White Album (FSG Classics) Paperback – November 10, 2009

arrived on time and as described. great Didion book

A select collection of acclaimed and previously published works by celebrated nonfiction author and journalist, Joan Didion.Didion is best known for her fluid and elegantly understated prose, making it a treat to experience the nearly palpable, emotionally-charged dissonance of 1960’s Los Angeles through her sharp observations. She manages epitomizing the complex, mosaic of a period by using her impeccable eye for detail to draw stark parallels from personal experiences as significant events are unfolding all around her, imperative signs of the time. Instead of focusing on macroscale, she magnifies and unveils the overall seedy feeling of growing unrest through tender, poignant digressions in search of purpose behind it. She offers lyrical yet incredibly subtle, meaningful essays that carefully diffuse bits and pieces of context to the greater concept; the failure to find a narrative in her own life, and consequently, in American society. The ‘60’s have come and gone, leaving behind peculiar feelings lingering stagnant in the air surrounding the city as time passes on. She’s a fly on the wall and readers are there with her, in the Sunset Boulevard recording studio anxiously awaiting the arrival of Jim Morrison with the rest of The Doors. They’re at the Alameda County jail seated across the table from Huey Newton as he’s giving Eldridge Cleaver a personal statement regarding the Black Panther Party; they’re helping deliver a hand-chosen dress the morning of Linda Kasabian’s testimony for the Manson family murders. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live... We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five,” her writing style cultivates a sense of taking the reader along for the ride, making them feel like they were there to experience these intimate, quirky morsels in time right there alongside her.Didion’s rhythmic style is illuminated by collage storytelling, conveying the tentative state rearing 1960’s America in a timeless assortment.

The praise gets heaped on Slouching Towards Bethlehem (as well it should), but after finishing The White Album, there is no doubt in my mind they are equals in every way - an eloquent, painstaking, timeless collection of one unexpected, evocative observation after another. The appeal of Didion's writing is often to glimpse the author underneath her thick and specific veils of details, to marvel at the way her specifics are often more telling about her than about what she's writing - her own sense of dislocation amidst the silly late-60's music industry, her heartbreak within a charred orchid greenhouse, her rather endless defensiveness of California in Hollywood board rooms and Beverly Hills restaurants. In that, my favorite piece in this flawless collection is the 3-page description of Georgia O'Keefe: "'The men' believed it impossible to paint New York, so Georgia O'Keefe painted New York. 'The men' didn't think much of her bright color, so she made it brighter. The men yearned toward Europe so she went to Texas." It's a proud and bold description of a proud and bold woman, but what it really is is a treatise on what it means to be inspired and emboldened by the work and life of someone who came before you. A similar piece could be written on the uncompromising career of Didion, and it could be written following any essay in The White Album.

Didion’s White Album confirms what I’ve subconsciously known my entire life: the Sixties were chaotic. Vietnam, Kent State, Black Panthers, Jim Morrison, Charlie Manson murders at Spahn Ranch, a sequence of events that shaped the mood of a generation. Didion’s collection is a trek through the a tumultuous era, spattered with iconic figures, writers, actors, producers, and luminaries from the women’s movement, the brilliance of Doris Lessing and Georgia O’Keefe. For the reader who lived through the 1960s, The White Album is a keepsake, for the outsider it is a collection of essays capable of transporting one into the fray of those chaotic times.

Some of her essays, which are personal critiques of notable events and people of the sixties/seventies, are amusing, accessible, straightforward satirical/ironic commentaries. An essay on a born-again pentacostal group in California is one such amusing, smart description of people who, to Didion, suffer from a noticeable lack of common sense and critical judgement. Average Americans can enjoy and chuckle at that essay. But in other essays, such as a critique of the womens' movement, she clubs the reader over the head with a barrage of professorial words like "sententious" and "didactic", "Emersonian". I continually was thinking "what does that mean? What is Emersonian, what does sententious mean? In that essay (womens' movement) she write like an Oxford professor of philosophy or ancient classic literature. In my opinion, it's never necessary to intellectually bully people with arcane, seldom used academic words. Every idea can be clearly, precisely expressed using common every-day language. So, for my taste, Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson were more pleasant and fun to read, for satirical, insightful commentaries on American culture. For example, Tom Wolfe's "A Man in Full", or "Bonfire of the Vanities".