One thing I’ve learned while taking my time reading this book is that I will eat up anything this woman has written. Joan Didion’s writing style, genre of books, and the vibes each of them give off never disappoint.

I have heard about people who don’t particularly like her writing or the way she tells a story and I think that’s valid criticism but I won’t be hearing it… She could’ve written about paint drying and I would’ve gladly read it.

This book is set in Central America and is about two American women named Grace Strasser-Mendana and Charlotte Douglas. Grace knows everything about everyone and is a member of a political family in Boca Grande. The one thing she can’t figure out is Charlotte and why she’s shown up with her progressive ways, her secrets, and “norteamericana” style.


If I went fully in depth about how much I loved this book this review would never end so I am going to keep it short and sweet. I loved it so much that I took my sweet time reading it. I read it so slow that it took me an entire month to read this 200+ page book and decide it was time to put it to rest. This book was written in a way that you’re only given little blurbs of information throughout the book that only make sense towards the end once you’ve seen the bigger picture. The ending of this book was glorious. It took all of the little scraps and pieces of information that Didion left all over the book and wrapped it all up in a nice little bow for me to read. I don’t want to spoil anything for anyone so this is where my review ends and where you decide whether it’s time for you to pick this book up <3

The way I see it, Joan Didion's career breaks into three big phases. In the '60s and '70s, she made her name as the chronicler of how the dominant culture and counterculture clashed and coexisted - you get this from her famous collections Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album (my favorite of hers), as well as her only novel to slip into the canon, Play It as It Lays. Then the global tumult of the '80s hit, with the Shah and the unholy right-wing alliance of Ronald "Satan" Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and the political unrest in Central America and the Soviet-Afghani War and the Iran-Iraq War and the CIA going all-in on the cloak-and-dagger shit and jesus christ this is getting depressing, and Didion turned her attentions to commenting on the chaos abroad rather than the (far smaller, more contained and less destructive – your average American has no fucking idea how good they have it) chaos at home. This period of her writing has kind of become lost in the shuffle, but it produced some great work as well, like [i]Salvador[/i], [i]After Henry[/i], and [i]Democracy[/i]. In her third and by far most famous phase, she became reincarnated as the widow grieving for her husband, the mother grieving for her deceased daughter. These two books you know, [i]The Year of Magical Thinking[/i] and [i]Blue Nights[/i] respectively, and they’re fine books, certainly quite honest, but I pick up on the whiff of sexism here; the female writer comments on national and world events and Martin Amis bashes her for “not being a good mother” or whatever silly thing he said in his review of [i]the White Album[/i], but when she mourns her husband and daughter, wellllll we can define her as wife and mother now so we’re okay with Joan Didion. Needless to say, I am not having this shit, and I encourage anyone who’s read the two later memoirs and nothing else to get up on their early Didion.

But it’s the first and second periods I want to focus on here, since [i]A Book of Common Prayer[/i] strikes me as a sort of transition between them, and like many “transitional” works of art, it’s compelling but not always smooth. And yes, I’ll freely admit her work doesn’t always fit into this model as well as I’m proposing, since usually our models are only guidelines anyway (I’d be the first to admit 2001’s [i]Political Fictions[/i], as well as parts of [i]After Henry[/i], kind of scuttle my theory), but it’s a good way into my review so I’m sticking to the model, just so long as you understand that I’m not whole worlds of attached to it or anything. You can probably tell I’m still hedging about whether arranging a writer’s career into an arc is reductive, yet I see some of the concerns of both [i]Play It As It Lays[/i] and [i]Democracy[/i] (her strongest novel out of the three I’ve read) here. From the former, she takes the power dynamics between women and men, the sense of insulation in the upper-middle class intelligentsia, and what happens the moment something unforeseen pokes into that bubble. So far, it might seem like the ideal setting for this book is the vision of either Los Angeles or New York City she articulates so well in her early works, but she didn’t set it in Los Angeles or New York City, she set it in the fictional Central American republic of Boca Grande, and these rich people’s lives are invaded not by addiction or surprise pregnancies but the political tumult and shadowy CIA operations I mentioned above. And I mightn’t need to tell you those latter two invasions are at the core of [i]Democracy[/i]. Oh, and did I mention that this book was released smack in between 1967’s [i]Play It As It Lays[/i] and 1984’s [i]Democracy[/i]? Or that this book features by far the most about political violence, which would soon become a major concern of hers, she’d written up until this point? Like I say, transitional novel.

