When Steve Wasserman, who now heads Heyday Books in Berkeley, left New York City to head the Los Angeles Times Book Review, author Joan Didion gave him some advice. Over a dinner at Elio’s on the Upper East Side, he recalls, “Joan gripped my forearm with steel in her fingers, and said: ‘Just review the good books.’ I laughed, and she said, ‘No, I mean something quite specific: Just because a writer lives in zip code 90210 doesn’t mean you have to pay attention. If the work is good, of course, but if it’s second-rate, or worse, don’t give it the time of day. To do otherwise is a formula for mediocrity, for the provincialization of the Review.‘”
Joan Didion died today of Parkinson’s Disease. She was the author of a score of books, including Slouching Towards Bethelehem in 1968. She won the 2005 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Year of Magical Thinking. Steve wrote an appreciation of her at the San Francisco Examiner here. An excerpt:
“Joan’s death at age 87 leaves a gaping hole in the landscape of California letters. There really was no one like her. She was, in a way, the least Californian of our state’s writers, if by ‘Californian’ we mean ever-sunny, full of optimism, wed to the conceit that history is weightless. Didion cast an unsparing eye on everything she examined. Her aesthetic, perhaps shaped as much by her early stint as a writer for William F. Buckley Jr.’s conservative National Review as it was by the dessiccated temperament of her Yankee forebears, was chilly, unforgiving, hard. She reminded one nothing so much as Chauncey Gardiner, the protagonist of Jerzy Kosiński’s Being There, who liked ‘to watch.’”
“She was always the consummate spectator, refusing to taint her stories with any personal intervention,” he wrote. “And yet, and yet. For all her enviable craftsmanship and her gimlet eye, Joan’s work often risked ethical failure. She was so good that often her readers didn’t tumble to the sleight-of-hand that was baked into the DNA of her peerless sentences. The pixie dust she cast on the subjects she covered was dazzling, so much so that you often found yourself succumbing to the spell of her style, much as a genius cinematographer stacks the deck by shooting wonderfully and compellingly composed pictures. When the movie ends, you find yourself unable to look at the world — at least for a time — in any other way. Joan’s style was pitch-perfect. The framing was always impeccable and her skill so good that you tended not even to notice that she’d had her thumb on the scale. She often mistook her own sensibility for a general condition. The Wall Street Journal got it right when a review of her book on the atrocities of El Salvador was headlined: ‘A Migraine in Search of a Revolution.”
“Joan was something of a forensic writer, looking askance at the foibles of people, unrivaled in her understanding of the use and abuse of the English language. No one was better at deconstructing the syntax of power inherent in bureaucratic idiom. She understood with exemplary acuity how entire ideologies are concealed in the warp and woof of everyday language. She knew the devil was in the details. Almost every piece she wrote is an autopsy of the mentalities that have shaped American culture. Unusual for a writer who started out as a supporter of Barry Goldwater, Didion drifted leftward, always wanting, as she once remarked admiringly of former Ramparts editor Robert Scheer’s journalism, to know who does the screwing and who gets screwed.”
Read the rest here.
Tags: Joan Didion, Steve Wasserman