Joan Didion

Horseshoe: I agree that Didion seems scrupulous - esp. compared to some clearly over-self-obsessed people. But I'm not sure she *is* that scrupulous. The point about getting into people's heads - well, interesting. Yes, in a way the externality probably contributes to the sense of disdain. But that tactic is defensible. The real problem, maybe, is a bit different: her way of delivering sour pay-offs and implicit put-downs, and of setting people up. I don't think she does just report neutrally and accurately - which is the impression the prose gives at one level. I think she arranges things so that other people seem foolish; and as I said earlier, after a while this doesn't seem so impressive on her part.

Distant but at least topical comparison: Borat - taking c.2 hours of footage and showing 30 seconds to make passer-by / real person look sillier than they really did.

I was not saying that Didion was derivative of Thomson - he comes after her and reveres her. Just that once you've read him, her take on movies doesn't seem so great. Though I don't mean 'In Hollywood', which is kind of interesting - though also sneering and nasty.

Once again: I quite agree that Amis *in general* is annoying - the point is about this particular essay, and the valid or at least interesting things he has to say in it.

-- the pinefox (the pinefox), Tuesday, 14 November 2006 15:41 (11 months ago) Link

That essay on her IS nasty! But nice (for thread purposes) the way it connects her with Salinger, in the first para!

-- the pinefox (the pinefox), Tuesday, 14 November 2006 15:45 (11 months ago) Link

Actually, can someone write that Didion-as-Borat sketch? I see great comic possibility, but not the time to do it. I'll expect it on this thread by c.9 tomorrow morning.

PS / I have to countenance the possibility that LATE Didion - much admired, Indian summer, crowning moments of career etc - might be better than early.

-- the pinefox (the pinefox), Tuesday, 14 November 2006 16:15 (11 months ago) Link

it does seem that you might like late didion better, pinefox!

-- horseshoe (horseshoe), Tuesday, 14 November 2006 16:47 (11 months ago) Link

I not like "Magic Think Year" so much like "Bethelehem Slouch" or "White Book".

-- PJ Miller (PJ Miller 68), Wednesday, 15 November 2006 14:03 (11 months ago) Link

how are people with 'political fictions' and 'miami' and the sept 11th pamphlet?

-- tom west (thomp), Wednesday, 15 November 2006 17:01 (11 months ago) Link

I started reading the 9/11 pamphlet at Accentmonkey's house, and my response was infuriation at its unbelievable political naivete. (As in: 'a few weeks after 9/11, I started to feel disturbed.... Something about the atmosphere of feverish patriotism just wasn't quite right.... I wondered if there were things the government wasn't telling us....') It might have been faux-naivete, but that didn't seem to work too well either.

Thomson adores Democracy.

I have Where I Was From on a shelf at home. I have heard good things about it, which may be better than reading it. I have found it difficult to bring myself to read about Didion's ancestors. I like the cover, though. It is nicely designed and she looks good on it.

-- the pinefox (the pinefox), Wednesday, 15 November 2006 17:23 (11 months ago) Link

It is nicely designed and she looks good on it.

This is her appeal in a nutshell.

-- PJ Miller (PJ Miller 68), Wednesday, 15 November 2006 17:48 (11 months ago) Link

You are being too sarcastic, PJ. Whether you (or I) derive much pleasure or insight from Ms. Didion, no one can make a long writing career by connecting to readers only through their book designs and author's mug shots. Someone is reading her with real appreciation. You can argue that it is misplaced, but not that it doesn't exist.

-- Aimless (Aimless), Wednesday, 15 November 2006 18:31 (11 months ago) Link

I know that was self-indulgent of me, but partly I want to lure the pinefox back, because I love Didion, but his criticisms of her were good and provocative. Anyway, I don't expect people to necessarily respond to or even read all of that, but I thought it would be nice to have an ILB Didion thread.

We do miss Mr. P. Fox.

He was a fine pox, that pinefox.

I can't believe I was so hard on poor old Joan.

