Joan Didion did not suffer fools gladly. These eight essays that cover the American political landscape stretching from the Iran/Contra affair to the Bush/Gore contest of 2000 are suffused with a sophisticated, cold contempt for the artifice, fake pieties, pretensions, and propaganda that define American politics. Her elegantly efficient prose deftly dismantles the veneer created by politicians and their enablers in the press, revealing the venality, self interest, incompetence, and sheer ruthlessness that lays behind that veil.

No one is safe from Didion’s withering contempt. She eviscerates Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives with equal aplomb. For it is the artificiality, the dishonesty of the political system itself that is her target in these pieces. This is perhaps why the political press, that necessary tool for selling the deceptions to the public, receives her harshest treatment. (And though she is herself here writing of politics, she manages to deftly demonstrate the admonishment of Christ when he instructed to be “in the world but not of it.”)

Though these essays are composed of concentrated contempt, they are delivered devoid of anything as crass as a sneer. Ms Didion’s style was far too sophisticated and well bred for anything so plebeian. Instead, she devastated with the literary equivalent of an arched eyebrow or a side eyed look. In most cases she simply allowed her target’s own words to do the work, placing them within a context where their actual intent is clear. It is a thing of beauty to behold; she dismantles an entire system of political pretensions with the ease of a long drag on her cigarette and a cold-eyed stare.

As a weird old funky mid 20s guy, I didn't really know what to expect from a political novel of the Reagan and Clinton years outside of some West Wing "the process" vibes The good thing is that absent the specters of respectability politics haunting a few pages, this is a Joan Didion novel that just happens to be about politics. Didion tears down any idea of actual utility within the Process, exposing it for the willing farce it really was. She paints Washington as a theatrical play, where subject matter experts talk to empty rooms and Presidents worried more about "the optics" than any actual policy implications. While I do enjoy her more social work better, this is a great novel for Didion and Process fans alike.

absolutely amazing a legitimately unmatched plain view of the political system. her illustrating how low voter turnout is directly related to democrats ceasing to represent low income voters, and their reaction being further abandoning low income voters in turn causing even further low turnouts is amazing. it is so far ahead of its time and provides such a succinct and accurate perspective. it was giving me jimmy neutron brain blasts.

This is mostly a book about people who report on Washington DC, the strange imaginary world they live in, and how they are willfully reproducing that strange imaginary world all the time. Its settings and motifs are classically Joan Didion: private planes, hotel lobbies, speech habits so empty and formulaic they seem haunted. Didion has a great ear for the solecisms of DC language; I laughed aloud at a moment where she quotes Joe Lieberman describing the local politicians who inspired his career as “figures of respect.” As a media critic she is of course great: terse, understated, and scathing. The essay “Political Pornography,” on the books of Bob Woodward, “in which measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent,” is a particularly great reflection on a certain kind of political reporting--high-minded, scrupulously nonideological, and above all dedicated to portraying all who participate it in as stainless public servants. “The West Wing of Oz” is the only place where the reporting strays far outside of DC: to El Salvador, and particularly to the town of El Mozote, where in 1981 the American-backed Atlacatl battalion slaughtered over eight hundred villagers. Didion’s account focuses on how the event played out in American communications and media. American diplomats investigated the event in the company of Salvadoran soldiers, a tactic not likely to induce survivors to share their story; the diplomats then sent ambiguous cables back to the U.S., fearing that they would be judged not “credible” if they communicated the scale of the atrocity; and the journalist who broke the story, Raymond Bonner of the New York Times, was swiftly pulled out of El Salvador and tarred for years afterward as the dupe who was taken in by a staged massacre. Of course, we now know that the massacre did happen, and that American officials like Eliot Abrams were briefed on it immediately by the perpetrators. It’s a pointed countermelody that shows the stakes of the rest of the essays collected here.

I'm glad that I picked this up after watching the new Netflix documentary on Joan Didion! I'd previously had Slouching Towards Bethlehem on my to-read, but for some reason, had never gotten to it. Will absolutely pick that up now. These political essays were incisive and funny page-turners. The only complaint I had was that this copy I read didn't have original publish information on each essay. I would have liked to know as I was reading them, what audience/publication they were originally compiled for.

I picked this book up because I was told that Joan Didion was part of wave of writers called Literary Journalists, in that they wove a storyline from among the myriad of source quotes and factual event recordings that went on in a typical journalistic piece. What I read was a series of long essays still mired in disparate source quotes, woven into complex, run-on, and fragmented sentences, some that spanned whole paragraphs – certainly not your everyday journalistic writing.

Many of these pieces were written on the eve of a presidential election – so the focus is on the buildup and not the outcome – i.e. Bush Sr. vs. Dukakis, Clinton vs. Dole, Bush Jr. vs Gore et al. There is also an implied belief that the reader understands the issues of the day, which at this point is historical and faded from memory. As these essays were also published in the New York Review of Books, and refer to several books within them – Newt Gingrich’s To Renew America, Bob Woodward’s The Choice and Marvin Olasky’s The Tragedy of American Compassion among others – one needs to have read these books to get a deeper appreciation of Didion’s essays – unfortunately, I haven’t read these books.

