nah pop, no style

Hello reader-folk:

This month, true spies returns with a themed blog project. This time around, our clever alliterative title is, er, All-Literative April, and the subject is, loosely, lit-stuff. This is a deliberately broad theme, so that we can all work with it in our own way. My main literary project here for the month will be cataloging five of my favorite living authors. They may or may not all end up being non-fiction writers, as that’s mostly what I read. I’m not trying to be edgy, nor expert — several, maybe all, of these folks are fairly canonical. But there’s a reason for that.

We begin here, today, with Joan Didion.

Didion is high in the pantheon of 20th century nonfiction writers — I encountered her first in classes I was taking for my nonfiction degree. She’s also written a fair amount of fiction; the only piece of her fiction I’ve read is The Last Thing He Wanted, a suspenseful work based clearly on her reporting on politics, espionage, and Latin America. It gets tripped up by her tendency — often endearing in her nonfiction, but grating in the novel — to repeat words and sounds, lingering on their meaning.

Didion’s most recent full book, since turned into a one-woman play in which Vanessa Redgrave figured on Broadway, is The Year of Magical Thinking — an excellent short work recalling, in Didion’s characteristic anxious and introspective style, the year after the passing of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne. The book also explores her dealing with their daughter’s continued health problems and hospitalization (Quintana Roo would die not long after the book was published).

It’s ano emotional work to be sure, tough to handle — but with a journalist’s clinicism. When she’s not cataloging her thoughts and feelings, Didion is describing exactly what, at times on a microscopic level, has happened to the two people most dear to her. She’s still dealing with words, and higher-order ideas, even as she describes nearly losing her mind.

It’s Didion’s ability to use words, and names, and singular events, to convey a larger meaning that characterizes her as a nonfiction writer. That sounds obvious, but it’s not an obsessive fixation on sensory detail that makes her writing work — it’s the ability to pick precisely the correct details, and pepper them in conservatively. (In this respect she’s opposed to some other reporters; in one review in the 1980s, she excoriated Bob Woodward for obsessing over sensory details of his interviews while foregoing what she sees as his duty to synthesize the information he gets from them into some sort of larger ideas — even his most recent work displays that very tendency).

Didion once said that she’s not a natural reporter: small, mousey, anxious, having been through numerous breakdowns. If anything about her constitution helps her to interview better, she explained, it’s that she’s so unassuming, subjects feel at ease with her. She barely seems like a reporter. And it’s her ability to maintain that posture even in her writing — someone self-conscious, nervous, yet grandiosely intelligent — that sets her apart from writers who try harder to come off as writerly.