Didion (a favorite of mine for her lyrical essays on cultural movements, such as Haight-Ashbury in 1968 in her book 'Slouching towards Bethlehem) takes on politics in the 1980's of George Bush the first. Her harshly honest expose of the inner world of republican politics is particlarly relevant today, two decades later.

Reading this, during the current political climate, is depressing. As Didion points out, everything about elections are theater and even worse, farce. Is anything genuine? People voted for Trump because they felt he was the real deal. Real deal what, though? Also, with all the nostalgia for the 1980s, from music to fashion, I, having lived the 80's, was reminded by Didion how politically corrupt the Reagan White House was. I cringed through the Clinton and Gingrich years..reliving this history is painful. Don't read this, if, like me, you were looking for a respite from our current political woes. It had me thinking, "When was America ever great?" ( I can think of 3 times... The Marshall Plan, the Moon Landing, the Obama election.) Didion has an acute bullshit detector and has razor sharp focus.

A book to read again at another time. This collection of essays were all sharp and focused, if a little bit difficult for me to fully grasp given my sparse understanding of American politics in the 80s and 90s. Some of her main points about the vast disconnect between the insider baseball and the actual wants and needs of the “American people” ring true to this day. The essays that were more or less book reviews didn’t really intrigue me that much. This was the only book by Joan Didion in my house, so the one I naturally picked up, though I’m told it’s not her best.

Great election year read - a little dense, but Didion really does her best to de-mystify the convoluted world of American politics throughout the collection.

Oh Joan! I wish you had written about the debate.

Fascinating snapshots of electoral politicking from the late-1980s into the late-1990s. A couple of them--"Political Pornography" and "Clinton Agonistes"--are superb critiques of the practices of commercial journalism.

I'm left with the sense that the New York Review of Books used to review bad books--not just aesthetically bad, but bad for humanity--and that they no longer do. Could you imagine NYRB assigning thousands of words on the latest Tucker Carlson or Ted Cruz manifesto? Didion reviewed the equivalents for the time and the results seem important. Not that we should take the ideas in those books seriously, but that we should take their role in the world seriously? Maybe. I don't really know.

Kind of an "After-After Henry," unfortunately plunked down right around 9/11 and therefore pretty much instantly irrelevant to Topic A. This book collects Didion's long-form, analytical essays (some of which were very long book reviews in the NYRB) through the Clinton years. On the one hand, "Political Fictions" is lacking another half-dozen or so essays that would round it out -- the margins are narrow and the type is leded-out, reflecting a paucity of material to choose from; she just wasn't writing as much by then (and perhaps got too bogged down in her 1996 novel "The Last Thing He Wanted"). On the other hand, the "Foreward" at the beginning is a brilliant essay in which she describes how she was all but forced into reporting on the 1988 presidential campaign and how that bizarre experience (the tale of getting aboard the Jesse Jackson campaign plane is worth the price of the whole book) pushed her work in a far more serious exploration of American politics.


My best memory of this book is meeting her, just another hardcore fan at her Politics & Prose reading and signing in the fall of 2001. Everything they say about her (and what she says about herself) is true: She's not a great speaker, not great at answering questions about her work in any satisfying way; she seems terrified of the attention and fragile as a baby bird. She once wrote that writers leave their game at the keyboard; in person, they can be a real letdown. I wasn't at all let down; I was impressed that she nailed herself as well as she nails others.

One of my favorites of hers (along with the year of magical thinking) as she dissects the too cozy elite relationships of the Washington press corps and the nation's political leaders.

Less a book about politics than about the media's failure to cover politics, starting in the Reagan '80s, through the Clinton '90s, and ending with the 2000 Gore-Bush election. You can draw a strong, straight line between many of Didion's critiques here and the shameful bullshit of the last few election cycles. Deeply depressing.

