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After Henry

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It's interesting to read Joan Didion in some sort of rough chronological sequence, because I'm watching her mind and her writing develop as I go. Her earlier books, Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, are intensely personal affairs that use her own experiences to illustrate general features of 1960's America. They are brilliant pieces of work that have encouraged me to read everything else she's written, but they are also profoundly self-absorbed. Reading her earliest works, I feel like a therapist talking to someone who is stuck inside her own head; every time she tries to solve a problem, she finds some reason why she can't, and the chain of reasons ultimately leads in a circle back to her initial desperation. It's a good thing Prozac didn't exist then (only gin and hot water, and Dexedrine), or else we'd never have gotten works of such political and literary brilliance.

What's fascinating about those earlier books, and about After Henry (the most recent book of hers that I've read), is that there's at least one strong narrative line through all of them: they are books about the stories in which Americans enshroud the news. The White Album's title essay is famous for its opening line: "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." That's what appears in Bartlett's from The White Album, but it's basically vacuous without the rest of the paragraph -- a paragraph that summarizes, at an abstract level, every essay that she's written since (at least among the ones I've read):

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be "interesting" to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest's clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

"Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling. ..."

The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem continue on this theme, at very concrete levels. Didion is our Virgil, giving us the slideshow tour of Hell and only rarely drawing out a lesson. The world doesn't make sense anymore; the center isn't holding, and the best she can do is to paint small pictures for us of what she sees. She'll let us make up our own stories.

After Henry comes 20 years later, and you can tell what the time has done. The essays are tighter, more didactic, less personal, less self-absorbed: her examples come from the newspaper, and are quite explicitly about the lessons we can draw. Only now she's drawing lessons about the media itself: here is the Central Park Jogger case, which the media rapidly distort from one woman's sufferings into some allegory about the city itself. The allegories try to paint New York as itself raped, itself violated, itself likely to rise from the ashes. The story is no longer about this woman. It is about a city, but a city that has never existed; the story ignores pervasive racial and class differences in New York, all in a very predictable (and probably unconscious) defense of the ruling power structure. The story can never make New York corrupt and frightening; it is only allowed to make the city courageous and "bustling."

When Didion wrote that essay ("Sentimental Journeys"), New York was on the decline and crime was rampant. Yet the stories the media produced bore no relation to the frightening empirical reality that New Yorkers (apparently) saw. Nor did the stories around the 1988 presidential campaign bear any relation to what Americans knew about their country, or how the political process actually worked.

A map of how stories form, fold in on themselves, and ultimately serve the needs of the ruling class, is what Didion brings to the table. Reading her is like taking a deep, relaxing breath after reading the minutiae of, say, the Plamegate scandal; her stories about media distortion have been true as long as she's been writing, and remain true up to today.

This book is a collection of Didion's essays from the late 1980s. It's organized into three parts: "Washington," "California," and "New York." Despite its geographical divisions, the book as a whole is rather uneven, tilting more toward West Coast themes. I wouldn't have thought of this as a weakness if the one essay devoted to New York themes didn't seem so wildly out of place here. Didion's piece on race and crime in the Big Apple is a distraction from an otherwise noirish narrative of life in Southern California since the 1960s.

Even the section on Beltway politics has a distinct California feel about it. Didion's essay on the 1988 presidential campaigns centers largely on Michael Dukakis's trip to Taft High School in the rural, central part of the state. Her observations on Nancy Reagan are also, predictably, informed by the Reagans' political roots in Orange County. In our age of 24/7 cable-news punditry, the experience of reading Didion's observations on politics is quaint but rewarding, a throwback to an older form of political commentary where critics were only beginning to come to grips with the mediated superficiality of American electoral politics.

"California" is by far the most compelling section of the book. The essay "Pacific Distances" threads together some insightful observations of West Coast living Didion wrote for the now-defunct *New West* magazine. "Down at City Hall" is an engaging profile of Los Angeles's iconic former mayor Tom Bradley. And "Times Mirror Square" is a bravura recollection of the history of the Los Angeles Times newspaper, set against the backdrop of Southern California's cycles of boom and bust throughout the twentieth century. This last piece provides an invaluable account of the business of print media in its most profitable years.

Overall, there's much to be gained (still) from Didion's collection today, especially if you're a fan of her casual yet pointed reporting style. But for the more general reader, I recommend approaching this book as an artifact of California history and culture, from the disillusionment of political radicalism in the 1970s to the rise of Reagan conservatism in the 1980s. Read in this light, you're likely to appreciate Didion's prose on its own terms. On the other hand, you'll probably find it a chore to read if you try to glean any special insight about "current affairs" from the book (one of the bookselling tags this paperback edition was marketed under). *After Henry* makes for decent, off-the-cuff history, but not for relevant cultural criticism per se.

Joan Didion is one of America's most gifted writers, and "After Henry" is no exception. Though at times her prose is lax, it is mostly pure and simple. "After Henry" is the perfect book of thoughts, essays for a rainy, Sunday afternoon. It is one of Didion's most heartfelt triumphs. Good