The draw of Joan Didion is alluring. I’ve surrendered to her siren call before, and will again.
I wax and wane with Didion—currently waning.
Didion brings the esoteric to the mainstream. That’s the draw. People feel better about themselves when they read Didion. Readers feel smarter, and well read afterwards.
I read Play it as it Lays earlier this year, and I fell in love with Didion all over again. But the word again is key here. Again because last year I read her highly touted Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a collection of essays. It left me cold, and indifferent.
But that isn’t entirely true, indifferent.
I found myself repeatedly rolling my eyes reading essay after essay, seemingly about nothing. A couple days ago I finished The White Album, another collection of essays. I’m left with the same sensation, but with growing annoyance.
Didion feasts on melodramatic prose. Melodramatic for no other reason than detached coolness.
I read many of these essays twice. But I was still no closer to deciphering any point beyond her very cool style. I would have loved this writing style when I was in college.
A professor once told me she was impressed by my ability to turn-a-phrase, but she doubted whether I had read the assigned material.
I hadn’t.
So I did my best impression of a pseudo-intellectual melodramatic writer. Of course the only part of her criticism I registered was the turn-a-phrase part, and not the failing to communicate anything of value part. I cringe now when I think of that paper1.
This is the worst trait a piece of writing can have. Saying a lot while saying very little. A word-salad.
Joan Didion writes word-salads.2
The same tone I adore in Play it as it Lays—a novel—I find wholly distracting in her nonfiction.
I can enjoy the anxiety-riddled-ennui ethos in her novels because I can simply admire the art of what she’s doing. This tone works because it makes sense within the context of the story—a woman, and a generation in a crisis of vapidity.
The ethos Didion conveys is the thing in Play it as it Lays.
That tone doesn’t translate to nonfiction. The anxiety and dread that permeates and charms her fiction suddenly becomes much less endearing when she turns into a reporter.
When malaise becomes a lens to probe mundane but not necessarily uninteresting phenomena of modern life, i.e., the Hoover Dam, the California Dept of Transportation, or the Santa Monica Freeway, it suddenly does feel uninteresting.
Didion’s essays place her in the role of journalist—but her existential and listless aesthetic give her reporting a sense of inertia. Her style supersedes her subject.
We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
It’s a wonderful opening line to The White Album, but you could just as well stop there.