Not sure this book knows what it is trying to say.
It meanders back and forth.
We hear about Charlotte, Marin, Grace, Warren, Leonard and a host of others.
But who was Charlotte?
A socialite? A kept woman?
She seems to have let other people do most of the living and just floated along in search of what?
There is great skill and acumen in developing undesirable characters.
But did I really want to take this ride?

Finished this within 1-2 days and then immediately proceed to watch the documentary on Didion. I would only be this obsessed with a 5 star novel. But I will try to explain why I was so drawn to this story...

"A Book of Common Prayer" is definitely a book that requires slow digestion; I am still trying to process everything that I just read. There are so many fine details scattered throughout that I felt like I was reading a whodunit novel (and not the dense literary fiction that I had expected). The tiny invisible threads and easter eggs that Didion weaves and scatters throughout the novel makes reading an intellectually challenging and rewarding pursuit. I enjoyed pulling back the layers of her writing: in one scene in particular, Didon juxtaposes Charlotte and Pete's conservation with memories of their past interactions (readers slowly realize there had been an affair) and with memories of her dead parents. The scene made me recognize familiar patterns of Charolette's behaviors and highlighted the extent of Charlotte's mental repression of her past traumas. But despite Charlotte's efforts, the "truth" does inevitably does spill out like water bulging out of a dam. At the end of the novel, after the "mystery" unfolded, I was not left with any sense of contentment, but instead, felt unease with the world at large and with my own memories and perceptions of others. This result, of course, is Didion's intention. She asks readers to question the nature of memory, judgement, and truth by examining this senseless tragedy. This is the first work of Didion's I have read and it wont be the last.

My first read by Didion, I found this book fascinating for its very unique delivery, which I suspect may be one of her great gifts. There is nothing predictable in the way the story develops or in its conclusion. I love that the characters are written as almost caricatures of themselves, rendering them almost irrelevant, thus forcing the reader to focus solely on the protagonist and to care only about her. They and their character flaws exist only to make us care about her, her storyline, her ultimate fate— and (at least for me) her relationship to the narrator. I found this book extremely compelling, from page one. There is no writer I’d even remotely think to compare Didion’s writing to. Very unusual.

For me, reading anything by Joan Didion is like taking a telescope and examining a slice of American life. She really doesn't fill anything in or spell anything out. She leaves it to you to figure out. Consequently, I sometimes have to read passages twice to get a sense of what she is hinting at. In this story of 2 American women in a fictional south American country, we get a sense of a not so long ago era, when air travel was easy and violence then, as now, was rampant.

Mi è piaciuta molto la scrittura della Didion, e il suo modo di tratteggiare i personaggi (Charlotte è talmente vera che sembra si parli di un'amica di famiglia) ma ammetto candidamente che non ho mica capito che senso ha questo romanzo. Nel dubbio apprezzo, e attendo di leggere altro di questa iconica autrice.

lovely when I understood it, otherwise pretty confusing

will probably reread sometime soon

A bit inflated of a score but meant to be taken in the context of what I'm reading lately. A book about awful people who are more than a bit off-putting and unrelatable in their Carribean bourgeoisie. Yet a book that makes fewer pretenses about being a Great American Novel than similarly structured plots in our literature. I found it to be reminiscent of American Pastoral but enjoyed the women's narration and subjective focus. Maybe it seems a bit dated reading it now, with plane travel so easy in the novel and Central American politics more transparently dominated by the United States and its White people. But instead of a Mad Men perspective of "those were the days, and they were fun if they were awful" we get a bit more visceral attitude of "people take advantage of our desires and we try to rationalize our concessions but usually end up confused and distraught if not dead." Didion suggests a plot that occurs behind the scenes, but ultimately this plot lies in the desire of the narrator to find meaning in the story and make sense of it all. Strasser-Mendana wants access to deeper meanings and motivations yet realizes her shortcomings in this regard, which because the book is set in a colonial milieu drives home the point that those in the story with greater access to these things further cross the observer-observed boundary. In the end, the narrator becomes unsympathetic by fully realizing her complicity as a member of the colonial party, which for me helped fully put this novel in its place. A story about shitty people doing shitty things, but one that is aware of that and tries to take responsibility for it more than we expect or really get from most novels.

With Joan Didion, writing style is everything: I appreciate the style, but I don't adore it. It's quietly powerful -- up to a point, after which it becomes (to me) annoyingly self-admiring.
In other words, I think Didion is best read in short essays, not in a full-length novel.

