Customer Reviews

Political Fictions

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There is a general consensus about the Joan Didion style: cold, nervous, cutting, superior, carefully penetrating. It is not a style good for writing novels, but much better for writing essays. And this collection of essays collected from the New York Review of Books shows this style at her best. If she lacks the empathy or the compassion to be a truly great novelist, here her style really does work on a target that so well deserves it; the essentially hollow and selfish world that is American politics.

Didion has always had a sharp gift for observation. Who can forget her account of the Reagans at communion during the 1980 campaign? (Despite their ostentatious Christianity, the Reagans rarely attended church. So when they had to go to mass for PR purposes Nancy told her husband to just follow her example. When she accidentally dropped her wafer into the Communion Wine, Ronald did as well.) Who can forget her description of George Bush the first's tour of the Middle East in the mid-eighties? (In an attempt to peer bold and courageous, he had a photo opportunity in Jordan looking out with the Jordanian army at "enemy territory," which happened to be Israel.) This collection of essays looks at the 1988 campaign, then on to the 1992 campaign, the rise of Newt Gingrich, the emptiness of Bob Woodward, Dinesh D'Souza's book on Ronald Reagan, the Lewinsky affair, and the moralism of the 2000 campaign. Rather revealingly, we have Didion talking in 1988 to Madeline Albright, at the time a Dukakis foreign policy expert. Albright argued against a "no first use" policy of nuclear weapons on the grounds that without out the Soviet army would overrun Europe. Didion's contemporary comment ("she was talking about a world that had not turned since 1948') would be triumphantly vindicated over the next 15 months.

There are many other stimulating details. We learn of how Clinton the candidate falsely accused Senator Tsongas of being anti-Israel, and Governor Brown of being anti-abotion. Her description of the 1992 convention is an excellent preview of all the nervous opportunism of the next eight years. Didion's style is understated, it allows people to condemn themselves out of their own mouths, while its cumulative effect slowly increases. And so we learn how Newt Gingrich has been inspired by both Jefferson and Tom Clancy, De Tocqueville and Zen and the Art of Archery. We read about Gingrich's excessive love for silly lists (5 Pilars of American Civilization, 7 key concepts and 9 leading principles of Personal Strength, 3 key concepts of Entreprenurial Free Enterprise, Five Enemies of Entreprenurial Free Enterprise, and so one), as his belief that de Tocqueville was somehow an American. The pieces on Bob Woodward, Dinesh D'Souza and Michael Isikoff all show her strengths. Her account of D'Souza's hero-worshipping account of the invasion of Grenada is superb: she deflates D'Souza's breathlessness by reminding everyone that the invasion "entailed landing six thousand marines and airborne rangers on an island significantly smaller than Barbados." She also points out that the medals awarded exceeded the actual number of combatants, while pointing out that D'Souza lets slip that Reagan was closer to Oliver North than he let on. Her discussion of the Lewinsky affair shows the essentially bogus quality of Clinton's opponents. (And how could Michael Isikoff have missed the fact that Linda Tripp had previously testified in four previous investigations-Filegate, Travelgate, the Foster suicide, Whitewater-like a regular Titus Oates?)

Behind all this is the everpresent mediocrity of American political discourse. We see the complacency, the triteness and the incapacity for critical thought of the American media. We note the cavalier discussion of issues while half the American electorate does not vote. We see the shrill moralism of the American right, with bathetic references to "If" and the Saint Crispin's Day Speech and their contempt for Aemricans as most people show themselves to be amazingly uninterested in the Lewinsky affair. The concluding essay on the 2000 election gives one of the best explanations for Gore's failure. When economic models predicted he should have won easily, Gore and his running mate Lieberman adapted an empty moralistic rhetoric that did nothing to attract the non-voting public. At the same this moralism fought the election on the Republicans grounds, with "compassionate conservatism" meaning little more than non-Clintonian adultery. As we ready ourselves for war, it is now more urgent than ever before to read a work which already has a bead on the hollow rhetoric of "bi-partisan consensus" politics.

The convoluted Didion style bemoaned by a couple of reviewers here deserves a few words in its defense. The syntax, highly distinctive and mannered, is also steady and navigable once you get used to it. The quotations pulled by reviewer Peter Metzler as examples of poor writing were readable to me. I got the Hillary Clinton paragraph the first time because I'm familiar with Didion's framework, and I am also familiar with the topic she is writing about. Her style, slightly impatient in its way of throwing all the parts at you at once, demands that you keep up with it. I mean, all these essays are about delving into the buzzing "ether" of Washington and tracking (and trying to nail down) the coded language churning out of it. I'd be throwing things, too.

If you read Joan Didion's essays from the early part of her career, working forward, you can trace the peculiar manner as it emerges out of a mind insistent that empirical data lacks meaning, complex structures are always rotting, and writing is ultimately futile. What remains in the ruins is this highly deliberate, manicured style that is, above all, trustworthy-for the reader and the "migrainous, crabby" writer. Words are never out of place in Didion's prose. Her famous style gels during the period of "Miami" and "Sentimental Journeys"- her two masterpieces.

