be certain) that this has to do largely with her shift away from magazines like VOGUE to magazines like the NYRoB. Perhaps with the shift in nonfiction editors, she was allowed or encouraged to take her writing in different directions. I don't know. But I am certain that I prefer the books Ms. Didion published in the 60s and 70s over these works (from the 80s and 90s). The sentences were both simpler in construction and shorter in length. Oblique or otherwise initially unclear ideas were given greater detail. Certain parts of the earlier nonfiction were elaborated on, rather than presumed known. During the 80s and 90s, it seems, Joan Didion was no longer able to transcend time as she had in the 60s and 70s, but became mired in the stuff, sinking in it like one would sink in quicksand.

Post TLTHW update: The second and final novel did not change my opinions. Ms. Didion's old style and voice seemed to be back, but she had lost the magic of the characters of Jack and Inez from DEMOCRACY and so the novel fell flat in its attempts to recreate them in Treat and Elena. ( )
  AuroraCH | Aug 15, 2021 |
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"In the 1980s and 1990s, even as successive administrations hailed "morning in America" and "a thousand points of light," Joan Didion brought her brilliant and impeccably stylish prose to bear on the darker truths of American empire. Gathered here for the first time in this second volume of Library of America's definitive edition are her masterful novels and nonfiction from this period, five complete book-length works. "Terror," Didion writes in Salvador (1983) at the height of that country's civil war, "is the given of the place. . . . Bodies turn up in the brush of vacant lots, in the garbage thrown down ravines in the richest districts, in public rest rooms, in bus stations." Her powerful and incisive reporting measures the perverse distance between such abstractions as Communism, human rights, and democracy in Central America and the senseless violence she is witness to. Often considered Didion's finest novel, Democracy (1984) tells a story of Inez Victor, daughter of an old money Honolulu dynasty, glamorous wife of a prominent politician, and sometime lover of a hardboiled intelligence officer, who is roused from a listless life of drinking and photo opportunities by her father's murderous insanity and her daughter's heroin addiction. Into this mix steps a narrator, "Joan Didion," who pieces Inez's story together with a sharp and often comic eye. More than an urban portrait, Miami (1987) is a deep dive into the violent heart of the Magic City's unwritten history. The "underwater narratives" Didion pursues take her not only through diverse and vibrant neighborhoods but into the clandestine operations and internecine rivalries of organized crime bosses, cocaine traffickers, CIA operatives, exiled Cuban counterrevolutionaries, and White House insiders. The essays in After Henry (1992) capture the zeitgeist of the 1980s and early '90s as surely as Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album did for the 1960s and '70s. Alongside signature reflections on life in California, including a trenchant account of the scourge of wildfires, are provocative examinations of the 1988 presidential campaign and an in-depth look at New York City and the notorious case of the Central Park Five. The Last Thing He Wanted (1996) turns Didion's fascination with the Iran-Contra affair into a tense, intricately plotted, inimitably atmospheric thriller. In the middle of the 1984 presidential campaign, Elena McMahon leaves her job as a reporter for The Washington Post to care for her ailing but secretive father--only to find herself on a late-night flight to Costa Rica, bound for a morally compromised world "on the far frontiers of the Monroe Doctrine," full of spies, ideologues, mercenaries, and assassins."

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