1 post tagged “essays”
Slouching Towards Bethlehem; Joan Didion
Joan Didion wades though counterculture, kitsch, California, and the far reaches of the United States in a collection of essays. By day, she is just another white-lipped, red-eyed, fragile poet, teetering continually on the verge of fashionable neurotic panic attack, but by night, she strips off her weaknesses and flexes her iron fist - confident, articulate (sometimes painfully so), and incisive to a fault .
Slouching Towards Bethlehem was a strange read for me. I'd only caught glimpses of it during all my cheaply xeroxed Freshman English Class packets, and I wasn't really wild about what I saw. Luckily, those essays seem to be the most anemic of the bunch, pandering to all of Didion's vices as an author:
pedantic in her eternal search for greater depth, unabashedly florid and excessive in her prose, and indecisive - at her worst openly wrong - in her conclusions.
Didion walks a tightrope throughout her book; her writing always warring on the edge between an overindulgent preciousness and easy parody, and an artist's dedication to delicacy. Several of her essays fall short - meandering and bled of all meaning - but when she hits her pitch, she roars, load, powerful, intelligent and deadly eloquent*. Her politics also inhabit a strange limbo. While her views are open enough to scare away the more strident members of the social Right, they also carry a surprising amount of old-fashioned morality, as confessed by Didion herself several times over. She views her subjects with a certain kind of kindness - as seen in her warm-hearted and unbiased approach to the waning counterculture movement in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco. Yet, unbiased means just that, and she is willing to unleash a scathingly honesty - completely devoid of any mean-heartedness, and still brimming with tenderness towards her subjects, yet unwilling to mask their faults.
Luckily, these gems outnumber some of her more woolly-minded and convoluted essays, and make Slouching Towards Bethlehem an intricately written, complex collection.
* Special gold stars go to the last segments of "Slouching Towards Bethlehem", the entirety of "On Self Respect", and also all of "Goodbye to All That." I want to xerox them en masse and roll around in them. Or, in a less creepy world, drop them from planes like evangelical napalm! Either one works.
