THE WHITE ALBUM, Joan Didion

I’d read Joan Didion before, but had somehow never sat down with THE WHITE ALBUM, even though it’s the one all the famous quotes come from. I picked it up as part of my winter projects of filling in the gaps in my reading I’d never got around to attending to, and then didn’t actually open it. During a week’s insomnia, I opened it up just for something to do. I’d already read the opening essay somewhere, but most of the rest was new to me.

Joan Didion was a reporter, author and screenwriter. In a lot of ways, I think she was always a reporter first. In the Sixties and Seventies, she was labelled as part of the New Journalism crew alongside Wolfe and Thompson. She shares a lot of creative DNA with Hunter Thompson – they both typed out entire Hemingway novels in their youth to get a feel for how that language worked – and early/mid Thompson has a similar music. But Didion was always more subtle. No less a mythologiser, in her way, but in a very different register.

I have never been sure what the word “nouveau” can possibly mean in America, implying as it does that the speaker is gazing down six hundred years of rolled lawns.

The sentences are glorious. I don’t even want to quote the famous ones. All of them have the glow of inspiration and the shine of polish. I highlighted this one because it is so clear and so timeless:

There is one of those peculiar social secrets at work here. On the whole “the critics” distrust great wealth, but “the public” does not. On the whole “the critics” subscribe to the romantic view of man’s possibilities, but “the public” does not.

(She was writing here in a time when “man” stood in for “humankind.”)

I could go on at length, but all that needs to be said is that this is a classic collection of reportage and memoir with beautiful, resonant writing, and I wish I’d read the whole thing years ago.

It occurred to me finally that I was listening to a true underground, to the voice of all those who have felt themselves not merely shocked but personally betrayed by recent history. It was supposed to have been their time. It was not.

THE WHITE ALBUM, Joan Didion