The Last Love Song Read Free Page B

deeply, the paradoxes in her writing suggest her real interest is language, its inaccuracies and illusions, the way words imply their opposites, and the ways stories, particularly stories that tell us how to live, get told or don’t. For all her fascination with American politics, the ostensible subject of much of her writing, George Orwell’s politics of language grip her most. There is a trace of the literary critic in all of Didion’s fiction just as there are echoes of nineteenth-century novelists—the omniscient, moral voice—in her later essays. And if, in the 1960s, her love of narrative structure led to a sense of betrayal (after all, one cannot be betrayed without first loving intensely), then that same love has allowed her to rediscover a coherent and ongoing American story.
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    It’s a simple story she longs for. A moral story, with a clear beginning, middle, and end. A road trip with a final destination. A John Wayne movie plot. But she also knows that such a story could not possibly embrace something as vast, diverse, and shifting as American life. The “pastures of plenty” will always remain elusive. The emphasis, then, in both her nonfiction and fiction rests not on the longed-for story—which can never be told fully—but on the longing itself. Her sensibility. The ironies shaping her disorientation and desire, her dashed hopes.
    On the page, Didion’s sensibility is individual, “passive,” “strange, conflicted,” as well as communal. She attempts to speak for us all through the apparently self-defeating strategy of grounding her authority in weakness. In the confessional tradition of Montaigne, Didion admits her limitations and befuddlements up front, so readers feel they are in the presence of an unusually honest speaker. “I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am and where I am and what is on my mind,” she says in The White Album. “I want you to understand exactly what you are getting: you are getting a woman who for some time now has felt radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest other people.” This self-deprecatory statement is also a brassy declaration. Rhetorically, its function is to establish the narrator as someone with a unique consciousness, someone whose disengagement places her in a better position than anyone else to plumb contemporary life. She is an outsider whose singular, untainted perspective allows her to assume a public voice. Our responses to her persona tell us less about the woman behind the books than about ourselves.
    Recall Robert Kennedy’s funeral watched on a verandah of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel: a glimpse of Joan Didion? Perhaps, perhaps not. But the detail serves a literary purpose. American hotels, like American consulates, are outposts of U.S. values, especially in old colonial settings. Hotels appear often in Didion’s work. They suit her persona. They establish contrasts (home and not home, freedom, restrictions, and loneliness) allowing her to mix public rituals with private insights and local politics—not to share her life, necessarily, but to expose communal currents, communal break points. Our response to her is more generally a test of our principles and concerns.
    One more thought to bear in mind, and eventually we’ll return to it: After the World Trade Center towers collapsed, many commentators, including Michiko Kakutani, a book reviewer for The New York Times, and Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, wondered if irony might be dead. No one felt like laughing. Political cynicism seemed insensitive, maybe even unpatriotic. The attack and the ensuing debate over responses to it posed a challenge to the literary enterprise Didion had pursued since the 1960s.
    Political Fictions, disparaging the corruption of America’s governing class, hit the nation’s bookstores on the day the towers fell. Irony? An example of why irony