My fundamental reaction to the thought of her, to the sight of her books, to her name in the press, is, always, positive - as in fact I repeatedly say above. It's just that the books themselves didn't quite seem to measure up to that. But as I also repeatedly say (do I ever do anything but repeat my own repetitions?), she has been fortunate in her admirers.

hi pinefox!

i thought Play it as it lays was rather good, but i've not read any of her other novels

bump

i have zero interest in her fiction but everything else is great. agree with the pinefox that her bit on the diamond lanes is one of the few places where her slip shows. disagree with the pinefox on "The Women's Movement." boo hoo hoo it's "reactionary" -- it's also quite OTM in some uncomfortable ways.

the barbara grizzuti harrison piece might seem more "mean" if it weren't so just simply obtuse. hate to speak ill of the dead but jeez, sorry JD doesn't write about class the way you want her to but IT'S PRACTICALLY ALL SHE WRITES ABOUT so wtf do you want from her?

also goddamn right she uses style as argument. this is not a revelation THIS IS THE GODDAMN POINT.

anyhoo, possibly Our Finest Living Writer imo so.

Her disinterest in literature is a problem, but as a journalist she's about the best we have.

lol i love how i started this thread basically to stalk the pinefox. where u been, man?

Our Finest Living Writer

otm

finest novelist too, she is without peer

You are allowed to say that, because she is a very good writer with an excellent prose style. Luckily, you are not allowed to be entirely right. Such matters are never decided, even a century after the fact.

srsly though can anyone explain to me what's "convincing" about the BGH piece other than the deliberate misreading/professional jealousy aspect?

this is apropos of nothing but something else on ilx just reminded me of it. i remember, a couple of years after reading the white album, remembering the essay about aspiring starlet dallas beardsley, who had an appetite for stardom at the time of didion's piece, was poised to break into hollywood any way she could. with the benefit of thirty five years having elapsed between writing and reading, i was able to look her up and see whether she made it in the movies: imdb. it seems like a kinda poetic extra supplement to the story.

'style as argument'? But does Didion have a good style? Yes and no.

Her style is very controlled and it achieves passion only in moments where it designedly and dispassionately takes control of the passions of the reader. This is an interesting trick that she does rather well, although you needs must be susceptible to her approach for it to work as she intends.

As for whether this is "good style" I would say yes, but, for me, good style is any style that embodies the intentions of the author and connects with the intended audience. For example, Dr. Suess has an excellent style. What would be a good style for a non-fiction author is almost certain to be an ill-style for a gothic-horror author.

she has a new memoir coming out next year - blue magic, i think, about aging (will just defer to the blurb on the back to see how a didion book spells ageing) - and an article about it linked to goodbye to all that from slouching toward bethlehem, which i haven't read for ages. i am not a writer so this isn't from the position of being envious of her craft, but man, reading her is just such a rich experience; she triggers the pangs you ordinarily get of wistfulness or regret but without the character of those, squaring some event in the context of her age, of who she was, making whatever you're reading about totally subject to all of these other influences

oh man great news! I would give almost anything for another novel but I think The Last Thing He Wanted is probably gonna be it for Didion's novels.

oh it's blue nights, though - dang - was already pumped for blue magic

Awesome.

joan didion takes on miles' blue moods. my mistake.

the last thing i heard - which might've been c/o the site linked above - was that she was writing notes or something for a hbo biopic on katherine graham. which i'd love to see. but yeah pretty jazzed. i think she probably has a fair amount of newish uncollected writing sitting around, also - i saw her read prepared remarks, around the time of the last election, and would love to read her recent stuff.

still haven't read the novels ...

oh yeah also worth plugging: that site also links to her paris review interviews, which just became freely available as part of their site re-jig

yeah they're great (like everything else she's involved with)

i started play it as it lays a few years ago and didn't know how iago was, so gave up disheartened on line two. probably ready for a rerun.

- didn't know who iago was -

I do like her essay 'goodbye to all that'
and Blue Magic or Blue Nights are pretty good titles
maybe she'd at least be better on ageing than Amis (M)
or then again, even, maybe not!

