TWO STARS

I got to know Joan Didion after I read The Year of Magical Thinking. A Tour de Force non-fiction account on the death of her husband, and the year spent in grief over her aloneness without him. Notwithstanding my research into her persona, which I found to be unlikable and very pretentious, the other night I picked up The White Album, idle and non-descript, from oft one of my bookshelves.

Published in 1979, this book is a collection of novelistic essays based on key events, such as the Manson murders; the Black Panthers; Huey Newton …. that happened during the 1960s, woven around her own mental instability at the time (yawn). Though written with linguistic accuracy, Didion’s disconnect drifts in and out, lending the text a mutable metaphorical quality that is, in my opinion, dark and boring.

Other than the flow of a meticulous movement of words, Didion’s ‘look-at-me’ was so intrusive that it made what could have been a very good read, an unpleasant one.