Joan Didion's Where I Was From and Colson Whitehead's The Colossus of New York
Howe, Nicholas
WHERE I WAS FROM by Joan Didion Alfred A. Knopf, 2003 vii + 226 pp $23 cloth THE COLOSSUS OF NEW YORK: A CITY IN THIRTEEN PARTS by Colson Whitehead Doubleday, 2003 xii + 158 pp $19.95...
...Yet Whitehead remembers better that a place is not entirely congruent with one's own experience in it or with one's memories of it...
...That was the first year, in other words, when that sense of the future and its possibilities that had marked the state from its birth gave way to the facts of incarceration, of being at the end of things...
...There is a certain idealization here, no doubt, about such workers, but it helps to explain Didion's underlying claim that what went wrong in Southern California was not simply the loss of very well-paying jobs...
...The difference between her early journalism with its wonder at the origins of California and the current book with its disillusionment can be dated accurately enough to 1995...
...THERE IS PERHAPS too much Of that sense of being at the end of things in Where I Was From...
...they were also guilds of skilled craftspeople that were "the last of the medieval hand workers...
...She writes, "There is no real way to deal with everything we lose...
...Sometimes all that sustains each book is its author's voice...
...And that sense of distance from the realities of lived experience is, in Didion's portrayal, part of the world she knew as a child: "so hermetic, so isolated by geography and by history and also by inclination...
...90 n DISSENT / Spring 2004...
...Do not doubt you inspire with every breath, that every breath is a marvel of engineering...
...Whitehead seems at times to be channeling Walt 86 n DISSENT / Spring 2004 Whitman as he catalogues the city...
...BELIEVE IN THEM or laugh at them, there is something undeniably big about California's myths: they come from and were meant to match an outsized state...
...To be a New Yorker then is to register the impermanence of the city within your own experience: all that is certain is that it will change and thus you cannot remain fixed in a past or passing vision of the place...
...Dislocation is hard on the heart, but it is also clear that Didion has never been far from California in her mind: "Yet California has remained in some way impenetrable to me, a wearying enigma, as it has to many of us who are from there...
...Didion pursues this sense of a lost Eden in some of the best sections of the book: her report of high-school violence and the Spur Posse in the suburban town of Lakewood...
...Whitehead mimics many of them, sometimes more as virtuoso performance than anything else...
...The topography of the street registers his psyche: "Pavement that remembers a night best forgotten...
...Didion summons a tone of faded elegance to write about the world she has lost...
...The necessary qualification to make from the start, though, is that both Didion and Whitehead are ambivalent about these myths of place...
...Reading Whitehead means enjoying the quick take, the telling phrase, the wisecrack that reveals his love of New York City...
...Potholes that remind you of sunken places in your spirit...
...We make declamatory breaks with it, as Josiah Royce did when he left Berkeley for Harvard...
...One need not be a wide-eyed optimist to note that her account of early twenty-first-century California would be very different if it for a moment noticed the new communities of Asian immigrants who are making lives for themselves without the myths Didion inherited from her ancestors...
...When, as here, the places in question have defined this country for at least several generations, then that conversation matters...
...A few of his sentences will make the point: "Shop in stores for things, shop on streets for people...
...The topic of this conversation, to be blunter and less evocative than either Didion or Whitehead would be, is how the politics of a place get shaped by the myths of its people...
...Didion destroys any nostalgia a reader might have for the California where she was from, even the nostalgia of those who know the place only through her writing...
...As a teenager, she heard the word BOOKS "class" and wondered what it meant for her family...
...Didion evokes her mythic childhood paradise of old California only to renounce it...
...Didion's burden of betrayal and loss would become tedious, and Whitehead's exuberance would seem unearned, if either were a less gifted writer...
...Those two final adjectives make clear that all of Whitehead's observations are bound together in a sense of the place: "terrible and generous" seem to me as precisely earned as anything ever said about New York...
...NICHOLAS HowE teaches in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley...
...There is, however, a point to all of these individual observations: "No more strolling, he must stop, because Broadway only gives this once a year, and grudgingly...
...The Terminator won because he embodied, complete with his immigrant story, the founding myth of the place as packaged by the Hollywood dream factory...
...Sometimes, places can survive their own stories...
...WHERE I WAS FROM by Joan Didion Alfred A. Knopf, 2003 vii + 226 pp $23 cloth THE COLOSSUS OF NEW YORK: A CITY IN THIRTEEN PARTS by Colson Whitehead Doubleday, 2003 xii + 158 pp $19.95 cloth 1 T WOULD BE HARD to imagine two more different and yet more oddly complementary books about native places than Where I Was From and The Colossus of New York: the first by an esteemed veteran—rural Californian by birth, white, female, a stylist of elegiac precision—and the other by a muchheralded newcomer—an urban New Yorker by birth, black, male, a virtuoso of celebratory riffs...
...Didion remembers a California settled by those who trekked across the Sierra Nevada in the 1840s for gold...
...Each keeps some distance from the place, but neither can stop writing about it...
