Book 69 - Joan Didion "The White Album"

[jazzy_dave]

Joan Didion - The White Album: Essays (FSG Classics)




As much as I loathe her frail-artiste pretensions Didion can be absolutely stunning.

At her best and shorn of her overworn neurasthenic security blanket, she has a gimlet eye capable of dissecting the messy, pulsating core of, well, America. Didion describes with a sort of preternatural, almost omniscient clarity, prying into the still-beating heart of the 60s, 70s, 80,s WHENEVER. She can be that oracle - a master of stripping a society down to its ticking cogs. And yet, she also refuses to Explain It All; she's a translator, not a storyteller, which can be frustrating. It would be fantastic to harness that ultra-charged, feverish mind to make some clarity, some sense out of, you know, all of this mess! Right here! But this same reluctance to explain is also the source of her essays' powers and strengths. Because Didion's so unwilling to hammer her observations into the straitjacket of some prescribed, prefab narrative, she's allowed to keep that widened aperture, recording everything that flashes across her always-dilated pupils without pruning out the complicated bits - the interesting bits.

She's not always absolutely coherent - the people she meets, the places she explores don't allow for that - but her eloquence and articulation and fanatic persistence in including everything are admirable and breathtaking in their own right. She's got a one-in-a-million set of eyes and thankfully a pen and voice to match. In a strange way, her clarity and her restraint remind me of Orwell a bit, with more frill, more baby-fat (not hard) and minus his sort of heart-hearted political twist.

Best read peacemeal and as a collection of essays you can dip anywhere into them whilst reading something else, and is exactly what i did.

Comments

[thespian15.livejournal.com]

I thought from the title it was going to be about the Beatles' album. :o
Hugs, Jon

[davesmusictank.livejournal.com]

Fooled you - fooled me at first but i knew the author from other essays lol!

[thespian15.livejournal.com]

LOL..........

[annie-r.livejournal.com]

I don't find her pretentious at all, but I've been a fan for decades. As for frail, you should read her next-to-last book, The Year of Magical Thinking. So much older than she was during the early essays, but her voice is still true, even if she is physically frail. And she still can't explain it to us.

[ladyblue56.livejournal.com]

I don't find Didion to be pretentious either and I've also read her work for many years. I've not reread "The White Album" in years. "The Year of Magical Thinking had me in tears as did "Blue Nights." Frail is not how I'd describe her.