This is a novel about memory, personal and political. It is a masterpiece. Democracy is Joan Didion’s fourth novel, preceded by Run River, Play It As It Lays and A Book of Common Prayer. It was published in 1984. The novel takes place between Honolulu and Jakarta at the hemorrhaging end of the Vietnam War.

It is written as a kind of memoir of Inez Victor, wife of U.S. Senator Harry Victor, told from the perspective of a peculiar narrator. The narrator is none other than Joan Didion.
She is also the self-conscious author of the novel and explains to the reader how this narrative could have been written differently, interjecting the authorial voice within its narrative.

It is a stunning literary achievement and this device is remarkably effective. I found myself reading passages twice as she talks about how they were constructed and why. The technique is so effective that you’ll be craving its craftiness in whatever you read next.

I imagine the book was innovative and creative even when it was published, but it's still pretty creative and clever. Didion is a brilliant writer and a pleasure to read.

Joan Didion's "Breakfast of Champions"

The more Didion I read, the more I want to sink her voice into myself, and carry her timelss style with me everywhere I go.

Democracy is no different, but it's... different. This is Didion's most post-modern work (At least of what I've read), which is perhaps notable because her career had its first arc during the era of Vonneguts and Kunderas of the world, and that I've found her work to be generally not post-modern. The meta-ness of this book, the ideas, etc. are all handled with a quintessential Didion grace, but it all feels slightly off. The characters and timelines are all tanlged - it's hard to pick out what relation everyone has to each other, how they meet, where they meet - Didion herself chimes in at unusual moments through the narrative to make some thoughtful but perhaps unnecessary observation about the authorial process and its relationship with the reader, and the vietnamese government is always falling. Perpetually in collapse.

Particularly the Pynchon-esque aspects of this book were what I found most interesting but also the most difficult to parse. Talk of government dealings, coups, connections of this person or that... It all amalgamates into this great critique - the downfall of American-backed democracy in Asia, that both paints the most visceral picture of 1970's political ethos and of the climate at the time, but perhaps only writable with the retrospect and hindsight of another era. What folly - to try to nation-build over and over again, and failing each time. There is always an evacuation. Saigon is always falling. Nuclear tests on a deserted Atoll. A politician's beautiful wife waits for her lover in Kuala Lumpur. It's hot and moist. A part of the world "of dense greens and translucent blues", and of "shallows where islands once were." Told by Didion, it's enchanting, quizzical, and bitter.

And while the chaos of this book was perhaps necessary to the "vibe," it certainly didn't make it a particularly easy or rewarding read. Recently I've been having trouble focusing when I read, and this certainly wasn't any help - but I also think maybe I missed some connection by trying - forcing myself to read - too much.

But oh, oh my. The language. Didion, you charm me every time with your cadence and sense of construction. Read it. Savor it, in its intricacies and scope. How the Santa Ana winds are no longer Santa Ana winds but instead Pan-Am flights, Tropical rain, White Christmas playing on the radio, and "dawn all the way."

3.8 stars

Overall I'm glad I read this book. I liked the writing style, it was unique and evocative. I enjoyed the parts where Didion directly talks to the reader, and discusses stuff like the nature of writing, the contract between writer and reader... It's an interesting and cool effect.

I didn't necessarily emotionally connect with the characters that much, it kind of felt like just a lot of things that happened. Maybe you can say the emotional blunting is an intentional choice to mirror the perspectives of the characters?

I'm also a little uncomfortable with the politics of the book. It reads as pro intervention to protect American interests, it is not really that critical of the Vietnam War. But at the same time that stuff is kind of a backdrop to a more personal and character driven story.

Regardless, it's good to read things from different perspectives. I will have to check out more Didion in the future!

Warning! Metafiction ahead. A fascinating novel of rich people behaving badly during a dark time in US History (the fall of Saigon). As usual, Didion is an excellent prose stylist, and is even a character in the novel (hence my metafiction warning). The first 2 chapters of the book are very difficult to understand, but mercifully short. After that the book picks up.

Contains an excellent description of a wealthy Hawaii (Oahu) family, so fans of Kaui Hart Hemmings (The Descendants) will probably find something to like here.

This is a strange little book. In some ways it echoes A Book of Common Prayer, in that it deals with a somewhat naive American woman and her daughter abroad in an unfriendly world, and in the style of the sentences. A stop-start pattern of accumulation and repetition prevails:

“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 are the first lines of the book. What kind of way to start a book is this? A cliche line of dialogue, looped around on itself a few times, and then those hiccupping sentences, dosing out information that means, at this point, nothing to the reader. I would lose faith in the author if I thought she were playing it straight, if I didn’t already know that I can trust her at least a bit. Maybe all of this is supposed to be read sort of in quotations; maybe these are the stumbling thoughts of the author struggling to begin the story. This book is a sort of autofiction; the narrator refers to herself as “Joan Didion” and describes doing things that Joan Didion, the person, actually did, such as working in the features department at Vogue. She refers to the characters as though the reader ought to already be familiar with them: “Surely you remember Inez Victor campaigning. Inez Victor smiling at a lunch counter in Manchester, New Hampshire, her fork poised over a plate of scrambled eggs and toast.” The narrator also inserts herself as an author and describes her trouble telling the story. From an early chapter:

“I have no unequivocal way of beginning it [meaning the novel], although I do have certain things in mind. I have for example these lines from a poem by Wallace Stevens:

‘The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze distance,
A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.’

