January 9, 2017
Even in raw form, Didion’s (Blue Nights) voice surpasses other writers’ in “elegance and clarity,” Nathaniel Rich astutely observes in his introduction to Didion’s notebooks from her 1970 trip to Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi and much shorter 1976 musings about her California youth. Didion’s notes display her characteristic verbal power: details such as “bananas would rot, and harbor tarantulas” (about New Orleans weather) punctuate this short volume. Moreover, Didion reveals remarkable foresight about America’s political direction: Rich traces a direct line from her nearly 50-year-old musings on the Gulf Coast as America’s “psychic center” to the Trump election. But most strikingly, Didion’s observations reveal differences with today, such as a degree of civility now often missing from public discourse. In one dinner exchange, for example, a wealthy white Mississippian gripes about busing, yet says, “Basically I know the people who are pushing it are right.” Students of social history, fans of Didion, and those seeking a quick, engaging read will appreciate this work: the raw immediacy of unedited prose by a master has an urgency that more polished works often lack. Agent: Lynn Nesbit, Janklow & Nesbit.
January 15, 2017
A revealing publication from the celebrated prose stylist.In 1970, Didion (Blue Nights, 2011, etc.) took a sojourn in the Deep South, beginning in New Orleans and then heading to Mississippi and Alabama before returning to the Big Easy. (Also included are some pages about the author's California homes in her youth.) Didion had intended to write a book about the South, but she just never got around to it. However, she retained her notes and observations, which compose this slender volume. Here are many of the splendid, sharp-eyed sentences for which she has long been admired. There are also brief notes, snippets of overheard conversations (in restaurants, on the street, in motels, libraries, around motel swimming pools), and sights along the road, viewed from her rental car. Didion writes about snakes, heat, sports, racial issues, and a strange coolness she experienced from many of the locals. In Oxford, she mentions that she could not find William Faulkner's grave, which is hard to miss these days. She also bemoans the lack of bookstores in town, hardly a problem now. But what will strike readers is--as Didion declares--her inability to "get into it"--to interview the people she ought to (some avoided her) and to venture more deeply into the Southern heart. She does chronicle her interviews with some locals and others, including a visit with Walker Percy (for which readers will certainly yearn for more details). Didion also confesses that she was ready--just about at any time--to hop on a plane for home. But some of her observations are classics: a man with a shotgun shooting pigeons on a street in a Mississippi town; a comment about the fierce heat: "all movement seemed liquid." An almost spectral text haunted by a past that never seems distant.
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Starred review from May 1, 2017
Reading this slim volume is like opening a time capsule...and then having the alarming realization that almost nothing has changed. Here, National Book Award winner Didion (The Year of Magical Thinking) gathers together and juxtaposes her notes from a visit to the American South during the 1970s with those she wrote a few years later in San Francisco while covering the 1974 Patty Hearst kidnapping. As she draws parallels between the two places, she reveals the false promise of commercial industry and development, "the kernel of cyanide" hidden within the American dream, which has brought about its current state of decadence and decay. Though her notes are notes--in no way do they resemble the perfunctory outlines or drafts one usually associates with the term. Her narrative arrangement closely mirrors her itinerary, resulting in a multitextured patchwork of voices from New Orleans; Mississippi's Biloxi and Meridian, and Tuscaloosa, AL. The reader gets the sense she is eavesdropping on the past, and these conversations, haunting in their prescience, are difficult to forget. VERDICT This is important reading for today, but it is essential reading for the future.--Meagan Lacy, Guttman Community Coll., CUNY
Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
February 15, 2017
Didion's first essay collection, the lightning-bolt Slouching towards Bethlehem (1968), contains the piquantly revealing On Keeping a Notebook, in which this now-revered master of incision and evocation confides, the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record. Instead, Didion asserts, it's an effort to record: How it felt to me. That is the power of her workher ability to precisely articulate feelings, atmosphere, and undercurrents, a gift on striking display in this slender volume made up of two sustained notebook excerpts. One records her often-pained observations during a June 1970 sojourn in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama; the other was seeded by the 1976 California trial of Patty Hearst and blossoms into many-faceted reflections on the West. Didion's notes are remarkably polished and slicing in their responses to place, conversations overheard and instigated, perceptions of social attitudes, and detection of hypocrisy, irony, and injustice; they shimmer with dark implications. A boon for the National Book Award winner's many avid readers, and anyone interested in the mysterious process of writing.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)