I wouldn't recommend Political Fictions to a new reader or someone unfamiliar with the players in Washington. There is a shift in these recent collected writings towards a kind of experimentally casual use of language within the syntax, where the author, comfortable with her method, relaxes the grip on her pen. The effect is thrilling for some of us, and apparently a chore for others.

More than seventy years ago H.L. Mencken satirized the politicians of his day by counseling the American people that we had the best Congress money could buy. Even then many observers seemed to understand that power politics served the needs of the elite, not the man in the street. Yet gradually this trend toward a polity more and more exclusively organized and perpetuated for the sole purpose of benefiting a small upper class has become noticeably more decadent and extreme, and it is this trend toward extremism that noted social commentator Joan Didion takes issues with in this absorbing series of essays centering on the dangerous drift toward an elitist polity. Miss Didion is an author with an incredibly diverse background, and while she is primarily known for her works of fiction, she has also delivered some provocative and thoughtful best-selling non-fiction works such as "Slouching Toward Bethlehem". Here, with her set of essays, "Political Fictions", she demonstrates her wry and sardonic insight into the political machinations and creative politics that characterize the American polity. While the reading is enjoyable and edifying, her protestations sometimes get to be a bit much.

For Didion literally nothing is holy or sacrosanct, and she savagely lambastes the cynical manipulations she attributes to the political elite in this country, who she pictures as systematically and ruthlessly engaging and using their power in the act of exploiting current events in inventing what they then characterize as the political drama of democracy in action. And, to Didion's credit, she understands that nothing is really quite as simple as it seems on the surface. Thus she describes a cynical manipulation of a national yearning for a nostalgic view of America in what is a mind-boggling juggling of the truth. What she discovers in this search through the highs and lows of the political landscape is a solipsistic political view, engendered by an almost comically vapid attempt to pander to the public in an attempt to perpetuate their vulnerabilities in order to maintain power and control. It is difficult not to empathize with her observations, and to subscribe to most of what she says, especially her pointed observations of how much worse, i.e. how much more extreme and more vicious the political process seems to have become. Yet I have to admit to a bit of surprise at the level of shock she professes at finding the political process, especially as represented by the two political parties, to be a patently self-serving enterprise that both individuals and groups engage in to serve their own selfish interests.

Thus, in tracing the plethora of ways in which such themes as a imagined American past are manipulated in order to further the aims of the political powers that be, she expresses horror to find that the two major parties, in concert with the electronic media, have consciously worked to deliberately narrow the forces within the electorate to a small but manageable cadre. Finally, in disgust she explore the ways in which this state of affairs winds up spawning a ruling class that is oblivious to, and unconscious of, the needs and wants of the general electorate. This leaves the reader to wonder whether her expressed rage is a creative tool, or if, on the other hand, she really was so naïve that all of this genuinely surprises her. Perhaps she was on Holiday from Smith the semester they taught about H.L Mencken and his celebrated works regarding the American political system. Yet this truly is a worthwhile book and one I recommend, because it is entertaining and very well written. Ms. Didion has a unique way with turning a phrase on its ear and making the thought she is making most unforgettable in the process. Just be sure you understand before doing so that much of what she says seems a bit disingenuous given her reputation for considerable street smarts and basic common sense. Enjoy

I hope what Joan Didion, essayist extraordinary, learned from this adventure in pol land Americana (that her husband, John Gregory Dunne, "already knew," as she notes on the dedication page) is that there is not a dime's worth of difference between Republicans ... and Democrats ... in this democracy by capitalism. Well, maybe fifteen cents. How terribly, terribly impatient I got with Bill Clinton and the demos, that is until George W. took office and then I began to feel some nostalgia for good old fashion sexual malfeasance in lieu of the Incredible Shrinking Bill of Rights and a return to foreign policy as conceived by the CIA.

I think Miss Didion did indeed notice the similarities between the parties in this collection of political essays and journalisms, 1988-2000, most of which were first published in The New York Review of Books. She seems to find Dukakis, Clinton and Gore just as lame as George and George W., although in different ways. (Of course one does sense that overall there is just the barest leftward lean!) Sometimes however it is difficult to tell whether she is just observing the madness or satirizing it, so exquisitely sharp is her rapier. But take a hint from some of the titles, e.g., "The West Wing of Oz," "Newt Gingrich, Superstar," "Political Pornography," "Vichy Washington," "God's Country," etc.