A theme emerges of the evolution, or a straying away from the core, of American politics between the ‘80’s and the year 2000, the time span during which these essays were written. Beginning with Reagonomics that reduced regulatory barriers and unleashed the “Me, Myself and I” culture, to the fall from grace that this hedonism attained with the impeachment of Bill Clinton, to the resurgence of the religious right under George W. Bush where a return to binding the state to religion (termed Reconstructionism) was advocated, Didion portrays the see-saw swings of political ideology and the manipulation of the electorate by a few college-educated, establishment types (and the partisan press). The photo-op, the undecided voter, the negative attack ad – these election-winning devices reared their heads during this 30-year span to become the monsters they are today.

What I liked best, if I were to confer the title of Literary Journalist upon Didion, was her character portraits of the personalities within this book. Ronald Reagan was the quintessential movie actor, even in his role of president: organized, superficial in relationships, managing his daily schedule like a film script, always looking for the drama in his interactions, even making up stories to deepen character. Bill Clinton always talked about the pain of his childhood, and seized upon hate speeches made by others to show what a clean guy he was. Newt Gingrich was the self-reliant man with outlandish ideas on the how much the individual could achieve – including space travel and a modern Jurassic Park. And Bob Woodward had a problem describing what his books were about. Being often in the coterie of journalists invited to accompany presidential candidates on their campaign trails, Didion had an incredible closeness to the personalities and issues of the time while writing these essays.

I am pretty sure these pieces would have been lapped up during the time they were written, for the author adopts an objective stance, dissecting liberals and conservatives alike. And yet, given the complex writing style, the overreliance on injecting source quotes that break up the narrative flow, and the assumption that the reader is fully versed on the issues being covered, I wondered whether Didion too was writing for the college-educated, establishment types and not for the masses who could have effected real change with their vote.

Torn on this one. Didion is hilarious, and tears into Reagan, Gingrich, Clinton, and the DC media apparatus with equal gusto. Some great extended meditations on the nature of political scandal. Marred by a sneering contempt for the religious right that seems akin to the self-satisfaction she skewers elsewhere. Does Marvin Olasky have “a view of women not far from that of the Taliban”? Didion says yes.

Markings from Political Fictions

"But of course the contract does not deliver: only sentimentally does "the vote" give "the voter" an empathetic listener in the political class, let alone any leverage on the workings of that class." (12)

"This notion, that the citizen's choice among determinedly centrist candidates makes a "difference," is in fact the narrative's most central element, and its most fictive." (44)

You know what you’re signing up for when you pick up a Joan Didion book because all of her work is Crit Lit, even her fiction novels. I think that Didion was an interesting choice to write about political commentary because this book was raunchy and, for a lack of a better word, ugly. She’s not a political science expert by any means, nor does she try to convince the audience that she is, but she, as a American citizen, is still entitled to share her political opinions. She researched this book a bit, but it was mostly election/political observations in a chronological order. She also referenced famous politicians and well-known scandals so you definitely need to be an academic to understand what is going on in this book.

I liked this political commentary book more so than others BECAUSE Didion wasn’t a political commentator, just a journalist with an interest in picking people and places apart. That new perspective made the book a bit more lively. Didion’s writing style is still very prose-y and I have needed to pull out the dictionary every once in a blue moon so reader discretion advised that this won’t be the easiest read if you’re not used to Didion’s style and political lingo.

What I enjoyed most about this book is that it gave me a new way of looking at political commentary and that sometimes the most minuscule events can have the largest and most prolific impacts. The sequence of events didn’t always make the most sense and seemed disjointed at times, but I enjoyed Didion’s work nonetheless!

collection of essays about American politics in the 80's and 90's. I put it on hold at our library when she died, and it's always good to read a great writer, but in this case I wasn't really taken with the substance. Not necessarily in disagreement with her, just that at this point I don't really need a devastating takedown of Newt Gingrich as a blowhard, Bob Woodward as doing too much transcription of various insiders' spin, mixed motives involved in the Clinton impeachment, etc. etc.

My recommendations for future readers --

1. get a copy now but hold off on reading it for about another 25 years. I can picture some stories in here (ex. the blather about moral leadership when Gore named Joe Lieberman his VP running mate in 2000 campaign) being more remarkable if you'd forgotten about it first.

2. Read one at a time, interspersed with other stuff, not back-to-back. Some of her affectations, notably the incessant scare quotes around banal catchphrases, empty political promises, etc. are striking in small doses but overkill when supplied by the hundreds. Put differently, IDing/mocking one seemingly meaningless line from a George W. Bush speech is funny; doing it dozens of times in a row is cloying.

Didion's style is appealing even when getting into the weeds of long-forgotten crises, and her observations are often cutting and hilarious. Still, two decades on from the events in the book, her thesis--that a certain political/ruling class dictates the narrative in spite of what the public actually believes--hardly seems like like much of a revelation. It actually seems a little naive, perhaps because, even on the brightest days, our political situation is so much stupider now than anyone could have possibly imagined back in early 2001.

Published in 2001, Political Fictions is a collection of political essays by esteemed 20th-century writer Joan Didion. Primarily chronicling late 1980s and early 1990s American politics, many of the particular figures Didion explores seem reserved to a distant political past, yet Didion effectively articulates the way politics operates as fiction. That is to say, politics is framing and messaging; substance (if such a thing ever existed) is absent.

More than anything, Political Fictions predicts our particular political moment, and while Didion far from predicts a figure like Trump, she describes the conditions that permitted someone like Donald Trump to emerge.

Plus, she throws so much shade at Bob Woodward. The book is worth reading for that alone.