It's not Didion book related, but I'm loving this:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1979/aug/16/letter-from-manhattan/

Didion's takedown of Woody Allen, after he went serious in the 70s.

i love her dearly and am a bit disheartened by the pinefox's indifference! just reread all of slouching towards bethlehem and read play it as it lays in the last month. i keep meaning to start the white album but i almost don't want to run out of vintage didion so quickly so i'm putting it off.

i think there's a lot more emotion in her writing than people assume -- that hatchet job linked to upthread makes no sense at all to me. i've never gotten the sense that didion's laconic style was meant to signify condescension toward her subjects. that essay on self-esteem is one of the most succinct and powerful essays i've ever read.

the only other thing i've read is political fictions, which is great and all but hasn't stuck with me like the earlier stuff (except for the review of newt gingrich's book, so hilarious mean it's almost hard to get through).

- didn't know who iago was -

That's ok. He is among the most impenetrable of Shakespeare's characters.

It's not Didion book related, but I'm loving this:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1979/aug/16/letter-from-manhattan/

Didion's takedown of Woody Allen, after he went serious in the 70s.

― Romeo Jones, Wednesday, November 17, 2010 7:09 PM Bookmark

This is great and unfair at the same time. If it were written by anyone less than Joan Didion it wouldn't work. Yes, Woody Allen films have a certain quality of being stuck in a hyper-precocious adolescence at times, but that's also part of their charm, and I don't buy that she's uncharmed by them. Besides, I think it's a little disingenuous for a professional serious essayist to criticize someone for pondering meaning. I mean most people go to offices every day and do work they don't even like -- they stopped sitting in cafes with notebooks a long time ago.

I get the feeling "I'm too mature for this" has been her posture for a lot of her life -- though it's exactly that posture that makes Slouching Toward Bethlehem so sharp.

Didion's political writing -- Miami, After Henry, Political Fictions -- was immensely influential on me.

As a novelist, though, she gives the impression that she hasn't read a new one since college.

JD, I don't think my feeling is indifference - more repeated disappointment. I think I've written this up so many times over the years, on this board, that I probably shouldn't go over it again. But to recap, I think she's been lucky in her admirers (including, maybe, you!); I think she radiates a kind of glamour and cool; I think she writes about interesting subjects sometimes; she always seems like someone that one would be interested in and want to read.

But I also think, in practice, that her level of actual insight isn't often that high; her prose is unadventurous, a mannerism that stops her needing to try things, find words, take risks; and yes I think 'condescension' / superiority / 'I'm too mature for this' is far too much a default setting in her writing. Also I've read 2-3 novels and they really weren't worth much more than a dime - I couldn't see why she persevered with them.

And yet, I still think of her as a writer that I like.

(I only say all this again cos the admirable JD prompted it)

thinking about the prose again: how many great phrases, striking bundles of words, do you come across in reading Didion? can anyone remember any? I think perhaps she has little lyric sense; there isn't much semantic bounty or verbal music; she's the opposite of a Pynchon (whom I also frequently find exasperating for other reasons); and writing in her sort of plain style has been a way of legitimating this - or has sealed it, encouraged it to happen, put her unseen lyric gift to sleep.

hey team didion: can anyone point me in the direction of a all-of-a-sudden-while-at-my-folks-place-for-the-holidays-very-relevant JD quote i'm looking for? there's something - it coulda been in the last one - that she said about using the best plates, and how everyday is the day you should use the best plates. is this ringing any bells? she may have the edge over me in having phrased this well.

thank you in advance from me and my plate hoarding family

Did you ever find that?

I've been reading her Paris Review interview to celebrate Pancake Day. She says certain things with a very impressive all-American coolness. But she also says things that aren't very impressive.

She says that when she's writing a novel, she starts the day by retyping the whole thing from p.1, or p.20 or so. That makes it seem the more remarkable that her novels don't seem to include any good writing - unless it was all excised by the endless rewriting.

Her interviewer crawlingly says that DH Lawrence 'didn't know anything about women at all'. Didion says: 'No, nothing'.

