Thoughts from
San Diego on Law, Politics, and Culture

 
And the award for most tedious author from California goes to . . .
By Tom Smith

Joan Didion! Didion has a new book out about California and I am not going to read it. Just reading the review of it in the NYT book review was so annoying, I knew I could not stand the book. From the back cover:

In Where I Was From, Didion turns what John Leonard has called “her sonar ear, her radar eye” onto her own work, as well as that of such California writers as Frank Norris and Jack London and Henry George, to examine how the folly and recklessness in the very grain of the California settlement led to the California we know today–a state mortgaged first to the railroad, then to the aerospace industry, and overwhelmingly to the federal government, a dependent colony of those political and corporate owners who fly in for the annual encampment of the Bohemian Club. Here is the one writer we always want to read on California showing us the startling contradictions in its–and in America’s–core values.

Please make her stop. Please. The Bohemian Club? That must be at their annual get together with the Elders of Zion. And "the folly and recklessness in the very grain of the California settlement"? Hooo boy, that's deep. It's about culture, you see. It's that culture thing. She should be arrested for impersonating a smart person.

The annoyingness of Joan Didion is elusive. It is like trying to describe why the screech of fingernails on a blackboard is so discomforting. To begin with, she is wound up way too tightly. She chips out sentences which are fraught with anxiety but not with meaning. She makes portentous observations that are supposed to be deep, but aren't. She wrote a whole essay debunking the Reagans, revolving around the fact that they had a wet bar in their living room. Imagine that! A wet bar in their living room! How, how, can you imagine just how . . . how what? Tacky? Yucky? Middle class? And I care because? You just want to say, for Christ's sake, Joan, just take another valium like all your readers do. Or her essay on migranes. She gets them, you know. Probably because she's just so darn sensitive, so darn literary, and this world is tough on girls like that. You don't have to read the essay. Here's the punch line: Migranes suck! Or, you can try to read one of her novels. Here's the plot: Joan is from California, but she went back East, but she's from California, but she went back East, but where she's from is California. They're really fascinating.

Oh, by the way, another essay displays the fact that Joan was close friends with famous movie director Roman Polanski, but then Charles Manson's fruitcake family cut up Sharon Tate, and that was very alienating indeed. But this essay was published before Polanski fled the country rather than face charges of molesting little girls, which was very darn morally ambiguous if you ask me. Still, that Joan was friends with Polanski and then his wife got murdered is just fascinating, you have to admit, and morally ambiguous too.

Joan Didion is from an old California family. I mean a really old California family. I mean, they knew all the original grizzly bears and everything. All this new stuff, suburbs, the defense industry, people who don't get migranes, people who don't miss the New Yorker, people with all their cars, well, it's just so, so, so, so. And, on top of it all, morally ambiguous as all get out.

California is not what it used to be, and just for the record, I really, truly do not give a shit. I hope I have been clear on this point.

I cannot in the end do justice to the true tediousness of Joan Didion. I suggest you do not buy one of her books and do not enjoy her for yourself.
posted by thomas at 11/18/2003 02:29:00 PM