The Last Love Song Read Free

this unexpected word into a familiar trope, Didion highlights her literary sensibility. She doesn’t care about magic kingdoms. She’d rather tour the embassies, the public squares surrounded by barricades and armored tanks. If this voice were to say, “It is a truth universally acknowledged,” you’d know to pull on your army boots instead of your glass slippers. The truth you’d be chasing would be located more readily on a military test site than in a ballroom. And it would hardly be universal. Every writer’s verities—Austen’s, Tolstoy’s, or Didion’s—have their boundaries and particular terrains.
    Second, Didion’s “images” are barely images at all. She tells us she watched Robert Kennedy’s funeral “on a verandah at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel.” “Funeral” and “verandah” are rarely sentence partners; Didion provides no visual detail and, more crucially, no context to lessen the strangeness of the link. What was she doing at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel during Robert Kennedy’s funeral? Was she alone? Did a crowd gather before a television set to watch the ceremony in sorrow? Was the TV propped on a wrought-iron table in the sun? What is the point of teasing us with the hotel if not to deliberately disorient the reader?
    Third, the story Didion offers of the mother leaving her daughter near the last Bakersfield exit on I-5 is a variation of a particular American narrative. When the Joads left the road in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, they exited near Bakersfield, hoping to discover the “pastures of plenty.” The famous final scene in Steinbeck’s novel depicts a new mother suckling a starving man like an infant, an image of maternal generosity undercut by Didion’s freeway anecdote. The shocking story of the I-5 mom is made even more powerful, almost mythic, by the ghost narrative of The Grapes of Wrath haunting it. Paradise has rotted rapidly since the Joads. More broadly, Didion plays against the whole genre of American road stories, all of which, from Kerouac’s On the Road to television’s Route 66, hearken back one way or another to Steinbeck’s novel, which played against the notion of the West as the final frontier.
    I mention these examples to demonstrate that even as Didion frets about narratives in tatters, she is weaving narrative. She is carefully plotting a story, manipulating details, with a clear direction and a sense of who’s in charge—Joan Didion, jittery, uncertain, but vivid and speaking with a distinctive Western voice. Her collages are not stitched of random scraps. Her roads do not dead-end. Her narrative breakdowns are mirages. Every piece fits, often in more or less conventional patterns.
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    In the foreword to Political Fictions, Didion tells us she spent her childhood and high school years among “conservative California Republicans” in Sacramento, “in a postwar boom economy.” In other words, she grew up in a well-connected family surrounded by Okies and others like them who had weathered the Grapes of Wrath, who had managed to escape the fruit fields and achieve a modest prosperity, buying a few fields of their own, working for shipbuilders or aerospace companies or on test-site ranges or some other outgrowth of California’s burgeoning defense industries. American Promise—in the shape of the war and its stimulus to the economy—had directly benefited these families and those, like the Didions, with serious ties to the land. They all had reason to believe in “the narrative” as the Cold War heated up and American consulates spread throughout regions we had liberated or conquered. As David Beers, the son of a fighter pilot, writes in his memoir, Blue Sky Dream, Sputnik was the “lucky star” for postwar kids in California, “its appearance in the darkness a glimmering, beeping announcement that we