Now, I don't like Lawrence. In some ways he is among my least favourite writers. But he was a human being in the C20 who was married to a woman and travelled the world with her; who had intense relations with his mother and perhaps other women. He wrote a lot about women (and men). Is it plausible to say of such a person that he 'didn't know anything about women at all'? What kind of discriminate literary judgement is this? You might as well say I don't know anything about books at all, even though I've lived around them all my life.

Of course, the duller truth is that women are different from one another. You can know one woman, and not know another. You can know some things and not others. That was probably the case with DHL.

My contribution for International Women's Pancake Day.

You might as well say I don't know anything about books at all, even though I've lived around them all my life.

maybe you don't!

i don't know; it seems a fairly standard hyperbolic statement. we could translate it as "d.h. lawrence's work takes a great interest in the relations between the sexes, but that interest, which qualified him as a remarkable writer on the subject to his contemporaries, makes him seem all the more egregious on the subject today; and it's fair to say that he seems entirely wrong-headed on the subject of women."

or we could accept the shorthand in its cattiness; it's not really joan didion's job, or anyone's -- unless, say, they're a lawrence scholar, or writing a survey of twentieth-century fiction -- to be immediately responsible to have developed opinions about d.h. lawrence ready and to hand.

well, I think it is true that most of us are ignorant in lots of ways about physical objects and processes (including eg books). This is a condition of which I always feel fairly aware.

But again, there are lots of things to know about books, levels of knowing. There are some things that I know about some books. It wouldn't be plausible to say I don't know anything about any books.

I think your paraphrase is very convincing, and much more sophisticated and interesting than Didion's / interviewer's statement (because you posit a connection between DHL's strong interest and his possible errors) -- until the last clause. I don't know whether we can assume that he seems entirely wrong-headed on this subject. We'd probably need to work a bit to remind ourselves exactly what he did think or say.

Again, I feel a bit doubtful that there is a 'subject of women' - that idea seems like part of the problem. But, maybe DHL did believe in it, and maybe that could be one way that he was wrong.

It wouldn't really have struck me much (these interviews are full of daft put-downs etc) - but she just doesn't come across very well in the interview as a whole. I always feel that Didion thinks she's a much better writer than she is - a strange effect.

But there is a fine sentence or two about sunsets on the West Coast which exemplify her American authority.

that's probably a pretty canny thing to say, and a good point from which to start investigating the subject of 'lawrence and women', if we choose to, if we're in some place to do so.

on the other hand, i don't really see that a passing topic (books didion wrote on as an undergraduate!) in an interview about writing nonfiction is a place where said subject really needs to be investigated: it seems a ridiculous level of precision to demand of anyone, that anything said about anything needs to hew that true to reasonable statement, to accuracy of expression. i'd probably have to give up on ever talking about books again, if that were the case.

(xpost)

barthelme put 'all the paris review interviews' on a list of things his students should study. i feel like they belong on a list of things no one that wants to write should ever, ever read, almost.

Didion is one of my favorite journalists and stylists, but I've long suspected she hasn't read a novel since the sixties.

This is what Didion said that made a bit of an impression on me.

"There's always something missing about late afternoon to me on the East Coast. Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff. Here it just gets dark."

A positive thing to do with Didion would be just to quote lines she's written that one thinks are good.

Great quote. The Year of Magical Thinking is a wonderful place to start. The deep seriousness actually goes with gusts of adventure, even fun, occasionally.Especially when she dreams about swimming with her daughter, or (apparently in the real-life waking world)exasperates a doctor with her self-taught sense of medical author-a-tah (as South Park's Cartman would put it). She's getting out of the house!

Although gravity (with those gusts) might be a more accurate description than "deep seriousness."

her novels don't seem to include any good writing

off-sides!

Didion is one of my favorite journalists and stylists, but I've long suspected she hasn't read a novel since the sixties.

I think her position is "if I've already got Henry James and Joseph Conrad what do I need with other authors"

my gf takes that line. it's kind of infuriating but also kind of impossible to argue with

no i just meant myopically reducing a writers output to one thing

Lol no. Hardy wrote novels about people in his time. But we are talking about (mostly) Didion's non-fiction.

