It is interesting to me that Joan Didion called her novel Democracy inasmuch as in it she shows both the heads and tails of the coin of democracy. On one hand, Inez Victor is married to a U.S. senator who runs for president in 1972 and heads of the Alliance for Democratic Institutions. On the other, she runs away from her marriage with a vaguely sinister CIA agent and war profiteer named Jack Lovett who had been in love with her since he first saw her as a seventeen year old.

Lovett is described as

reserved, wary, only professionally affable. [His types'] responses seem pragmatic, but are often peculiarly abstract, based on systems they alone understand. They view other people as wild cards, useful in the hand but dangerous in the deck, and they gravitate to occupations in which they can deal their own hand, play their own system, their own information. All information is seen as useful. Inaccurate information is itself accurate information about the informant.

A pioneer rancher's daughter from Sacramento, Didion has, in the arc of her literary career, moved from being a Goldwater devotee to a hard-eyed skeptic, a slightly-built sphinx who turns out to be surprisingly durable.

When asked by her husband's political consultant to give one reason why she is in f—ing Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Inez responds with a tersely worded telegram: "Colors, moisture, heat, enough blue in the air. Four f—ing reasons. Love, Inez."

Curiously, Joan Didion is a character in the novel, writing in the first person about her efforts to report on Inez's life. What strikes me as strange is that Joan and Inez are, in many ways, identical.

Democracy is an interesting look at the mid-1970s, when Nixon was forced to step down and the Vietnam War ended in an embarrassing retreat. Inez in her life plays both sides of the coin.

Fascinující posun románu do reportážní polohy.

Jen mám dojem, že by si překlad zasloužil pečlivější redakci.

An original, vividly written, taut, short novel about Inez Christian, the wife of Harry Victor, USA Presidential hopeful. Jack Lovett is Inez’s lover in the 1970s. Inez had known Jack twenty years ago. Inez and Harry have two adult children who cause them some anguish. Daughter Jessie, has a heroin habit. Jack Lovett is a schemer and shadowy fixer Internationally. He is a C.I. A. agent. There is some consternation when Inez and Harry’s scatterbrained daughter, Jessie, somehow without a passport, flies to Vietnam to find work at the time the USA are planning to withdraw from Vietnam! The novel pokes fun at political manoeuvrings, and the boundaries between one’s public and private personality.

This book was first published in 1984.

After feeling disappointed by "Run River" and "A Book of Common Prayer," and having worked my way through all her other books that existed at that point, I took it slow with "Democracy." (It was her journalism I wanted more of, circa 1991, which was coming at a slow but somewhat steady clip in pieces she wrote for The New York Review of Books and, less occasionally, the Robert Gottlieb-era New Yorker. I began to realize that I was running out of new Didion stuff to discover.)

Anyhow, "Democracy." This one has more resonance for me -- in terms of era and setting and theme -- than the Central American political backdrop of "A Book of Common Prayer." Though both novels have that same vibe, where personal narratives become part of a larger tapestry of contemporary history and conspiracy. Style is still the real show here. You can just luxuriate in the spare sentences and strange structure. Anyone wanting a traditional novel or any sort of plot-related thrill is going to be flummoxed and disappointed. Which I suppose is a real question for the group: At what point is a novelist obligated to deliver something we can all recognize as a novel? Could anyone but Joan Didion turn in a manuscript like this and be well on her way to publication?

I do actually feel SORRY for people who have not read this

It’s been one of the most challenging but eventually genius narrations I’ve read: fragmentary, sharp, seemingly not consequential, starting with third person, then introducing the author herself. It all fell into place towards the Part Two of the book, and then I realized I need to reread it as soon as I finish it to draw better parallels and enjoy what challenged me at first.
I’m onto reading everything that Joan Didion has ever written

Definitely resonate with the loss of memory in the political life. I used to remember everything, but now things seem to fall through the cracks in each day. This book would be really fascinating to study in terms of cognitive poetics and narrative spaces but it was pretty emotionally dead and Didion is aware of that. So I wouldn’t say I particular enjoyed it but I recognize that that’s on purpose.

A complex book to rate for non Didion fans, but from a major fanboi, this is Joan at her finest.

You could make the argument that inserting Didion as herself in the text could be gimicky, but it lends light to her own reportage and essayaic assaults on subject and theme by way of language.

Having come from

Didion here authors a romantic tragedy, or authors the authoring of a romantic tragedy, which has a limited scope through reminding us of the potentiality of its broad scope as it dips in and out of metafiction where Didion tells us what she's leaving out, or the difficulties that she's having with the opacity of the circumstance which reflects nicely on the opacity of the war in Vietnam, which backdrops a significant portion of this novel, while allowing the novel's main drama to be domestic and about the long (mostly intellectual) love affair between inez victor and jack lovett, the former of whom is a senator's wife and political figure and the latter of whom is a CIA agent and somewhere in there is a murder that feels like an afterthought but again shadows Didion's writing with an inherent violence, which by the way is already shadowed because these are all political figures in a volatile time in America history and oh also by the way Didion is a god damn surgeon with this dialogue, I mean come on. I think this is a pretty hard book to be honest, because of its structure and method of delivery but it's worth your time because of course it is.

Another excellent novel of the United States of America by Joan Didion. An examination of American colonialism.

Incredibly charming, with moments of striking intimacy. Very hard to put down due to the well-paced storytelling and clever dialogue. Loved.

i read like mj from the spider-man trilogy: https://youtu.be/6H4iKjHSVgA


it took me some time to get into this one, but once i did i thoroughly enjoyed it. i especially liked the fact that our narrator was something of a character within the story themselves.