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The "dazzling" and essential portrayal of 1960s America from the author of South and West and The Year of Magical Thinking (The New York Times). Capturing the tumultuous landscape of the United States, and in particular California, during a pivotal era of social change, the first work of nonfiction from one of American literature's most distinctive prose stylists is a modern classic. In twenty razor-sharp essays that redefined the art of journalism, National Book Award-winning author Joan Didion reports on a society gripped by a deep generational divide, from the "misplaced children" dropping acid in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district to Hollywood legend John Wayne filming his first picture after a bout with cancer. She paints indelible portraits of reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes and folk singer Joan Baez, "a personality before she was entirely a person," and takes readers on eye-opening journeys to Death Valley, Hawaii, and Las Vegas, "the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements." First published in 1968, Slouching Towards Bethlehem has been heralded by the New York Times Book Review as "a rare display of some of the best prose written today in this country" and named to Time magazine's list of the one hundred best and most influential nonfiction books. It is the definitive account of a terrifying and transformative decade in American history whose discordant reverberations continue to sound a half-century later.… (more)
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The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers.
I enjoyed most of these essays, where Didion seems like a naturalist in close observation; she infuses more so than reports, and eschews transitions so that I suddenly realized things that hadn’t been written. It’s been long enough since I read them to recognize a few that still pop up as especially memorable, among them the piece about Haight-Ashbury; one about infidelity and murder outside Los Angeles; another about becoming enamored of John Wayne and forever after dreaming that a man would, as Wayne did in a film, “build her a house ‘at the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow’ ”; and one about the psychological effects of the Santa Ana and other foehn winds that compels me to read more on the phenomenon.
I’ve always been struck that Didion is about the size of a mosquito, and here I was interested to read her take on the matter:
My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does.
Yeah, don’t let appearances fool you, Didion is brave and passionate and compelling, and it occurs to me that one of the essays, “On Self-respect,” details the stitching behind her strength of character. And she’s shockingly wise:
I remember one day {…} we both had hangovers {…} and we walked to a Spanish restaurant and drank Bloody Marys and gazpacho until we felt better. I was not then guilt-ridden about spending afternoons that way, because I still had all the afternoons in the world.
Are you kidding me? That wasn’t written by today’s septuagenarian Didion looking back; that's her at age 32. I look forward to reading more, next up probably The White Album.
Reviewed by Elwood Miller
In Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion writes mostly of life in California. These essays are not only about place but also about the feeling of loss which often can accompany change.
Ms. Didion responds to the outside world moving into her world, the world of her memories and taking over; a world in which she admits at times only exists in her mind as a memory someone else once related to her. Ms. Didion struggles with the center of her (and our) world not holding, the coming apart, the breaking-up of things. She tells us our country “was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled” 84. The lessons she seems to learn through her exercise in essay therapy is that perhaps it is not the world changed she grieves for but herself.
Ms. Didion’s essays explore the difference between what we say we want and what we do want. She examines middle-class values and desires and in doing so manages to paint an evocative portrait of American life in the 1960s, our dreams, hopes, passions, and follies. Ms. Didion is a voice for the center, she speaks as a member of the white middle of America with no historical context of a past beyond that which white Europeans brought to this continent and little acknowledgement of injustices or oppression and much critique for liberals protest leaders, and that is what makes her such an effective observer of America. Ms. Didion tells us that none of it matters, that change is inevitable, and that soon, we will matter little more than the millionaires whose mansions line Newport, empty monuments to the antithesis of money and happiness.
What Ms. Didion leans and imparts to us is that the discovering is what matters, the getting leaves only disappointment, and she does so which a richness and elegance of prose rare indeed.
I also loved "On Self-Respect", "On Keeping a Notebook", and the first essay about an odd murder case.
For all that these were first written in the sixties, they did not feel particularly dated.
I've read Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking and A Book of Common Prayer and wasn't impressed with either. This collection of essays is different, perhaps because they were written while she
"Slouching Towards Bethlehem is also the title of one piece in the book, and that
No matter what topic she is writing about, the consistent theme is one of the breakdown of the social order, or of the American psyche. But there is also a strong subtext which shows that the center, though embattled, really is holding; it is the margins, both at the upper and the lower ends of the social spectrum which are falling apart. Didion's prose style is sublime, a model for what I seek when reading non-fiction. I found these essays alternating exciting and charming and always thought-provoking.
Of course the title essay here is now so famous as to be almost unreadable as journalism. It is almost frightening in its portrayal of this lost generation of American youth. Didion is less successful, perhaps, in the five essays collected under the heading, “Personals”. It is as though by focusing too directly on herself she loses her perspective. Much better to let us see the author obliquely, around a corner, when the author’s attention is focused on something else. Two of the best essays that accomplish that are the final two in the collection, “Los Angeles Notebook” and “Goodbye to All That”. The former offers up a fragmented but entirely crisp impression of LA, the latter is almost mournful of lost youth and lost hopefulness, which perhaps is always symbolized by giving up on New York.
Didion’s writing is clean and concrete and always willing to make the jump-cut. But she herself is not naive about it. It is, or was, a product being sold. And as she notes at the end of her Preface, “writers are always selling somebody out.” And sometimes that somebody is themselves.
One thing I
And yet she never fully exposes her mind and its secrets. Instead she steers us toward our own, bringing clarity as well as deeper questions.
In this volume, images of the 1960s in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere are served with a quality of moving air that makes me feel that I am breathing in these scenes as the author experiences them. In the title essay in particular, the poignancy of her depiction of the Haight in the summer of 1967 is almost too vivid for my sensory imagination. I wasn't there. I was in Boston that summer, Boston's own summer of love. A summer that bridged the nation.