And Didion's politics otoh could make her non-fiction unreadable if she looks at people the way bustillos says she does. Saying "but her sentences" is a get out clause for fiction some of the time, less so for non-fiction.

I also don't see how Bustillos being a worse stylist (or the platform they got their essay published in lol) invalidates their readings. It's just putting Didion on a pedestal and not dealing with what they say.

I couldn't take Bustillos seriously after, like so many people with hot takes, she omits discussing Salvador, Miami, After Henry, and Political Fictions, all examples of reporting which by its nature observes and -- what most reporters don't do because American j-school practices are still shit -- judges.

She does mention The Year of Magical Thinking because, whaddya know, it's a memoir, hence a sign of her insularity.

I'll repeat: Didion stopped being that Californian diarist in the 1980s. She engaged the world. She criticized the Reagan-Bush year's heinous foreign policy in Central America -- she wrote a book about the El Mozote massacre when the Beltway press was fawning over Reagan's syntactical lapses.

I can accept -- hell, I would accept payment to write -- a critique of her work in its totality, not specious bullshit that stops with The White Album and her fiction.

I guess Bustillos excoriated 1993's “Trouble in Lakewood,” which I haven't read in years, but from what I remember she draws the wrong conclusions.

Brad is otm about Bustillos’s critique of Didion. I’m not saying her politics don’t merit critique, but Bustillos performs a very weird reading of “Trouble in Lakewood.” I also just think Didion is tricky, politically speaking, particularly when she overtly starts covering American electoral politics.

i'm sure there are persuasive critiques of joan didion out there, i'm not an uncritical admirer, but that maria bustillos essay is not good. i mean:

Didion’s work is an unrelenting exercise in class superiority, and it will soon be as unendurable as a minstrel show.

i mean, this is profoundly more offensive than anything i've ever seen joan didion write! and i'm not sure if bustillos meant this to be facetious or not, but wtf at this:

I never even heard of anyone getting as wasted as Didion’s hippies do.

I don't concur with the view that the Joan Didion thread should only be about celebrating Joan Didion because the writer died last month. The thread has been going since 2007, and was initially composed of statements reposted from 2006 -- that is, ILB has been talking about Didion for years and years, and (if anyone can be bothered to go back and read it) 'we' were ambivalent, divided, etc, then, as 'we' are now.

The fact that this thread keeps coming back is, for me, consonant with how I happen to feel about her, namely: however much I sometimes dislike her, am frustrated or disappointed about her, I can never quite put her away and dismiss her. She has an uncanny capacity to stay the course as an item of reflection. In a sense that is my primary experience of Didion - an interest that never goes away.

I think the statement, often repeated, that 'she wrote very good sentences', is overstated. She wrote in a particular way. I am still not convinced that she was much better at writing than most other writers. And there are some other writers who write in more ambitious or flamboyant ways (Nabokov would be the extreme, but even ILB darling Patricia Lockwood would qualify in her own way) whose 'sentences' might be of more interest to consider as such.

I don't really agree with the idea that you buy Didion's 'sentences' and ignore what they say, or the views they express. The sentences, the content, the views, go together. There are probably talented writers in the Spectator (well ... maybe), but I wouldn't buy them. The analogy with music doesn't hold up very well because compared to language, musical is a relatively abstract medium.

I agree with the view that the later Didion (c.1980s, 1990s) is probably politically different from the earlier. I've been saying it over and over!

In the critiques of Didion, I find the idea of 'class status' strangely overplayed - that has never been an issue in her for me, really - and I also think that the idea that she is 'nostalgic for a golden age of better values' is very overstated or not very apt. (Both Harrison and Bustillos seem to emphasise both these ideas; I'm not very convinced by them.) I see little nostalgia in her -- again, an unusually unsentimental writer.

I can't believe I was so hard on poor old Joan.

― the pinefox, Wednesday, November 7, 2007

Well put.