And like I say, the transition is awkward. This book’s major weakness is it seems to wander away from its central conflict too often, instead wandering into the conflicts between our protagonist, Charlotte Douglas, and her two ex-husbands, both of whom are long on menace and short on pretty much everything else. Which is a goddamn shame, because that central conflict offers us a lot to work with –Charlotte’s daughter joins a terrorist organization, she seeks out to find her and tries to come to terms with her acts of terrorism. Charlotte feels real, hardened in some spots and naïve in others, and it’s fascinating to see her interact with the world, but it would’ve been more fascinating to see her interact with the world of political unrest than her two non-character husbands (one is named Leonard and the other’s name I’ve already forgotten, so he’ll just be “Not-Leonard”) subtly and not-so-subtly insult both her and each other. Insults are the currency Didion invests, if you will, in this novel’s conflict, and they’re fine for the start but when your escalation essentially amounts to “more insults,” maybe it’s time to stop and reconsider where your project’s going and how you plan to get it there. And this, again, is a shame, because Charlotte is a compelling character and Grace, the narrator with substantial connections to Boca Grande’s political and economic elite, is as well; she swears up and down she’s not the story’s protagonist, but by the end I started to doubt that.

So I guess basically my problem with [i]A Book of Common Prayer[/i] is that it’s so transitional, Didion may have missed the fact that her setting presents a different and more meaningful set of conflicts than what she gives us. A question of emphasis, if you will. It’s sure not a question of prose, as this contains some of Didion’s strongest writing ever. I’d compare her sentences to claw-hammers; she’s got the blunt force of her minimalism and raw honesty when she needs it, but since she’s super intelligent about and insightful into national and world events while at the same time being one of the best writers currently living and in the inner circle of literary figures I admire most, she also has the claw end to pry ideas, characters, sentences apart and dig into what’s inside them. She’s also on-point as ever tonally, striking a nice combination of dread and irony. She is, in other words, a brilliant fucking writer, and that brilliancy shines even on a book like this, which is one of the weaker ones I’ve read by her on a whole. That’s at once comforting and frustrating; I feel such compelling material deserved a better novel. Well, that’s what [i]Democracy[/i]’s for!

I wish I could read a Joan Didion book without being able to tell that Joan Didion wrote it because she keeps pissing me off

Like Play It As It Lays, this is a supremely disillusioned novel -- in people, in politics -- but the theater across which it plays out is sprawling and unique, from the pitch black personal-destructive recesses of the deep south to the revolutionary conflagrations of a small South American dictatorship. Ostensibly the story is Charlotte's, a complexly-shaded women adrift in her life until she washes up in Boca Grande, but equally fascinating, and obsessively observed, is our narrator, Grace, an anthropologist and semi-disinterested political manipulator who takes it upon herself to relate the events of the novel, despite or because of her own not so incidental involvement in them. Throughout, the rhythms and cadences of Didion's words, and the cultural-psychological weight behind her repetitions and reconfigurations, maintains a tightly controlled performance. It takes a little while to see how the parts could possibly all be in communication with eachother, but they are, with precision and coldly boiling insight.

Wonderful book. Didion is a genius. It's interesting to read something that was written so long ago, it seems another lifetime--and yet I was alive when it was written. The times were a-changing and the world that they lived in was so very different from what it became by the time I was an adult.

At some point, I was struck by some similarities between this book and another book that I really loved, Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett. Neither is a real, named place (although Bel Canto seems to be based on something that happened in a South American country sometime during the 1990s, IIRC), but there's an evocation, especially in this book, of an equatorial country and its heat and poverty and corruption that makes me feel like I've been there, even though I'm as removed geographically from anyplace like that as I am from that period of time.

Anyway, glad I finally got to read it. It was a "found" book--someone put it out on their stoop in a box of other freebies. I'll have to think about letting it go the same way.

mm...not great- 2.5

Sorry Joan I love you, this was just really boring. You could not pay me to tell you what any of it was about, I retained not one word.

Snore.
The style of writing is not my cup of tea.
I didn't get the characters.
The plot was confusing.
And the repetition was ANNOYING. The REPETITION was annoying. The repetition WAS annoying!!! THE repetition was annoying!

I am slowly making my way into the writings of Joan Didion. She is brilliant. Her writing is lyrical and emotional and even though this novel is almost 50 years old, it feels fresh. But it was so sad and heady - I wasn’t exactly in the right frame of mind for it.

DNF ~ 38%

Confuso, distaccato, noioso.

This is one of my favorite books of all time. Joan Didion has an incredible way of crafting flawed yet accessible people, with incredibly beautiful and resonant language that is not overly complicated. She uses the words she needs to give you the ideas she has. I wish I still had the copy I read in college, marked with highlights and comments written on almost every page. I devoured this book, I didn't just read it, and many of her images and turns of phrase have lasted with me to this day.

Read this for the superbly nasty Warren Bogart, a villain righteous in his contempt, critically intricate in his abuse, and for that worthy of the narrator's single sympathetic glance his way. Charlotte Douglas, his ex-wife, is the kind of female character Didion is known for: numb, baffled, drifting in and out. I don't find characters like Charlotte very interesting, but Didion does milk a kind of poetry from their stunting and disappointment, their air of unfulfillment; and Didion's portraits have at least a documentary value, as we're littered with Charlottes, women who had an illusion of an idea of themselves at, say, age 19, but who soon hit a rock, and in the subsequent years allow their spouses and lovers to talk over them, talk for them, while she warbles ineffectually over the souvenirs of youth.