I've already read and drunk in The Year of Magical Thinking, which helped me greatly in my first months of widowhood. I'll be seeking out the rest of her work.
It’s easy to
Her prose takes your breath away with it’s descriptive beauty. Regardless of the subject matter, it's so easy to get lost in her words. She tells each person's story without condemning or praising their belief system.
"She does try, perhaps unconsciously, to hang on to the innocence and turbulence and capacity for wonder, however ersatz or shallow, of her own or of anyone's adolescence."
I felt like the essays on Didion's personal life and experiences were a little stronger than the rest. There was also a story that opens the book, "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream," that really stayed with me. It's about a woman convicted on murdering her husband in a burning car. It was a haunting tale, as so many things are in Didion's hands. Even a trip to the tropical isles of Hawaii becomes a morose reflection for her.
"Las Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification."
One of my favorite pieces in the book is about how we change when we return to our childhood homes. Our personalities revert back to the roles we took on within our family dynamic. Our spouses often can’t understand the strained relationships or odd attachments that we have with the place and the people there.
“I had by all objective accounts a ‘normal’ and a ‘happy’ family situation, and yet I was almost thirty years old before I could talk to my family on the telephone without crying after I had hung up. We did not fight. Nothing was wrong. And yet some nameless anxiety colored the emotional charges between me and the place I came from.”
BOTTOM LINE: As with most short story collections, not every single piece was my favorite, but with a writer like Didion you’re sure to find some gems. Didion conveys moods and feelings with such incredible talent and this collection is one of her best.
“I have said that the trip back is difficult, and it is – difficult in a way that magnifies the ordinary ambiguities of sentimental journeys.”
"Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself."
I can't wait to read more Didion.
If you are unsure of Didion because you are not a fan of nonfiction work I would suggest reading the essays that are contained within entitled "Goodbye to All That" which focuses on her realizing she no longer belonged in New York and the title piece "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" which is about a visit to San Francisco. Both pieces are classic Didion and will showcase her writing style for you.
What can I say about this author that hasn't already been said by more prestigious individuals? Not much. She is a well-respected author for a reason and I say hats off to her for writing about the American experience even if it is told through her lens.
Side note: why did they choose such an angry looking picture of her to put on the front?
Side note: why did they choose such an angry looking picture of her to put on the front?
I was introduced to Didion through her essay “On Keeping a Notebook,” which I was really impressed by. (Some of this is a lie-- I was actually made to read part of her essay “Los Angeles Notebook” in high school, but that was before I realized what literature and words could really be, so I paid no attention to it.) Didion sunk somewhere into my subconscious after that, and a little while later I found this collection at a $1 book sale. I immediately bought it, because I knew that I would be an idiot not to.
I read this book slowly and in bursts. A few essays a night, then maybe a few weeks later a few essays more. I slowly began to wear the book down. I tore off a corner of the cover after my friend startled me in Starbucks. The spine is flaking away at both ends. This book intrigued me greatly, and somewhere within it I fell in love with the essay as a medium. Some of them hit me particularly hard. “Goodbye to All That,” for example, forced me to take a walk at midnight to be alone with my thoughts. The essay had given me so much to think about, not to mention that I was sad that I had just finished such a brilliant book.
Didion devastates me a tiny bit. Even writing this review, I am starting to turn quiet. I want to carry this book around with me, but it falls apart every time I touch it.
The first essay, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” tells the story of a woman accused of murdering her husband, who, apparently, suffered from depression and other ailments and wanted to die. Joan began the essay with a description of San Bernardino, California, site of most of the story, when Lucille Miller visited a 24-hour minimart. She writes, “…on the night of October 7, 1964, […] the moon was dark and the wind was blowing and she was out of milk, and Banyan Street was where, at about 12:30 a.m., her 1964 Volkswagen came to a sudden stop, caught fire, and began to burn. For an hour and fifteen minutes Lucille Miller ran up and down Banyan Street calling for help, but no cars passed and no help came. At three o’clock that morning, when the fire had been put out and the California Highway Patrol officers were completing their report, Lucille Miller was still sobbing and incoherent, for her husband had been asleep in the Volkswagen. ‘What will I tell the children, when there’s nothing left, nothing left in the casket,’ she cried to the friend called to comfort her. ‘How can I tell them there’s nothing left?’” (6). Quite a story, but as Didion unwinds the tale, numerous pieces of evidence do not add up. Miller ends up in the San Bernardino County Jail charged with first degree murder. I could not stop reading this 28-page essay.
Other essays involved a portrait of John Wayne, whom Didion admired since she was a child. Eventually, she meets the Duke and recounts dinner at an exclusive restaurant with her husband, when suddenly three men appeared playing guitars. She writes, “…all the while the men with the guitars kept playing, until finally I realized what they had been playing, what they had been playing all along: ‘The Red River Valley’ and the theme from The High and the Mighty. They did not quite get the beat right, but even now can hear them, in another country and a long time later, even as I tell you this” (41). I have met a few people I really admired, John Updike, John Cheever, and Joyce carol Oates to name a few, and I can vividly recall the time, the place, and the topics we discussed.
Finally, I would like to share the opening paragraph of the title essay for the collection. Didion writes, “The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together. People were missing. Parents were missing, Those left behind filed desultory missing-persons reports, then moved on themselves. // It was not a country in open revolution. It was not a country under enemy siege. It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967” (84). How could I not continue reading an essay that began this way.
I think I see another visit to Joan Didion’s Miami in my near future. 5 stars
--Jim, 2/2/16