I think she wrote good sentences in that she was unsentimental but evoked sentiment in the reader, in her novels and essays and articles.

more like groan didion

more like joan didifart

the pinefox: Is it possible that you don't recognize the markers of class in CA where money is new and a recent history is tied to land and frontier stories? Not that I know myself but the markers are interesting ...

and she’s explicit about them! anyone who wants to make a performance of like pulling back the curtain to reveal that author of Slouching Toward Bethlehem and The White Album writes from the perspective of “establishment” California and about politics (both left and right) with both privileged fascination and privileged contempt is a priori suspect given that she comes out and says this repeatedly.

obv she gets older, sees more, comes to a different kind of understanding about what’s at stake and for whom. we haven’t mentioned Salvador in this context but it’s a moment for sure.

I think the motives of the seller were being questioned rather than the aptitude of the buyer or the existence of buyers who do not also consider quality and purpose.

I agree that music is a relatively abstract medium, but popular music is often written with lyrics intended not to be abstract and that is what is often discussed here. I think good writing can evoke response that is non-literal.

re: Didion's famous exchange with the Woody Allen fan, I don't like her response, though I also think the film is bad. My question is: has anyone read her actual review? Could anyone post it here?

OK, the review is here
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1979/08/16/letter-from-manhattan/

But much of it is subscriber-only.

From reading the first paras I'm somewhat entertained but not very convinced, as the critique seems rather applicable to Didion herself. Maybe she was, for this reason, the ideal reviewer.

the critique seems rather applicable to Didion herself

I don't know if I agree here! I also only have access to these opening paragraphs, but reading them over her accusations are: cultural accesorising (an interesting one as arguably much of our culture has become this!), infantilism and self-obsession. Out of those three the only sin I could see someone saying Didion has is the last one, but even there the very nature of her work means she is constantly confronted with things that are alien to her and requiring at least some curiosity to analyse, while Allen's world, being fiction, can afford to be more insular.

Nedlene Grendel: random guess - they don't want to explain themselves for doing something that cannot be justified to their audience for technical reasons only that point to skills appropriate for contests of dominance

Will give this a listen

For your listening pleasure, here's our deep-dive on Joan Didion's conservatism—her Sacramento roots, her early writing for National Review, why she loved Barry Goldwater (and hated Ronald Reagan), and much more. Our guest? The great Sam Tanenhaus. Enjoy!https://t.co/04u8xopsb2

— Matthew Sitman (@MatthewSitman) January 13, 2022

really enjoyed that

Yes, terrific podcast.

really excellent discussion, thanks for sharing

patricia lockwood makes an excellent case for her in the introductory essay to this book, and i think, pretty objectively, joan didion gave great interviews, so it's prob worth buying: https://bookshop.org/books/joan-didion-the-last-interview-and-other-conversations/9781685890117

Where I Was From is notes from her lifelong trek through legacies of illusion, coming to grips with the Californias of heroic individualism and artificial paradise of water and land politics,the white pioneer destiny, fed to the childhood heads of her generation and so many before, some since: familiar enough in sum, but she fills in the details of her experience and others', from ancestors barely avoiding the fate of the Donner Party, to delusions of some Jack London characters and her own, in River Run, also the real-life citizens of Lakewood, shining suburban island tied to military contracts during the Cold War and after or "after," lots of other people and ties: the rhythmic development of all this is amazing (and "was" from is right, right as she can make it, with no desire to break with the people, places, and things she's loved, though memory is most of that now---prob no illusion of breaking entirely with the other stuff, the mad insidious bullshit, but she seems to be sitting there waiting at the end, having gotten this far.)

I finished LET ME TELL YOU WHAT I MEAN: a 2021 collection of essays. Information about the essays is poor: the book should have a simple list indicating the provenance and context of each, but only has a date after each.

The Foreword by Hilton Als (who?) is bad.

The first 6 are short essays from 1968. They may be the best material in the book. They don't outstay a welcome. Didion is at a certain kind of peak here - in the simple sense that she was a "great documenter of 1968 CA", or whatever.