Let's take especially the chapter on the one-time Speaker of the House of Representatives, the Republican congressman from Georgia ... to see what Miss Didion is up to. The chapter starts out innocently enough with a 213-word sentence (no semicolons!) detailing the "personalities and books and events" that helped shape the one-time presidential hopeful. Didion uses a technique here that might be called "damning by bizarre association." Thus one reads that Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, etc., influenced the Honorable Mr. Gingrich, but so did Tom Clancy, "Zen in the Art of Archery," and the 1913 Girl Scout Handbook. One senses where Didion is going when a page later she describes Gingrich's method of developing "an intellectual base" by "collecting quotes and ideas on scraps of paper stored in shoeboxes" (quoting Dick Williams, author of "Newt!" on page 169). The cat is completely out of the bag when Didion notes some of Gingrich's publications, including the novel "1945," which Didion describes as "a fairly primitive example of the kind of speculative fiction known as alternative history." Didion goes on to give capsule reviews of "1945" and "To Renew America," taking some delight in Newt's fixation on numbers and outline forms, "seven steps necessary to solve the drug problem," "eight areas of necessary change in our health care system," etc. ending with the observation on page 179 that "we have here a man who once estimated the odds on the survival of his second marriage at 53 to 47." Didion calls this an "inclination toward the pointlessly specific...coupled with a tic to inflate what is actually specific into a general principle, a big concept." By the time Didion is through with Professor Gingrich, one sees that the epithet, "Superstar" is sarcastic and a delusion of the mind of a nerd fully grown.

Well, is this fair? I don't know, but it is kind of fun. However I recommend that you read this not for fun or for the edification that you might get from the material. Instead I recommend Joan Didion's political pieces as a study in style, as an education in how to slice finely and well, how to discredit and lampoon with class. Didion, when she writes about politics, is like Gore Vidal or Mark Twain being well-behaved at tea with a pinky aimed directly and unmistakably at the hostess.

Comparing this book to her now classic Slouching Towards Bethlehem (circa 1961) which includes the famous self-revelatory essay, "On Going Home," one notices that the novelistic and "affecting" style has disappeared. In its place we have a hard-nosed, but fancy, street journalism with the author somewhere in the background discreetly washing her hands.

...

What can I say I might be biased since I consider the discovery of Joan Didion one of the highlights of my lifelong passion for reading. Still this is her best effort in years and the chapter on the obsequious power lunch journalism of the likes of Bob Woodward alone is worth the price of the Hardcover.Other lovelies are the spit out loud funny reading list of that misunderstood" historian and intellectual"(pun fully intended) Newt Gingrich which reads like the Who's Who list of the Bible Belt conspiracy crowd and as well as the beautifully constructed and persuasively argued" God's County" which clearly states that the bias in power is neither liberal nor conservative but lily livered and infantile and forever catering to the constituancy that sees the Virgin Mary on a pancake in a drive- in and thinks curlicues on Hallmark cards will bring family values and a spirit of gentleness back to our errand ways. The fifth star is for the purity of her language and the sheer beauty of her complex but always rational thought patterns.

No one really wants to read Didion's perceptive take on partisan politics and the theatricality of the entire political process during trying, uncertain times such as these. Nevertheless, Didion shines here. She's at the top of her form -- her lean, angry prose illuminating the horrors of the United States intervention in the El Salvadorian civil war, the odd rise to power of the odd Newt Gingrich, the bewildering Reagan presidency. Though she's very much a leftie, the nature of this inquiry is into all things political, and Dukakis as much as Bush is a target for Didion's scorn. Didion is an incredible writer and a capable thinker and in general we need more political books of this ilk -- books that aspire to illuminate, educate, not obfuscate.

Yes, Didion's syntax is convoluted; one needs to be patient and attentive while reading this book. Didion spares no one. Clinton is opportunistic and juevenile: slick. What else is new with politicians? Master of the non sequitor, the lunatic Gingrich could have been a character in "Alice in Wonderland". Does Dinesh D'Souza really maintain a straight face when he tells us that Reagan the snoozer and jelly bean popper was in reality a shrewd strategist? The media uncritically bought into the bogus Clinton scandals, hook, line, and sinker. Didion demonstrates that we can't trust the government or the media. Now that we are presented with a threat to our survival, with the government in essence invoking martial law and the media cheering it on, Didion's revelations are topical and profoundly disturbing.

The ditto heads of the world will not like this book. Many of their transmuted myths are challenged by Didion. I will not bother to compile a list of their headliners and legends.
They prefer whipping boy prose. If it does not have the quasi paranoid syntax attacking liberals, then it is not worth their time.
I like Didion's book because it reveals further the disturbing triangular symbiosis between the media's "journalist", the fragile bought and sold politicos, and those who make this arrangement their reality.

No book published in the past few years does a better job of capturing everything that is wrong (and right) about American politics. Exceedingly well-written, insightful, irreverent, just plain smart. Reads even better the second or third time around. A gem.

Didion's writing is as tight and sharp as ever, but in all honesty, this book isn't going to tell you anything that you don't already know. Her premise is that politics in America are no longer about the "common man" and that politicians are woefully out of touch with the constinuents that they serve. In this day and age, is news that government agencies lie to the public, cover up events, and work to find scapegoats big news to anyone? I can't imagine that it is. And ditto for the revelation that most politicans are willing to do and say whatever is necessary to get elected. I admire Didion's voice as well her ability to structure her work, but this book is best for die-hard political junkies or for younger people who want to get a real look at how government works.