Joan Didion (1934-2021)

Yesterday I heard that Joan Didion passed away. Kinda stopped me in my tracks. Yes, she was old (87), but she was other things too.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem (not necessarily a seasonal title) and The White Album (1979), published eleven years later, are great collections, while A Year of Magical Thinking (2005) laid bare certain things about the author that reminded me why it is sometimes best never to meet those whose art you admire. 

Maybe I will re-read her novel Play It As It Lays (1970) over the holidays. I remember not thinking much of it the first time around, though I think I understood what she was getting at with the construction/subtraction of her subject, something I was reminded of a couple years later when I read Lorrie Moore's short story "Willing" (1990).  

"… the prides of detachment …"

Robson relates what Mailer once said of Vidal the writer: that "his narcissistic explorations … do not go deep enough into himself, and so end up as gestures and postures"; that he "lacks the wound" required of all great writers; but that he was hopeful Vidal would "turn the prides of detachment into new perception." Vidal's friend Anaïs Nin seemed to concur, for after she read Vidal's first novel, Williwaw (1946), she wrote, "I am startled by the muted tone, the cool detached words."

Setting aside this business of "the wound" (which I am sure Vidal possessed, but, unlike Mailer, did not wear on his sleeve), and what Barthes had to say about the author in relation to the text, I am interested in detachment and what it is capable of when it comes to the production of literature. And this of course led me back to my library, to focus on more recent books by younger writers who share traits similar to those ascribed to Vidal, and whose own writing is consistent with these traits. What I found in fact were writers whose books I had unconsciously or otherwise shelved in the neighbourhoods of their stylistic imitatees -- neighbourhoods established by older writers like Bartheleme, Coetzee, Perec and Sebald.