Among the chattering class, it is common to assert that there were two Joan Didions. There was the Goldwater-voting conservative, who laid bare the hypocrisies of the hippie movement in "Slouching Towards Bethlehem." Then there was the "radical" Didion, as Louis Menand calls her, who saw clearly in "Sentimental Journeys" and Where I Was From that the only thing that matters in America is "money and power."
What both of these Didions had in common, of course, was an impatience for claptrap, whether from the Left or the Right, and a tragic view of life. The hippies, despite the rhetoric of peace and love, ate their own, feeding their children acid in "High Kindergarten." American feminists turn out to be more reactionary than radical in the way they constantly treat women as if they were "wounded birds." Law-and-order types show themselves to be motivated not by justice but by a paranoia that the media are all too happy to stoke.
If there’s a refrain in Didion’s work, it is that the language of "social action" is a ruse. We love high-sounding moral sentiment because it allows us to mask "that dread of the meaningless which was man’s fate." We prefer a "broad strokes" account of reality because it allows us to ignore inconvenient details that might otherwise upend our "sentimental" narrative.
Unfortunately, Evelyn McDonnell gives us exactly this sort of "broad strokes" sentimental narrative of Didion’s life and work in The World According to Joan Didion. McDonnell writes that she hopes to show how Didion "beautifully but relentlessly laid bare the fictions that we tell ourselves, and each other, in order to live." Instead, she creates a fiction of her own: Joan Didion, feminist superstar who inspired millions.
In McDonnell’s telling, Didion overcame "toxic masculinity" and the "traumatizing pressures" that society places on women to create "whole new ways of writing." She "deconstructed the hierarchy," critiqued "American empire," and "convicted" New York City—and the rest of the criminal justice system—of its "systemic racism." She made "anxiety central to her narrative" and came out on top. "She didn’t just school us; she armed us," McDonnell writes. Without her, "untold numbers of readers might not have become writers."
This isn’t to suggest that Didion was perfect. Her politics, McDonnell tells us, could sometimes be "blindered by privilege" and her "early aversion to the feminist movement was an example of the ways in which she was not always conscious of how her own life was shaped by power structures." But she’s still worth reading because "she loved women."
It’s hard to imagine a book more at odds with Didion’s practice, as McDonnell herself notes, of avoiding "the pat answer or obvious noun."
McDonnell’s analysis of Didion’s style is equally banal. "Writers revere Didion," McDonnell writes, because she was "original and precise": "She chose every word with machinelike precision." "One of the hallmarks of her prose is her specificity," McDonnell tells us again. Her details "speak volumes."
Didion didn’t "tell." She showed. In fact, "Joan was the queen of show." She "understood that decisions about form are decisions about content." She even alternated her sentence length: "Extremely long sentences whose strings of clauses are so artfully woven they flow like scarves … alternate with extremely short sentences: two, three, four words. Phrases—key ideas—get repeated, like refrains in a song."
McDonnell is so struck by these elements of style (as well as Didion’s use of the first person) that she decides to imitate them. "You’ll see those tricks here," she writes, "some of them conscious gimmicks on my part, some of them so woven in the fabric of my writing I don’t know they are stolen goods."
Imitation may be the highest form of flattery, but McDonnell’s aping of Didion’s style seems more like parody. Her use of repetition is repetitive, not evocative, and her single-sentence summaries of Didion’s life and work are corny. For example, when discussing Didion’s repeated ability to question her presuppositions, McDonnell writes: "Call it Joan’s arc." Or this chestnut: "Didion mastered the power of observation and the power of grammar. Who needs shotguns?"
McDonnell’s mastery of metaphor is also less than perfect. "We live in an age of reckonings over who gets to tell stories and how and why," she writes. "Didion faced this abyss as a young woman beginning her career and her family, and her transparency about this dissolution was her, and our, saving grace" (emphasis mine). She regularly inflates her diction. Instead of using "countryside" to refer to where Didion grew up, for example, she uses "natural environment." And her insertion of herself into the narrative is jarring.
McDonnell tells us that Didion was such a professional that she deleted whole passages of her work: "Words did not burst in precise formation from Joan Didion’s brain and land on the page pristine. She crossed whole passages out. Her rigor is apparent in the final product. It took time and labor to get there."
I am not sure the same can be said about The World According to Joan Didion.
The World According to Joan Didion
by Evelyn McDonnell
HarperOne, 243 pp., $26.99
Micah Mattix, a professor of English at Regent University, has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Examiner, and many other publications.