A Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion is a novel taking place in a fictional Latin American country, Boca Grande, in the midst of a lot of civil unrest and the underlying threat that a group of guerillas will overthrow the current regime. No doubt, relying on the background of her journalistic career of concise reporting and sublime sentence structure, Joan Didion brings us a novel that is of both innocence and evil. Our narrator is Grace Strasser-Mendana, an anthropologist who controls much of the wealth in Boca Grande having married into a family of power. Grace knows all of Boca Grande's secrets as well as the potential for unfathomable violence. She befriends Charlotte Douglas who knows nothing of the secrets of Boca Grande, arriving in search of her fugitive daughter, Marin. Charlotte can be described as a hapless heroine. The book's narrator describes her thus:

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"She was immaculate of history, innocent of politics. There were startling vacuums in her store of common knowledge."

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The book is largely one of flashbacks by the myriad of characters as we gradually begin to understand more of the drama that is unfolding in this volatile Latin American country as well as in San Francisco and New Orleans. Our narrator, Grace Strasser-Mendana, opens A Book of Common Prayer with the pledge, "I will be her witness."

'As a child of comfortable family in the temperate zone Charlotte had been as a matter of course provided with clean sheets, orthodontia, lamb chops, living grandparents, attentive godparents, one brother named Dickie, ballet lessons, and casual timely information about menstruation and the care of flat silver. ... She was immaculate of history, innocent of politics...During the two years she spent at Berkeley... she had entered the main library once, during a traveling exhibition of glass flowers from Harvard. She recalled having liked the glass flowers.'


The patron saint of feminine nullity and sorrowful irony does it again... Charlotte is another version of whatever 'Play It As It Lays's' Maria Wyeth is - Maria Wyeth if she were a modern Marlow journeying into the Heart of Darkness...

Also in the vein of 'Wide Sargasso Sea'...

Worth a read of course because it is Didion but doesn't pack as much of a punch as her other work - too many threads and the blankness that permeates Didion's fiction doesn't necessarily suit such an ambitious narrative and the narrator character feels like a spare part...

NYT hit the nail on the head 'Like her narrator, [Didion] has been an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time, a memorable voice, partly eulogistic, partly despairing; always in control.'

This starts out feeling like one of those Deborah Eisenberg stories set in a made-up Central American country, but pretty soon you orient yourself and realize you're in deliciously dated late-1970s Didionland. This entails being surrounded by characters who think, speak, and behave only like Joan Didion characters and not remotely like anyone in actual life, and reading gorgeously crafted and sometimes embarrassingly dramatic sentences. The novel is narrated by steely, Didionesque observer Grace, and tells the story of Charlotte Douglas, the wealthy, childlike, hypersensual, idiosyncratic mother of a Patty Hearst-type rich-girl-turned-revolutionary-terrorist. Charlotte is hanging around Boca Grande, a fake maybe-El Salvador where she has fled to escape her Joan Didion novel of a past and to submit the enigma of her existence to the former-anthropologist-cum-hobby-scientist-and-ruling-elite narrator's gaze.

I personally feel sentimental about the Bay Area in the 1970s, as it's the ground out of which I was grown, and this book fed my hunger for a glimpse of that time. This is actually just the second Didion novel I've read, but she has such a distinctive style that I keep wanting to make broad pronouncements about her fiction. There is almost no one I take more seriously than Joan Didion the nonfiction writer, but I find her fiction pretty absurd. I happen to love it, but it strikes me at many times as coming close to camp. Everyone is so rich and disoriented and the sex is all weird and women are these confused, fascinating creatures who are sort of hapless victims of often cruel, or at least detached men who have great success both in understanding and controlling the female characters and in navigating the world. I'm not sure what to make of it all, but I do like it. This book is fun and, as I said, very late-1970s. I read it on an airplane, in a hotel, and at my in-laws' house, and it's good for that kind of vacation. Definitely recommend this paperback edition with the lighter on the front and the lady's face and Cosmo blurb on the back.

❤️‍

Razor sharp! Definitely think I’ll need to read this again at some point, quite sure I didn’t get everything on this first read!

Nevertheless… absolutely captivating!

Joan Didion y Joy Williams deberían pasar un día juntas, paseando por el desierto de Arizona, o conduciendo por una carretera solitaria, turnándose al volante, y hacer inventario de todas sus heridas y de la manera en que han decidido intentar cicatrizarlas. Esta novela es otra masterpiece de la introspección quirúrgica. Un viaje.

A skillfully written but oddly unlikeable book detailing the crossed paths of a cold, analytical narrator and the star of the show, Charlotte Douglas. Charlotte is puppet and heroine, burned out trophy wife and battered survivor, ignorant of history and literature, but constantly reading. She drifts in and out of stores, in and out of beds, and in and out of reality. I will probably add a star or two as I realize that I am continuing to think about the book long after finishing it, but I did not enjoy the company of these wasted, wasteful people spawning damaged children and doomed governments.

slow reading didion on a warm, sunny los angeles afternoon. there aren't many things better than that

Good writing, but depressing story. The author's style is repetitive.
Could be.
Repetitive.
Still.
It was OK.

An extraordinary novel that feels like non-fiction. Didion portrays politics and personal tragedy in both a poetic and cutting way. Her characters are depicted in such minimal and seemingly effortless detail that makes me think they must be real people.

Filled with horrible adults that bicker and never listen.

This book tells the story of a dysfunctional bourgeois family, with the seventies era Berkeley dropout daughter going terrorist, her globetrotting mom searching for "something," her self-righteous and bombastic dad, and a seemingly kind step-dad who is professionally a not-so-kind internationally-connected power lawyer. Didion is a talented writer, and while the style might seem less innovative, and at times repetitive, to certain contemporary eyes and ears, this book was cleverly arranged to deliver a story in a tangled and nonlinear way. While the specifics are dated, it seems to touch on some modern dilemmas involving internationalism and the distribution of wealth and power. I would not tell you to run out and read this book, but it's a pretty good read.