Consider that.”

I am considering it! But I don’t know how it applies. The strangest thing here is that, although the form of the book is modernist and self-referential, the narrative could hardly be more conventional. It’s the love story of Jack Lovett, a CIA operator, and Inez Christian, the daughter of a wealthy family in Honolulu and the wife of a prominent Democratic congressman who once thought he could be president. Inez and Jack meet and have a brief affair in Honolulu when she is a teenager; they run into each other over the years after Inez is married and yearn for each other; eventually, in the midst of a family crisis, they run away together, but their time is short and Jack quickly meets a tragic death. After his death, Inez gives up her socialite status and flies to Kuala Lumpur to work at a refugee camp. It’s sentimental! I’m accustomed to experimental fiction that tells stories that don’t fit into conventional frameworks, books like The Remainder or The Passion According to G.H. I’m not used to self-referential autofiction as a vehicle for a perfectly conventional adultery plot!

As with A Book of Common Prayer, many of the characters here are bitterly empty, so empty that it goes beyond an ironic view of the ruling class and into a sort of hauntedness. Here are some lines of dialogue from a scene where Inez’s relatives have gathered in the aftermath of Inez’s father fatally shooting her sister and a congressman with whom the sister was (maybe?) having an affair:

“Inez. See if this doesn’t beat any martini you get in New York. I add one drop of glycerine. Old Oriental trick.”
“Ruthie’s on top of that. Flowers to the undertaker. Something to the house. Deepest condolences. Tragic accident, distinguished service. Et cetera.”
“Tell Jessie we’ve got a new Arabian at the ranch. Pereira blue mare, dynamite.”
“If you drove around by the windward side you could see Dick’s new project. Sea Ranch? Sea Mountain? Whatever he calls it.”

On top of the fact that everyone talks in the same repetitive cadence that doesn’t at all resemble human speech, who are these people? Is anyone on earth so perfectly vulgar and superficial? Inez’s father, the killer, is inscrutable. When she visits him in jail, he asks after a certain settee and describes the police officers who arrested him as “completely out of line.” Possibly the only character description of any depth comes near the end of the book, describing Inez’s daughter, Jessie: “I should tell you something about Jessie Victor that very few people understood. Harry Victor for example never understood it. Inez understood it only dimly. Here it is: Jessie never thought of herself as a problem. She never considered her use of heroin an act of rebellion, or a way of life, or even a bad habit of particular remark. Jessie Victor used heroin simply because she preferred heroin to coffee, aspirin, and cigarettes, as well as to movies, records, cosmetics, clothes, and lunch.” This same Jessie Victor decides, for reasons that seem unclear to her and everyone around her, to go to Saigon in 1975 to look for a job. She gets in without a passport, in the “confused and febrile” days around the final evacuation of American forces, but Jack Lovett with his intelligence connections manages to get her out. Jessie is the strange soul of this book; she’s as opaque and passive as anyone else in her baffling family and her baffling social context, but she seems to have human desires, at least occasionally.

After all that, the most perplexing thing about this book might actually be its title. Inez, wife of a presidential candidate, daughter of a man who shot a senator, lives in the political realm, but it doesn’t seem to interest her. She shows up for the photos and that’s it. At one point, responding to a reporter, she describes the experience of living all the time in public: “You drop fuel. You jettison cargo. Eject the crew. You lose track.” Certainly the narration here mimics that losing track; Didion seems sometimes to be staging scenes from memory, having lost track of their emotional content. Jack Lovett, meanwhile, is deeply engaged in some kind of politics, a politics that revolves around making deals and trading information, certainly not a politics that cares particularly for the will of the people. His work places him in Jakarta in 1969, and this goes completely unremarked. There is a reference to some deal-cutting with “the failed third force” in Vietnam. All of this is background; at most it establishes something about Lovett’s character, his flexible sense of loyalty, his utilitarian approach toward people and information and everything but Inez. Maybe that title is the final distanced irony in this very distant, very ironic book. I would have welcomed a few more moments of earnest meaning. Do I sound like I disliked this book? I honestly didn’t. Like all of Didion’s writing, it’s terribly readable, with a compelling staccato rhythm and surprising, revealing word choices. I just couldn’t really find a way into it!

“Anyway we were together. We were together all our lives. If you count thinking about it. Not that it matters. I mean the sun still rises and he still won’t see it.”

Joan Didion owns my ass.

a littleee hard to follow liked but didn't love

It is indeed true, Didion is a writer you’ll never forget. I definitely challenged myself with this book as I was jarred by how disconnected each character was from one another. My takeaway is : life itself is completely devoid of meaning if one is only focused on personal ambition. Community must be formed within a society or we are lost within the fabric of humanity.

first book that made me audibly chuckle in a long time

Na minha opinião as "heroínas" da Joan Didion podem ser facilmente resumidas com uma quote de J.D.Salinger, da qual eu sou grande fã.

“She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing. She looked as if her phone had been ringing continually ever since she had reached puberty.”

Quando penso na Inez Victor penso nessa quote, e de facto há uma passagem no final do próprio livro em que Inez mantem-se impávida e serena enquanto o telefone toca. E em parte é esta característica da personagem principal que me faz gostar tanto deste livro.

A Joan Didion faz com que o tempo pare, para quem está a ler o livro dela, e para as próprias personagens que o vivem. Nos livros da Joan Didion o telefone está sempre a tocar.