Verse
Brennan, Joseph Payne
Harrisorl's work in a number of places, including the New York Times, Harpers, The New Republic, and (yes) Com-mon weal. Some of her best journalism and criti- cism has now be6n collected in Off...
...It is nice to see something sharper at work...
...Even Gay Talese had a good one out, years ago, called Fame and Obscurity...
...Hard- son isa feminist, but is irritated by Rich's anti-male oversimplifications: "My reading of Ms...
...I close the door quietly on the whole past of the universe waiting to be born again...
...Anthologies are Considered risky...
...There are a lot of journalists who write about people like Jane Fonda, but few who would say "I have never met anyone who exerted so little energy to be charnfing...
...no one else seems to have paid much attention to them...
...Now it lies quietly, gilded by" sun...
...We ought instead to recognize that longing for the transcendental is a reality of the human condition, and not one to be scorned...
...Rich's book," she says, "does not even tell me whether I may assume there are any qualitative differ- ences between my son--poised on the brink of adulthood, scared, brave, kind, uncertain--and ldi Amin...
...These, and other assorted facts--such as the fact that Didion chose to buy the dress Linda Kasabian wore at the Manson trial at I. Magnin in Beverly Hills--put me more in mind of a neurasthenic Cher than of a writer who has been called Ameri- ca's finest prose stylist...
...So much writing validates our culture uncritically...
...JOHN GARVEY 24 October 1980:585...
...Or, "On the flight to L.A...
...She is equally sharp in her reaction to the extremism and intolerance of Ad- rienne Rich's brand of feminism...
...According to Harrison, Frady re-veals, despite himself, Graham's "desire to ingratiate that is so profound as to amount to cunning, a pragmatism that stems from a lust to be Caesar's buddy, to share Caesar's power...
...This looks like the opening slash in a fight which will leave a gory mess all over the floor, but it is much more than that: Harrison makes good points about the things that are wrong with Didion's prose, and is most concerned with the political conservatism and moral empti- ness of the attitudes which crop up again and again in Didion's work...
...I have to •confess that I love collections...
...There are pieces on Moonies, Dick Cavett, hypochondria, Jane Fonda, famous writers, and Rose- land...
...It is not so easy to see clearly what is false in a writer who has been as universally praised, by good reviewers, as Joan Didion has...
...This cryptic dust, I tell myself, came from the ends of the universe a billion years ago, through inconceivable black voids, through immensities of time we speak about but never comprehend...
...Gloria Emerson is quoted on the jacket of OffCenter: "She is never pompous, coy, or dull...
...what always shines through is wit, intelli-gence, and compassion...
...But taking on the sham in Jane Fonda is relatively easy, though it is done here very well...
...Through all of them there is a sense, or rather a compassion- ate commitment to the fact, that ideas matter too much to be dealt with in a sloppy or lazy fashion, because people are implicated in ideas, and are wounded by bad ones...
...Apart from essays which reveal a keen critical eye and a way of seeing through received ideas, there is a tender apprecia- tion of her son, a recollection of her Jehovah's Witness girlhood, a funny, sad piece about her hypochondria, and many more good things...
...I am talking about the sort of thing People does for movie stars, and reviewers at another level do when they call every third novel the greatest book of the decade...
...I don't know why this should be--a collection is something you can move around in, and you can read something whole at a sitting...
...I am disinclined to find endearing a chronicler of the 1960s who is beset by rfiigraines that can be triggered by her decorator's having pleated instead of gathered her new dining room curtains...
...In this one moment of peace it bears the richness of diamonds, every mote precise as memory...
...I (economy class--millionaire Fonda dis- dains first-class frills) Jane told me more than I wanted to hear about the multina- tional corporations, and less than I al- ready knew...
...Some of her best journalism and criti- cism has now be6n collected in Off Center (The Dial Press, $9.95...
...Down the long centuries of light it glided toward this room...
...and her review of Marshall Frady's Billy Graham: A Parable of American Right- eousness challenges the notion that Graham is an innocent in a world too complex and ambiguous for his simplic- ity...
...We have to stop being embarrassed by religion before we can come to grips with the cults...
...There is a review of Linda Bird Francke's The Am- bivalence of Abortion which will bother both pro-choice and pro-life people, an indication that she is on the right track...
...Ioseph Payne Brennan Dust The dust in this deserted room, disturbed, swirls in a ray of random sun, hangs, settles, more silent than death...
...I al- most threw a party when John Cheever's collected stories came out, two of Raymond Chandler's anthologies are among my favorite books, and Eudora Welty's The Eye of the Story delighted me...
...It is good to have this book, and good to know, from the jacket, that Harrison is at work on another...
...Pub-lishers, I hear, tend not to...
...In the course of her story on the Moonies she makes a statement which could open into a book: "If we deny the validity of all absolutes, we leave the field open to mischievous charlatans and psychopaths--like Jim Jones, and, some would say, Sun Myung Moon...
...perhaps because we want to be- lieve that life is as hollow as Didion suggests it is...
...Off Center is a selection which is as varied as could be...
...I like Didion's writ- ing, especially her essays, and was not prepared for this opening: "When I am asked why I do not find Joan Didion appealing, I am tempted to answer--not entirely facetiously--that my charity does not naturally extend itself to some- one whose lavender love seats match exactly the potted orchids on her mantel, someone who has porcelain elephant end tables, someone who has chosen to bur- den her daughter with the name Quintana Roo...
Vol. 107 • October 1980 • No. 19