...At times, one senses that Whitehead could go on for pages with yet more of his fast impressions, his relentless walking commentary...
...The Colossus of New York is skeptical celebration, moving through New York in thirteen parts as Whitehead catches the voices of the city in all of their variations and registers...
...DIDION, BY CONTRAST, writes Where I Was From with disillusion, if not heartbreak...
...it is the home of endless possibility, the state where you could be poor for the moment but were never condemned to a life of poverty, a place that then grew fat and corrupt on rugged American individualism...
...As govBOOKS ernment spending was slashed in the 1990s, and the dot.com boom went bust, California fell victim to its own myths...
...believe in both in roughly equal measures over a lifetime and you will understand why New York is a colossus...
...Didion wrote her book before the recall of Davis as governor and the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger, but she predicts it in all but words...
...Terrible and generous...
...Do all of these quick sketches, these notations made on the move, add up to anything...
...The fact about New York that Whitehead loves is the city's ability to attract the young and the talented: a few make it, many just survive, and not a few head home...
...Keep looking, his prose seems to say, because if you spend too much time on what's just passed you'll miss the next character coming down Broadway...
...Where I Was From is a mournful threnody, measuring to the final cost the waste and destruction caused by the edenic myths of California that have defined it throughout its existence and that shaped Didion as a writer early in her career...
...Reading these sentences, one wonders if the past tense verb "was" in her title shouldn't be changed to the present tense because her own "declamatory break" with California seems unlikely ever to be complete...
...Two of the best sections of The Colossus of New York are accordingly "Subway" and "Broadway...
...If you don't like one of its sections, he seems to say, move on to the next one and don't worry about narrative continuity or interpretive consistency...
...The sentiment is true enough about parents, friends, childhood memories of place, but it can also blind one to all that is gained by others in the course of one's own loss...
...A parent dies and we lose the place where we were raised, whether we have moved away from it or not...
...When these plants closed, there was one less reason to migrate to California and one less reason to say that one was from California...
...What Whitehead sees are people, and this also links him with Whitman, the encyclopedist of urban character types...
...This note of daughterly regret is muted throughout Didion's book or, perhaps more accurately, is sounded more objectively through a series of journalistic reports on what went wrong with the California dream, especially the boom economy of aerospace and defense Los Angeles...
...This tour through the city has nothing to do with famous buildings, tourist attractions, souvenir shops...
...Whitehead is far too cool, far too downtown, to have any interest in "I Love New York" Tshirts, Frank Sinatra singing "New York, New York" or grandiose, self-congratulatory memorial designs for Ground Zero...
...There are no edenic myths of New York or, more likely, those that surface are not to be trusted: "Never listen to what people tell you about old New York, because if you didn't witness it, it is not a part of your New York and might as well be Jersey...
...Didion has the novelist's feel for the right anecdote or memory to characterize the world she was from...
...Transportation matters in this version of New York because it is a city of mobility...
...Those who arrive by bus at the Port Authority, those who ride the subways, those who walk the great streets, all of them are also searching for the American dream of the city as a place of change where no one need be fixed for life by the facts of his or her birth...
...These two sentences speak of a worldview that belongs to those who need not think about class because they do not feel its injuries, hidden or otherwise...
...As has Didion herself...
...We worry it, correct and revise it, try and fail to define our relationship to it and its relationship to the rest of the country...
...For Whitehead, you become a New Yorker regardless of your origin the first time you remember from your own experience that whatever is in place now was something else before: "No matter how long you have been here, you are a New Yorker the first time you say, That used to be Munsey's, or That used to be the Tic Toc Lounge...
...If Whitehead's walking through the city seems simple restlessness, continual motion in search of something else to see or do, it can also be read as a commentary on the idea of 88 n DISSENT / Spring 2004 mobility...
...Whitehead's myths about New York are less brash, more modest, and better calculated to help one survive the city...
...In this contrapuntally organized book, more a series of sketches resting uneasily against each other than a worked-out argument, Didion mixes personal memoir, family history, political analysis, and solid journalism to see through this same myth: "This extreme reliance of California on federal money, so seemingly at odds with the emphasis on unfettered individualism that constitutes the local core belief, was a pattern set early on, and derived in part from the very individualism it would seem to belie...
...To be from somewhere means that one can still be hurt by the place...
...It is partly, as she acknowledges, the heartbreak of becoming an orphan after her mother's death in the 1990s, of feeling that the last sustaining tie she had with the place had been cut by death...
...The sadness of Where I Was From, then, is not entirely the writer's dismay at a state betrayed by its own "core belief...
...Whitehead never quite puts the matter as I do here, but his egalitarian embrace of everyone walking down Broadway seems deeply hopeful at a time of power-broker mayors like Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg...
...There is finally something too distanced, too renuniciatory about Didion's book: rejecting where you are from means having to say where DISSENT / Spring 2004 n 89 BOOKS you are now, and that never happens here...
...Each is a quick take on the passing population, kept sharp and never made banal by too much explanation or development...
...Beneath all of the urban cool, the skeptical eye searches the streets most eagerly for reasons to fall in love with the city again...