What makes this particular novel especially interesting is that the style perfectly matches the personality of the main character, Charlotte Douglas: prone to vagueness, repetition, narcissism (or self-reference), and a short attention span.

Charlotte is a wealthy San Francisco society wife whose college-age daughter, Marin, is being sought by the FBI for allegedly blowing up a passenger airplane as an act of anti-capitalist revolution. Charlotte has come to the small Latin American country of Boca Grande because ... because she thinks she'll find Marin there? because she thinks Marin will find her?

As it happens, Charlotte arrives just before one of Boca Grande's perennial "guerrilla uprisings" (AKA switch in political control between scions of the long-ruling family).

To some degree, the reader sympathizes with Charlotte's deep pain: With her life and her assumptions about Marin thrown in turmoil, Charlotte is confused and in deep denial. She flits from one topic of conversation to another, or to silence. She refuses to focus or make decisions.

The problem is that, other than her pain, there is nothing sympathetic about Charlotte. She's a spoiled, clueless, rich "norteamericana" dilettante (actually, the characters in this novel use an unprintable noun, beginning with "c"), and there's no indication that she was much different even before Marin disappeared. The narrator, Grace Strasser-Mendana-- the American-born doyenne of Boca Grande's ruling family -- seems to think Charlotte's flightiness is largely adorable.

The stunning ending, however, proves Didion's brilliance after all.

Didion is one of those rare authors that pens hypnotic sentences that weave into paragraphs that make you struggle to recall where you are and why there's drool on your chin. It doesn't matter if she's writing about a fictional banana republic or a non-fictional bout of depression from having outlived her husband and daughter, JD writes sentences that I want to climb into like a warm bed. Ones like this:

n  

As a child of the western United States she had been provided as well with faith in the value of certain frontiers on which her family had lived, in the virtues of cleared and irrigated land, of high-yield crops, of thrift, industry and the judicial system, of progress and education, and in the generally upward spiral of history.

n

There's a lot of dialogue in this book - more than I can recall in other Didion works - but it's wonderful, like something ripped from the second act of a Wilde play. Our narrator is telling us the story of Charlotte, Warren and Leonard - a love triangle that traps the worst human detritus in those three acute angles - all the while peppering the narrative with her own story in the fictional country of Boca Grande. This is a great place for Didion initiates to begin, a tremendous novel that packs so much into its small amount of pages.

In some ways, similar to American Pastoral by Roth. Both with psychologically tormented protagonists, both with demented terrorist daughters. The drawback to A Book of Common Prayer is that Joan Didion's characters and narrator are lofty and bourgeoisie, but are also cold and hard to identify with. Charlotte Douglas is not as tormented nor driven as The Swede, and Marin never develops into a character with any substance, let alone the brilliance, like Merry's.

Maybe I am daft, but I did not feel like Boca Grande was a real place either. I know that it is an "imaginary" place, but I sat around looking at the island off of Florida "imagining" how that place could be the place in the book. Neither of them seem real to a landlocked Midwesterner such as myself, no offense to real Boca Grandeans.

There were some echo's of The Year of Magical Thinking in Common Prayer, and in someways I recognized parts of the stories of the young Quintana in the young Marin.

Common Prayer is best when Didion uses repetition to reinforce solid observations about Douglas's tragic life, but overall it is too undeveloped and unsatisfying a read.

If _Play It as It Lays_ was Didion doing Chandler, this is her version of a Graham Greene novel, whereby a sophisticated viewer in a small former colony (in this case the Latin American Boca Grande) learns that the naivete of a stranger is the proper way to encounter the world.

Here, the sophisticate is the American-born wife of a former dictator of Boca Grande, and the innocent abroad is Charlotte, mother of a girl gone radical terrorist in the sixties, who has washed up in Boca Grande for, well, a novel's worth of reasons-- to reconnect with her daughter (indirectly), to expiate for her sins and those of her daughter (perhaps), to get away from both of the above strains.

I didn't love this one the way I did _Play it as it lays_, though. I kep feeling like Didion was missing the realities of life outside of the US. Yes, there's something bracingly cynical to see BG as just a plaything of the wealthy, and it suits the narrator, but I'm not sure it's the most interesting way to tackle the material.... I could say almost the same thing about the daughter-as-terrorist, that Didion here isn't able to get past her own prejudices to really give voice to the characters she is writing about.

It's not meant as much of an indictment, really. I like Didion, I like what she does. But I'm not sure that this book really plays to her strengths, or that she sufficiently stretches to successfully tell the story contained here.

tropics, coups, abuse