Customer Reviews

Run River

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...but Run River is her finest novel. "Democracy" is excellent, but it is more a tour de force than a novel. Didion was only in her twenties when she wrote Run River, and it is a winner--stylish but never mannered (something you can't say about her subsequent novels), subdued, witty, assured, and filled with Valley (as in the Sacramento Valley) characters with whom Didion was rather obsessively in love. It is a pity that she seems more interested these days in writing about Washington insiders for N.Y.C./L.A. insiders. Everett McClellan, my favorite character in the book, would not have been able to sustain an interest in such figures as Henry Hyde and Kenneth Starr. That Didion can--even if only for the purpose of eviscerating them--is an indication of how far she has strayed from her literary roots. Ah, but what roots they were. Run River is an extraordinary achievement.

This novel is early Didion, wonderfully lyrical and dark, passionate without sentimentality, and beyond conclusions. It is homage to James Jones, to William Faulkner, perhaps a little to John Steinbeck, but mostly to a California now almost vanished. That California is mostly the settlers' California, but it is also a California felt and known aboriginally. She writes, as always, poignantly about things dying away: but the heirs live on and the Californian sun and hills, rivers and floods, carry on- the part of eternity we can know a little of. I liked this book very much, but the reader should be warned it is not a light read and not written as completely in Joan Didion's famously sharp style as her later works.

This first novel by one of modern America's prose-writing treasures is set in a part of California no one associates with the Golden State: the Sacramento Delta. The emotional and physical geography of the book blend seamlessly. Didion has since critiqued this book herself, in her much later prose reflection on California, "Where I Was From." She's a bit hard on her former self. This is a lucid, hard etched short novel on the same general theme as Tolstoi's "Anna Karenina": that is, how a uniquely unhappy family got that way. Didion is of an old California family. She takes no false pride in that, here or elsewhere. There is not a useless or spongy sentence in the whole book. Writers will be reminded of what they're supposed to be doing when they pick up a pen.

I'll keep this brief. This is one of the best novels about California since The Grapes of Wrath. A story of farmers, soldiers, husbands, wives, sex, deceit and land. Didion has a strong grasp on the American idiom of postwar America. It exposes and demystifies the dark side of "The Greatest Generation" while at the same time being fairly nonjudgemental. These are human beings, with just as many feelings as anyone else. Didion makes the characters realistic struggle to be good truly engaging and extremely heartfelt. With each passing chapter the reader feels a pang of torment knowing the characters tragic fall from grace will be unavoidable. Despite its quite depressing qualities (and there are a great deal of them, expertly explored by Didion) it is an enthralling read. If you like socially aware fiction, this is for you.

Easily one of the strongest and expertly crafted American novels of the 20th century and maybe the best novel about California next to Grapes of Wrath.

There's a wealth of evidence in Run River (Didion's first book, published in 1963) that the world was to get one of its great writers, but it gets lost a bit in the story. Using a sort of end-of-the-golden era view of Sacramento land booms as its backdrop, it follows Lily and Everett, holdouts of the wealthy Knight and McClellan pioneer families that struck it rich in Northern California, an era described by Didion as "the cutting clean which was to have redeemed them all." Didion's sense of location and the specifics of the era is remarkable, so it takes little effort to be interested in the events, but set up as it is a framed story revolving around a murder, 20 years of backstory, and then the conclusion of the murder, she seems far too willing to make Run River an act of condemnation. I picked up Run River as a fervent reader of Didion's astonishing nonfiction works, and felt a little dismayed at first at my willingness to avoid reading the book. It's a feeling that goes away - the middle section of the book is filled with flawed, impish characters rendered in empathetic specifics, and is full of the humanely observed understatments that make Didion's best work so accessible (I am convinced no writer can devastate more with a seemingly average sentence - perfectly interrupted, of course). Still, returning to the murder at the end of the book, my reluctance returned, and I realized Didion's failure is to make the book a declaration of decay, to turn her events "tragic" (or, really, the stuff of nighttime soaps) in an attempt to critique the California pioneer identity. All this winds up doing is rendering the fates of her characters not all that important. Still, the book should be read for that glimmering center of the book, a time when its characters flaws are rendered rich with empathy - its chapters detailing Martha, Everett's sister, as she (miserably) attempts to conquer heartbreak with pioneering audacity shows Didion's characters as fascinating idealists, endearing in their quixotic fucntionlessness.