...Which means everything is still filthy, because that is my city and I'm sticking to it...
...Didion knows that better than does Whitehead, at least at the level of personal experience...
...There is something larger about a New York City or a California than there can be in any one writer's version of it...
...Their titles are true to their books...
...there is no past to the place, and everyone makes the city over in the image he or she wants...
...The value of personal, idiosyncratic books about places—like The Colossus of New York and Where I Was From—is not in offering an objective, synthesizing portrait of somewhere but rather in illuminating how myths or core beliefs or stories matter to the politics and history of the place...
...Paradoxically, as she shows, all of these stories about the place were underwritten first by vast government subsidies for railroads and agricultural water-projects and then by contracts to the defense and aerospace industries...
...Her mother answered her question by saying, "It's not a word we use...
...It's the early seventies, so everything is filthy...
...In Where I Was From, Didion plotted the script for his victory...
...People on cell DISSENT / Spring 2004 n 87 BOOKS phones realize they were cut off blocks ago and wonder if they have the courage to repeat their words...
...His account of the subway sometimes verges on the literary, as in its too knowing allusions to Dante, but perhaps that is Whitehead's counterweight to the grimness of the subway he remembers from his childhood: "My first city memory is of looking out a subway window as the train erupted from the tunnel on the way to 125th Street and palsied up onto the elevated tracks...
...There is nothing of the official guidebook to The Colossus of New York, and it is all the better for that kind of personal edge...
...But more often, he gets the voices right, as here in a passage where the toughguy opening gives way to a Whitmanesque tenderness that wins the reader's heart: "Listen up because I'm only going to say this once: We need all our monuments, no matter what size, carved stone or mortal clay...
...Broadway is generous and knows that if it did not dollop out, it would be dried up...
...It's not the way we think...
...The disillusionment with the place that drives the book is as extreme as the enchantment the place had for her when she was younger...
...But for all of them, it becomes the defining experience of their lives...
...Part of what it means to be a colossus is that there be a range of styles and voices to the place...
...Movement defines Whitehead's New York, the constant searching for the new club in an undiscovered area, the wandering across neighborhoods, the coming from elsewhere, the return to elsewhere...
...Here we see the same skill in shaping a piece of reportage that made Didion famous with The White Album...
...The heart of the book is "Broadway," just as that street is a main arterial of the city...
...her portrait of the strip-mall suburbanization of formerly agricultural regions around Fresno...
...He does not offer a mindless celebration, a chamber of commerce press release, but instead a catalogue of the treasures he has found by moving through the city...
...That was the first year in its history that California spent more on its prisons, she tells us, than on its universities...
...These occasional gifts cost nothing...
...Didion had finally seen through the myth of the place...
...That's why The Colossus of New York opens with a section on the major bus terminal, "The Port Authority," and ends with one on the major airport, "JFK...
...Believe in one at the expense of ignoring the other, and you will be doomed in the city...
...It hardly surprises the reader, then, that Didion should report her mother's observation to her as they drove from Monterey to Berkeley in 1992: "California had become, she said then, 'all San Jose.' " To which one can only add, the late Mrs...
...She looks like someone who has seen more than she can bear and who now wants to be from nowhere...
...He might have called his book Where I Move Through, though he is not the pretentious flaneur celebrated in so much recent po-mo writing...
...His most recent book is Across an Inland Sea: Writing in Place from Buffalo to Berlin...
...and her very angry account of the power exercised in the state legislature by the California Correctional Peace Officers Association...
...It also meant the end of a way of life in which aerospace workers were not assemblyline robots but individual artisans who belonged to a community...
...It is also the heartbreak of the native Californian who even as an eighthgrader dreamed of leaving the Sacramento Valley so she could attend Bennington College and then have a life in the New York theater...
...For Didion, these industries were not simply economic engines...
...there is also a sense of regret that she took it in as part of her own birthright...
...And it is also the heartbreak of the writer who spent much of her young adult life in New York, then moved west to Los Angeles, and finally returned to settle permanently (it would seem) in New York...
...And to a huge budget deficit that Californians did not want solved by an unheroic bean-counter like Grey Davis...
...But they are powerfully democratic in suggesting that the city is above all else the place that can erase racial, social, and economic distinctions...
...Whitehead's politics are never explicitly ideological and they rarely register the daily facts of elections and governments...
...Is The Colossus of New York just a series of clever lines without a narrative or a larger vision of the city...
...Not famous, merely famous-looking, but he really works it...
...For all of these differences—and there are certainly more than I have suggested in this quick sketch—there is also an implicit conversation going on between Where I Was From and The Colossus of New York...
...In her jacket photo, Didion stands indoors and looks at the camera from behind big sunglasses...
...Whitehead writes of his walk along Broadway as an annual pilgrimage, a kind of pedestrian reconnection with the soul of New York...
...Whitehead alludes to the legendary statue bestriding the harbor at Rhodes in the Mediterranean so that he can depict New York City as a wonder of the modern world...
Vol. 51 • April 2004 • No. 2
