Nov 2, 2005

Book Review

Writing Against Death

The prospect of reviewing even the discarded sentences of Joan Didion should daunt any critic worth his weight in bookmarks. Her essays on the 1960s and its fallout, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, helped define what's come to be known as literary journalism while showing how the personal and the political could be wed in a way that transcended a feminist platitude.

The Year of Magical Thinking (Knopf, New York, 2005), Didion's eighth work of nonfiction, is a meditation on grief. Her grief to be exact. In late December of 2003 the screenwriter and novelist John Gregory Dunne, Didion's husband of 40 years, slumped over in his reading chair and died of a heart attack. It was a condition his doctor dubbed "the widow-maker" nearly 20 years before.

Underscoring this loss, however, is an equally devastating one looming in the rear view. Little more than a month before this book's publication, the author's only daughter, Quintana Roo Michael Dunne, died of a brain condition that had plagued her for two years. In fact, the night Dunne passed away, the two had just returned from visiting their daughter in the ICU of a Manhattan hospital. It was the last time the family would be together.

Didion's first full year on her own was not reserved for mourning, as it contained the unenviable distraction of Quintana's illness. Nevertheless, she manages to convey how grief borders on insanity. In her case, it centers around two impulses that are at once irrational and intuitive. First is the idea that affirming her husband's death was akin to betrayal. She couldn't remove his voice from the answering machine message; forget donating his clothes. Didion's fear was not what would happen if she accepted his death, but that doing so would foreclose on the possibility that he would return. Irrational and fantastic in the same breath. As is her initial reaction to Julia Child's death, which was to think "this is finally working out: John and Julia Child can have dinner together."

Further destabilizing her situation is the failure of literature. For a writer this is no minor letdown. "… I had learned since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was control," Didion writes. Except, of course, when it's not. For as she discovers, the year of magical thinking has less to do with gazing at mortality than having her nose rubbed in her own powerlessness. However much she studied her husband's autopsy report or scrutinized his lifestyle, there's no getting around her irrelevance to the final outcome.

This is all the more startling when social class is thrown into the equation. Though Didion doesn't press her finger very hard on this, it's obvious that a sudden loss of agency might hit an iconic writer harder than the layperson. Describing the "habit of mind" of her class Didion writes:

"They believed absolutely in their own management skills. They believed absolutely in the power of the telephone numbers they had at their fingertips, the right doctor, the major donor, the person who could facilitate a favor at State or Justice." Of course, Didion knows better than to "believe absolutely" in any such thing, however much she's grown accustomed to the illusion.

What's so remarkable about The Year of Magical Thinking is that it offers no magical answers. Didion channels everyone from Freud and Auden to medical texts in an effort to comprehend her loss, but neither research nor poetry can bail her out. What's left are small steps towards carrying on. Hosting Christmas Eve dinner, reusing a special set of dishes, plodding on to meet deadlines.

Didion's voice has always been unintentionally haunting. Her rendering of deindustrialized California towns in her recent effort, Where I Was From, practically serves as an advertisement for gated communities everywhere. But this is not to suggest she's a blowhard, or a writer who has settled into shtick. If anything, Didion is an anti-blowhard. Through a delicate, if often oblique, language she creates a sense of peril in less than obvious places. Here, however, her focus is herself, and her life, and the memories no longer shared by the living.

Grief is not a "get out of criticism free" card, or at least it shouldn't be. But in this exquisite rendering of loss, the prospect of criticism is less gauche than pointless. Might as well review a wake. "The corpse was derivative…" You get the idea.

That it manages to elude self-indulgence, or worse still, Oprah-esque "inspiration" is part of the magic of The Year of Magical Thinking. If Didion achieves anything, it's the ability to publish in the absence of the husband who read and edited everything she'd written since 1963. Two writers working from home, alone together. One imagines few people so closely wed. One can't imagine what the other will become on her own, but let's hope beyond hope that she continues. Death may not become her, but it hardly tarnishes her unique, powerful voice.
John Dicker

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