"Why I Write" is a 1976 talk on her writing and imaginative process. "Telling Stories" is a 1978 recollection of writing short stories in the 1950s and 1960s, and notes that has written none since and doesn't feel comfortable with the form.

"Some Women" (1989) starts off about photographic studios and models in general, then turns into an essay about photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Possibly this would be explained if we had the context, eg: maybe this was really always presented as an essay about Mapplethorpe.

"The Long-Distance Runner" is about director Tony Richardson. It appears to be the foreword to a posthumous memoir by him. It's quite interesting to learn that Didion and her family were so close to Richardson, who was making films way back before she was known as a writer.

"Last Words" is a longer essay about Ernest Hemingway, on the occasion of the publication of a posthumous work. It contains elements of appreciation and even of "close reading", and may be somewhat significant in clarifying her adherence to, admiration for, Hemingway, in style and narrative outlook. She then spends much time criticising people for publishing writing (including letters) that Hemingway didn't choose to publish.

"Everywoman.com" (2000) is a very of-its-time, late-90s / dot com sort of era, article about Martha Stewart - a very successful businesswoman who I believe has been very popular in the US but has never made such a dent in the awareness of my own country. Didion spends time rather needlessly arguing with others for their complaints about Stewart, as a way to get her own contrary view forward. The view is rather simple: people (women) like Stewart because she is a successful businesswoman and they'd like to be like that. The materials of this essay - lots of corporate-speak - do not make for a good text when transposed into Didion's typically inclusive rendition, ie: one in which she repeats corporate phrases and titles as fully and repetitively as possible, as though to laconic effect.

Didion writes with the plainness, and / or carefulness, that we expect from her. I quickly come to realise, again, that one of her typical effects is to report what people say, within this flat style, and thus make them look silly or vainglorious. I ask myself why this effect is achieved and I think: well, it's a bit like letting them speak, then, rather than responding, applauding or reflecting, just leaving silence, and thus making them appear to "fall flat". This, roughly, seems to me one of the characteristic strategies of her whole career.

She also occasionally goes in for the notes of faux-naiveté or lyricism that others have found in her writing. That woman, quoted upthread here, who trashed Didion in about 1979 was good at seeing how repetitive her style was, not just in its flatness but in the particular tactics that she used to relieve the flatness. One that I don't like is her, I think the word is, paratactic style, when she says "and ... and ... and", as though this is a canny literary effect, or as though it conveys being, as an ilxor once said, "overcome by unexpected emotion". I find it rather adolescent, and certainly mannered. The sentences from Hemingway that she quotes admiringly are precisely like this, so she is fairly open, implicitly, about having taken this stylistic idea from an admired precursor. I don't think it's great in Hemingway either.

Didion has a mystique of writing. She talks quite preciously or pretentiously about the experience of writing, the task of the writer, the nature of writing, and so on. One of her claims is that writing is always aggressive (p.44), which is only plausible or true at such a level of abstraction or generality that it has little purchase. It might be more productive to consider how Joan Didion's style, specifically, is sometimes aggressive, while tending to dissemble this.

When I mention a mystique of writing, the best antidote to it that I can think of it might be a long-ago LRB review by Ian Sansom, basically saying that writers like to go on about how hard writing is but actually it's easy compared to other kinds of work. Perhaps a partial truth, but just as useful as Didion's. That review is here:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v26/n23/ian-sansom/whamming

In these remarks I have tended to focus on the annoying and poor aspects of Didion's writing, but it may be fair to say that first half-dozen essays, which are quite brisk and do report on actual things, have more worth than that.

Hilton Als (who?)

oh he put out one of the best essay collections i’ve ever read a few years ago, called white girls. pretty regular new yorker contributor

Yeah, was gonna say that. Haven't read his intro or anything else in the collection, but The Year of Magical Thinking and Where I Was From, which I mentioned upthread, are contributions to world literature, though cost her almost almost all her writing and other life, a lot of loss and endeavor to get there.
Seems fitting, since WIWF is from the California Children of the Pioneers mythos, very gradually seeing all through that, closer and closer to home.