Ms. Didion's first novel contains many of the elements which make her later works such a joy to read: the somewhat lost, somewhat selfish characters who are yet so well developed that they manage to capture reader empathy (we doubt we'd like them if we encountered them in the flesh, but still find ourselves needing to know); the impetuously emergent vacuity which sometimes arises in relationships built on irradicable bonds; the congenital inhumanity which underlies political arrangements. Two factors distinguished this novel amongst her canon for me: my mild frustration with its end, which seemed to be constructed with less grace than the rest of the book; and its magnificent grappling with the trappings of being Californian.

Ms. Didion explores the California themes of "Run River" more nakedly in "Where I Was From," and I recommend that any who find themselves intrigued by the setting make their way toward that nonfiction work. Here, the issues are teased at: pioneering spirit (always fed, in some part, by curiously lazy capitalist sympathies, by a thirst for the quick and eternal "Eureka!") gives way to complacency, to comfortable living which fears only disruption. Didion's characters are uninspired to engage in introspection, and so never develop passions beyond the upkeep of what they have always known; their lives are guided by unearned ease, which leads to malaise, which ensures that they develop into very stiff lovers, fathers, mothers and brothers, indeed. When their bloodless expectations happen to be disappointed, they--the younger generations left ethically crippled by their ancestors' easy scores--find themselves without the tools to cope, and are only able to respond by shirking self-preservation and resorting to seriously dramatic moves. (I wish to avoid spoilers...)

I say all of this with the most keen admiration for Didion; she creates such careless characters, and then, with great skill and humanity, manages to make us, her readers, assume responsibility for each of the life complexities which her characters disregard. If they forget to be ambitious, Didion leaves us certain that some life ambition could serve. If they don't fight against the nasty ruptures in their relationships, Didion leaves us aware of the daily work which healthy relationships require. Where they are unkind to one another, we are reminded that we should be kind; where they are lazy, we are invigorated to work. It is a testament to Didion's art that her unfailingly bereft characters leave us feeling compelled to be more collected, to want more, to be better. These are the marks of great literature.

Read the book for book club. While I felt it was well written and was a reflection of the times, I didn't identify or enjoy any of the characters in the novel. Because of that, it took me longer to read than such a short book shoud.

This first fiction story by Didion surely catches her at the beginning of her career as a fiction writer. Copyrighted 1961, it is her first fiction novel. The Didion reader will recognize it as an early work. It is meandering, difficult to follow and in fact, in some points, downright boring.

However, the seeds of a brilliant writer and observer of human behavior still shine through. The book is about human interactions, set in early California between about 1920 and 1959, the story traces a family and their quest for land ownership in the young State of California.

Her concentration is on the manner in which love is expressed in the family. She concentrates on the strengths of the loves and on the incredible weaknesses. Her depiction of a family in emotional shambles is clear. Her elucidation of a family in every type of crisis except financial, is stark. And her characterization of the intense philandering of both the men and the women in the family is revealing and unexpected to some extent; yet fully expected in another.

The book is recommended to Didion readers and is of interest in seeing how her style was refined and honed as she went on in her writing career.

As a longtime Didion fan I was mildly disappointed with this text. It's cumbersome, swishy, and sloppy. It hints at phrases, and the sort of language she eventually uses later in her writing, but this early novel is exactly that...early. It shows promise, and is not entirely without wit, but it's weak and cumbersome plot, it's overwrought prose, and it's harlequin voice were a disappointment given her profound later works.