Democracy

At first I thought the authorial interruptions and cut-up narrative a distraction, but I think that their distracting nature also tells part of the story. Which seems to be about how privilege, media coverage and the public life can kill/obscure real thoughts, memories, and feelings. Highly relevant today, by the way. The book as a whole reads like a Somerset Maugham novel—The Painted Veil or The Razor’s Edge spring to mind. Less lush than those, but more real.

Didion reports this novel the way she reports cultural essays and memoirs--by reflecting on her reporting process in the text--making it something like magical realism without any magic, like the sharpest and sultriest and best version of Graham Greene's The Quiet American.

When I first read this book in 1984 I was absolutely staggered. Immediately, I flipped back to the beginning and read it again. I'm sure I've read it a couple of more times since, and this latest re-read has merely confirmed that this must be my all-time favorite book. Although I've been land-locked for the past number of years, I am -- in essence -- a person of the Pacific, and Didion's book IS the Pacific.

Still, it's a complicated little book and demands more from the reader than most. One must pay attention to all the tiny details and have more than a passing knowledge of the locales -- from Hawaii, to Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and the scattered islands in between (Guam, Kwajalein, Johnston) -- including the names of the airports, the capitals and the history of these places in the 50s, 60s, 70s.

The title is curious. I've never heard a definitive explanation for it, only hints of it being compared to Henry Adams' book of the same title. My take is that it's an ironic title. The book is actually about American colonialism -- our original takeover of Hawaii and our hubris in thinking a war in Vietnam was 1) winnable and 2) appreciated by that country.

[2021 edit -- the pink cover of the dust jacket gives it away -- a book of colonialism, pink being the navy blue (fashion-wise) of India and Inez's sister Janet having a closet-full, more than a dozen pink dresses. Especially when juxtaposed (in Jakarta) to Frances Landau's outfit that mimicked military fatigues.]

But mostly I love this book for the sound of it -- the prose is like poetry and begs to be read aloud. It is, in fact, a mystery, a romance, and a political critique -- but clothed in shear elegance.

Damn, so many of the reviews for this book are terrible. I kind of want to get a gazillion votes for this review just so that it will come before some of the nonsense in the other reviews. Any talk of post-modernism or meta-fiction or there being too many characters in this novel (there aren't that many, more than say the one in certain Beckett works, but less than in a Dickens or Pynchon novel), also plug the ears in your head that listen when you are reading to any of cries that the book is dull or that harp too heavily upon the plot for better or for worse. Just ignore all that stuff (and probably most of what I'm going to say too, but not really because I want you to read this and I want your vote, it's important to me to get ahead of these other reviews). The only thing you need to know about this book is that it is crushingly beautiful. Not flowery pretty, or the literary equivalent of some replaceable blond starlet that graces the cover of gossip mags; but awkwardly gorgeous, insert your own parallelism to the blond starlet here.

The book starts:

The light at dawn during those Pacific tests was something to see.

Something to behold.

Something that could almost make you think you saw God, he said.

He said to her.

Jack Lovett said to Inez Victor.

Inez Victor who was born Inez Christian.

These short sentence long paragraphs could have been condensed into something like, "The light at dawn during those Pacific tests was something to see. They were something to behold and almost make you think you saw God," Jack Lovett said to Inez Victor (nee Christian). Instead, Didion pulls the reader immediately into an intimacy between the two characters. Without having to say it the signals are present that these people share a closeness, it's like some of the great opening sentences from Raymond Carver stories that paint whole nuanced paintings with broadly sparse paint strokes. It's never said where Jack Lovett says these words to Inez Victor, who was born Inez Christian, but the repetitions that move slowly in on to the subjects being said feel like an intimacy of two people laying close to one another, as opposed to the simple way I rewrote this section to read like something someone is saying to someone someplace that could be anyone and anywhere.

I love the way she opens this book, and I'd go quoting a bit more, but at the next line she pulls back the perspective a little and gives a longer paragraph describing parts of the scene surrounding a the atomic bomb tests, and I don't really like quoting long blocks of text. Throughout the book, Didion moves between different perspectives, controlling them through the way she chooses to write, instead of always having to explicitly state what she is trying to achieve. She does get explicit at times, and some reviewers seemed to find this annoying since she inserts herself, as the author, into the work, but I'd argue it isn't a literary trick she's pulling but uses it as a way to move about the themes of the novel. If the story were told from a traditional third person point of view quite a bit would be lost. Partially this is a novel about perspective, about the past and history and stories and it's about myths, and where the truth lies between all of what I just rambled out like a grocery list. I feel like I'm sort of rewriting my defense of the narrator for the YA book, The Book Thief. I guess I am. Good read that review for some more on this I guess.

This isn't an exciting book. The basic plot of the whole novel is given in the first couple of chapters. Most of the story the reader knows before the book is half-way through. Roughly it's about some events that happen in the Spring of 1975 as the United States is preparing to evacuate from Vietnam. The historical events taking place are mixed with the personal lives of the characters and the reader is left to draw the lines between macro and micro happenings and can use the books title Democracy as an ideal and an irony when applied to an export to third world countries at the barrel of a gun to construct a myriad of themes. There are quite a few different readings this book could be given, and for such a short novel Didion manages to pack a lot of big Ideas into the work. Even though there are a lot of big Ideas at work Didion never grabs the reader and forces him or her to have to confront them. The novel could be enjoyed as a love story, or a family tragedy; or as a slightly more humanist perspective to the world that James Ellroy's Blood's a Rover frolics in.

But none of that last paragraph is really that important to know. What is important to know is that the book is gorgeous. It's the kind of book that can be savored for the way the author deftly moves along, I guess like literature for literatures sake. I'd almost not want to recommend other people to read it, I might feel hurt if they didn't find it as good as I did, but I will recommend it. But only to readers who I know aren't reading novels just to get from point A to point B.

P.S. I kind of want to read everything by Joan Didion now. I think she might even move into my favorite writers category. Sort of like Don DeLillo and Cynthia Ozick, I just didn't pay much attention to her and now I think I might have been depriving myself of something awesome. I'm going to cautiously call her an up and coming favorite of mine until I read a couple of more books. It makes me so happy when I realize there are great writers whom I never paid much attention to and now I can look forward to reading them.

Not a novel exactly, but a narrative which essentially strikes me as portraiture of a certain segment of American society which the author seems to handle with nostalgia and critique in equal measure. Even if readers don’t necessarily have a strong grasp of the historical events that Ms. Didion presents as a backdrop to her candid political and social commentary, often emphasizing the tragic flaws of the players on her stage, her spare writing style is absolutely gripping.

joan wrote this one especially for me

4.5 rounded up

One to re-read and re-visit for sure, but I found Didion's 1984 novel Democracy to be smart, perceptive and more multilayered than it perhaps first comes across. Apparently the novel takes it's name from Henry Adams novel of the same title which tackles corruption under the second Adam's administration, and I think if you're familiar with the political climate of 1970s America and the Vietnam War then you'll likely "get" this novel more than I did. Regardless, Didion's writing shines, and because of this and the clever structure it's possible to get enjoyment out of the Democracy without this knowledge.

Stile molto particolare. Ambienti descritti così bene che si ha voglia di entrare nel paesaggio e di visitare tutti i luoghi citati. La storia in sé non mi ha preso particolarmente, mi è piaciuto di più il modo in cui viene raccontata.

“Comunque siamo stati insieme” disse. “Siamo stati insieme tutta la vita. Se conta il pensiero”.