Somewhere between 3.5 and 4 stars. Not the most captivating Didion read, but overall enjoyed the critical look at the political landscape, a cohesive story told through the lens of multiple presidential terms / campaigns. The strength of it comes from her outsider perspective - not the typical political journalism / commentary.

"Another of Those Agreements to Overlook the Observable":
The Routinization of Avoidance and Denial in American Politics
As Delineated in Joan Didion's Political Fictions

Christopher Snyder
May 31, 2013
Little Red Schoolhouse
(undergrad vers.)
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¶ When Joan Didion states, "[t]his kind of [political]

forecasting, which was based on analyzing mathematical models

of the thirteen presidential elections since 1948 and the state

of the economy (both actual and perceived) during each of

these elections, had in the past proved remarkable accurate"

in the last-published of her collection of previously-published

essays, Political Fictions (2001), she seems to leap

right over the heads of those who were stunned that the

election which was to come, predicted handily as an Al

Gore victory, should go to his "compassionate conservative"

opponent: already the known-and-knowable has been

established, in the prior essays stretching back over

twelve years, as a "tune out"-able inconvenience. The map

is not the territory, as the linguistic aphorism goes,

but, at least in late-Twentieth Century American Politics,

the territory had been so obscured by competing "maps"

that its very existence became conveniently disputable.

¶ Hence, the "map-making industry" that seemed to know,

all too well, how to refer to itself, and, all too feebly,

how to refer to the electorate: "They tend to prefer the

theoretical to the observable, and to dismiss that which

might be learned empirically as `anecdotal,'" she wrote in

1988, from the Dukakis campaign trail, observing a sort of

yes-men encircleship around the candidate that, apparently,

involved little more than offering mild rebukes in the form

of dissent as to whether the candidate was or was not, also,

saying "yes" in a manner that could be validated by the

others, far afield, who were also part of "the process" —

itself a term more laden with import and meaning than most

lay Americans with anything, anything at all better to do

with their time could reasonably be expected to divine

(without a research grant and/or a per diem and adequate

time and/or motivation). "`Anything that brings the process

closer to the people is all to the good,' George [H.W.] Bush

had declared in his 1987 autobiography Looking Forward,

accepting as given this relatively recent notion that the

people and the process need not automatically be on convergent

tracks" — a delineation of a moat that only those so safely

on the "other side" of could be so casually comfortable with

even articulating, one could add.

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- 2 -

¶ By the time this "process"-centric process was confronted

with the Clinton "scandal," most commentators were left

with little other than grandstanding condescensions with

which to filter the public's lack of shock at the events:

"The notions that Americans apparently willing to overlook

a dalliance in the Oval Office would go gale at its rather

commonplace details [soon to be released in Ken Starr's

`oddly novelistic' Referral to the United States House of

Representatives] seemed puzzling in the extreme, as did

the professed inability to understand why these Americans

might favor a person who had engaged in such a common

sexual act over the person who had elicited the details of

that act as evidence for a public stoning." Nonetheless,

the Conventional Wisdom as held by the Punditariat [a

term Christopher Buckley coined in his "oddly realistic"

novel Boomsday] was such that, indifferent to the

nation's (relative, but crucial) indifference to these

goings-on, the shapers of Al Gore's successive campaign

for President would have to "acknowledge" these

shortcomings — in the face of the (relative, but crucial)

financial success voting Americans had been enjoying

since President Clinton's first term started and was

why the political scientists mentioned at the start of

this paper failed to account for the only indicator which

could predict a loss for the former Vice President: a

majority-share subsumation of the signal within the noise.

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A-

Christopher, I don't what it is about this assignment, but, suffice it to say, I think you've joined the ranks of leagues of undergraduates (and other eager-to-learners) whom Joan Didion has "shown the light" to. This is your best yet, and, as such, warrants little further comment. Ant apt end to your coursework with us, if nothing else.

Have a nice summer!

Johnson de Johnson
Prof. Emeritus, Eng. Lang & Lit.
Univ. of Chicago

i sure do love feeling worse about politics in america than i already did