Thirding White Girls

I know it's late but you can read that WA piece - and a lot of the older NYRB articles in general - by putting the URL in the Internet Archive and going to the earlier incarnations. It's actually quite short by NYRB standards.

Didion writes with the plainness, and / or carefulness, that we expect from her. I quickly come to realise, again, that one of her typical effects is to report what people say, within this flat style, and thus make them look silly or vainglorious. I ask myself why this effect is achieved and I think: well, it's a bit like letting them speak, then, rather than responding, applauding or reflecting, just leaving silence, and thus making them appear to "fall flat". This, roughly, seems to me one of the characteristic strategies of her whole career.

This is a great observation! Something that's annoyed me that I haven't seen put into words before. Didion's not the only writer who does this. And obviously it's a staple of reality show editing.

What annoys you about it? Curious.

Thanks, poster Chuck Tatum. I had to think a bit before I could articulate this small observation.

xpost

Perhaps it's the unprocessed need for the writer to seem smarter than the people they're observing. I guess there's a line between allowing someone the space to damn themselves (which is fine) and unfairly making someone seem like a phoney (which might say more about the author than the subject).

Imagine someone (not) reacting to you like that in real life and it’s clear why it’s annoying.

the style referred to entered journalism (or anyway this is my under-informed guess) via the younger new yorker style-switch from a youthful over-admiration of henry james to the golden-bowl guilt phase of absorbing imitating and parodying hemingway and his mentor gertrude stein: whose combined shtick was (a) less is more, let the subtext sing in the air stripped of any DO-YOU-SEE-style announcement* plus in particular stein's penchant for repetition as a device for variation of mode

*where "not saying it" is a mark of shared sensibility: we needn't comment-explain bcz we all already get it (which narrowing of the "we" -- as chuck above suggests -- is actually kind of a betrayal of journalism i guess, certainly a super-complex ethical-aesthetical line that the NYer created and then made its early home in )

yes i am meant to be cleaning my kitchen floor and not at all on this thread, yell at me next time i post plz

"less is more" = leaving out the (b) = stein's use of repetition as a forensic device

I'm relieved to see that I broadly agree with Mark S, though without knowing enough about New Yorker magazine history.

I like his reference to a "betrayal of journalism".

Perhaps it's the unprocessed need for the writer to seem smarter than the people they're observing. I guess there's a line between allowing someone the space to damn themselves (which is fine) and unfairly making someone seem like a phoney (which might say more about the author than the subject).

― Chuck_Tatum

This is true, but this approach starts to ebb around the 1980s. It's why I admire Miami and the later work over the more famous early stuff.

I think it's important for the writer of features and reviews to know when to let the quote have some space around it, for the reader to fill, having established context. The writer also has to be choosy about quotes, not just pick the best or worst lines, but also not just stringing a lot of lines together, beyond just enough of the latter to give the idea, if that's what the artiste mainly does. I've had some hard times with that kind of writing, but it's worth doing, I think--of course some readers, incl. some editors want every damn thing spelled out. I even had one editor who told me to "spoonfeed," in so many words. I don't go around that joint no more.

As a reader, I find it offputting to have the writer jumping in there to explain everything, unless I'm reading an instruction manual or dispatch from a country/situation I've barely heard of etc.

I'm not talking about leaving space in "hard journalism," that is. The harder it is the more I want to be told about it.

anticipation: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/06/arts/design/joan-didion-hammer-museum-hilton-als.html

Who cares if she staged the photo in the article for a Williams Sonoma photo op? She tried to write.

betrayal of journalism my ass---in all the things I've read, some of her later writing, she provided the context, and so do the better New Yorker writers, rather jump in there with commentary, lecture points, that Gopnik Thurman etc "polymath" ponderosa

She did warn people not to forget she's in the room (as they tended to because she was so small and quiet, she said), because she's there to getcha (that was earlier though, I may never get back that far)

LOA wrapping up the trilogy this fall:

https://www.loa.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/9781598537871-185x300.jpg

I am excited to read the stage version of Magical Thinking