If there ever were an author who seemed a product of her own language, it is Joan Didion, divine mistress of the careful revelation. Under cover of a first-person persona markedly cooler and more composed than those of her New-Journalistic peers, Didion has borne witness to 40 years of American fragmentation and produced five novels, countless screenplays co-written with her late husband John Gregory Dunne, and two late-life memoirs on aging and loss, one of which, “The Year of Magical Thinking,” became a successful Broadway play.
The novels, especially “Play It As It Lays,” are powerful experiments in style, but Didion’s reputation rests firmly on the essays in her early collections “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and “The White Album.”
Reporting on the splintering of American culture in the ’60s and ’70s for the Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, and The New York Review of Books, she adopted the Cassandra-like posture of an unstable observer burdened with — perhaps even weakened by — near-perfect vision. This version of Didion is emblematized by the oversized sunglasses she wears in iconic images from the ’70s to spring 2015’s Celine ads, twin darkened shields that at once protect her eyes and enlarge them to fantastic proportions. Sure, they make her look cool, but you get the feeling that if she took them off she might crumple under the weight of her own visual acuity, or, like the X-Men’s Cyclops, accidentally kill you.
More Top Picks Best Extra Wide Shoes For Standing All Day
It’s disappointing but not at all surprising that Didion, now 80, “chose not to cooperate” with her first biographer, Tracy Daugherty, on “The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion.” There’s something terminally uncool about an authorized biography. Moreover, Didion may feel, with perfect legitimacy, that she has produced enough writing about herself to satisfy anyone. This isn’t true, of course; the more perfect an author’s control over her own story, the hungrier we are to see the flip side of the embroidery, run our fingers over the lumpy, tangled threads beneath its beautiful surface.
Such lumpiness is in limited supply in Daugherty’s biography; without Didion’s input or that of her closest friends, he is forced to draw mostly from Didion’s own oeuvre and her published interviews and profiles, supplemented with new interviews and correspondence only from long-lost friends and acquaintances who’ve lost touch with Didion, like New York ex-boyfriend Noel Parmentel and L.A. “art groupie/art model” Eve Babitz.
Daugherty gamely makes a virtue of these limitations, however, proposing to write cultural history rather than psychological portraiture, and announcing his intention to follow Didion’s own method of “enact(ing) her on the page, reproducing her mental and emotional rhythms.” The resulting 600-plus-page biography is more sprawling and novelistic than anything Didion herself would write, but it succeeds in adding a remarkable texture and density to Didion’s own, often airless, self-reflections. Daugherty, who has written literary biographies of Joseph Heller and Donald Barthelme, understands the literary and cultural milieu in which Didion’s fractured first-person prose first found an audience. A native Texan, he also has a feel for her troubled love-affair with her own Western origins.
Didion’s California roots, in fact, form the basis of one of Daugherty’s cannier arguments about her style. The daughter of a loud, possibly unstable gambler and a quiet, possibly depressed mother devoted to polite Sacramento society, Didion was drawn to pioneer narratives as a child, including that of the fateful Donner Party. She seems to have absorbed a fundamental narrative instability in these stories, whose narrators could not possibly have witnessed all they describe. In Didion’s dual identification with the dead who had to be abandoned on the trail and the survivors who abandoned them, Daugherty finds a narrative analog for Didion’s seemingly contradictory qualities of toughness and fragility, as well as her air of ruthless detachment.
It’s hard, after that opening, not to see the same narrative instability everywhere in Daugherty’s account, which, by eliding end notes in the text itself, naturalizes Didion’s late-life reminiscences of her own childhood beside more reliable primary sources. Daugherty is at his best when he can map Didion’s social world apart from her own recollections, like the chaotic Hollywood of the ’70s and ’80s, in which Dunne and Didion achieved a brittle, insular, West-Coast celebrity in close proximity to Dunne’s brother, Hollywood scenester Dominick Dunne. Ongoing portraits of the drug-addled Nick and other Didion/Dunne satellites give the reader a sense of the alternating currents of exhilaration and exhaustion on which the couple rode: the center has long ceased to hold, and the very idea of a falconer sounds hopelessly quaint.
In fact, Didion’s world-weariness never got in the way of either her productivity or her humanity; her political turn in the ’80s and ’90s shows her struggling to knit together ever larger and more complex stories from around the globe, until she eventually stood accused, by Michiko Kakutani in a review of her last novel, of paranoia. So much for the perfect embroidery.
Ultimately, however, the third act of Didion’s biography is so grim that paranoia seems like a reasonable response. The premature deaths, within two years of one another, of her husband from a heart attack and her daughter Quintana Roo from pancreatitis did not silence Didion, but rather ushered in an elegiac phase for which she seems to have been uniquely prepared. Daugherty uses restraint in exploring details of Quintana’s troubled life that Didion herself has not made public, but cannot resist the Didion-like urge to link her tragic death to those of other young women: her cousin Dominique Dunne, murdered in 1982, and Vanessa Redgrave’s daughter Natasha Richardson, killed in a freak skiing accident just a year after her mother played a grieving Joan Didion in “The Year of Magical Thinking” on the London stage. If there’s a logic to such coincidences, it’s a logic of surface, not depth, and it asks only to be observed.
Amy Gentry is a freelance writer living in Austin, Texas.
“The Last Love Song”
By Tracy Daugherty, St. Martin’s, 728 pages, $35