Family Dramas
MATHEWSON, RUTH
FAMILY DRAMAS BY RUTH MATHEWSON some novels suffer not from neglect, but from the wrong kind of attention. They are discussed too quickly for their bearing on contemporary issues, read too hastily...
...One hopes that this superior namer will continue to identify real fears and earned guilts...
...In Didion's treatment of what she has in an interview termed "flash politics" here and in Central America, a weapon is not simply a gun, it is an M-3, an M-6 or a Kalashnikov...
...She is slowly dying of pancreatic cancer...
...that she returned, after 14 years, to travel with Warren on a hard, bitter, journey through the South...
...But similarities between the two women are suggested—by shifts of tone, sudden doubts, a change in the rhythm of Charlotte's voice...
...Student revolutionaries hijack a PSA L-1011, not just a plane...
...and dead two weeks later, in her mother's arms in a parking lot in Yucatan...
...she imagined herself capable of shedding that baggage and came to Boca Grande...
...A 40-year-old Californian, Charlotte makes few distinctions, is inattentive to details, and is "immaculate of history, innocent of politics" (although her present husband, Leonard, is a famous radical lawyer who is mysteriously involved in the international gun trade...
...One of the many advances of A Book of Common Prayer over Didion's early notion is in the subtle use of precision of language to establish (and limit) the authority of an intelligent, skeptical, non-obsessional narrator...
...Yet the idea of lost children as "sexual punishment" is a false note that flawed Play It as It Lays as well...
...Still, in A Book of Common Prayer she shows that she knows the difference between anxiety and emotion...
...We would initially dismiss her as just another Graham Greene tourist were it not for the rather cryptic introduction Grace gives us: "She left one man, she left a second man, she traveled again with the first, she let him die alone...
...he persists in tracing his line back to the court of Castile...
...in the bar of the Mountain Brook Country Club in Birmingham, Alabama...
...The last element in Grace's introduction, Charlotte's death, occurred during a revolution that lasted four days longer than expected, because she refused to leave and did not understand that her presence could be interpreted as "political...
...that knowing he was dying, she nevertheless left him "at ten past 11 p.m...
...When they go into hiding, someone wants to find them through "sensitive programming of a Honeywell 782 solid-state computer...
...born—premature and hydrocephalic—soon after Charlotte left Warren in the Birmingham Country Club...
...A brain-damaged child is not an objective correlative for social disintegration, or even for the Decline of the West...
...We may accept Charlotte as tropismatic—biologically driven—because she is real in these pages...
...It lends a special poignance to the sad and grotesque absences of ceremony we see in Charlotte's strange and sordid understanding with Warren...
...Marin's voice was later heard on a tape explaining, "The fact that our organization is revolutionary in character is due above all to the fact that all our activity is defined as revolutionary" The child lost to "complications" is Charlotte and Leonard's baby: conceived, as Leonard knew, in the vain hope that Charlotte would not feel compelled to return to Warren following Marin's disappearance...
...Her private papers, turned over to Grace, show that she dreamed only of "sexual surrender and infant death, commonplaces of the female obsessional life...
...She died, hopeful...
...Charlotte Douglas, silly as she indubitably was, lived more intensely than anyone would have guessed...
...Once a highly regarded anthropologist, a student of Kroeber and an associate of Levi-Strauss, she has lost faith in her method and turned to the amateur study of biochemistry...
...Charlotte had come finally to Boca Grande hoping that someday Marin would pass through this "cervix of the world" and they would be reunited...
...As the novel develops, we become increasingly aware of possibilities that lie outside her "empiricism...
...She used to like him, "but not too much any more...
...The all-night Mexican movies Charlotte visits are "tales of betrayal and stolen babies and other sexual punishments...
...At the same time, "naming" intensified the terror in some of her reportage...
...Charlotte shares this burden, and the North American scenes are family dramas of their kind...
...To think about family dramas is to find new implications in the book's title, taken of course from the liturgy composed by Bishop Cramner for the Church of England in 1552...
...True, it deliberately risks consignment to the category of the merely topical through its extraordinary specificity...
...In the brilliant journalism collected in Slouching Towards Bethlehem it seemed to enable her to control her sense that "the world as I had understood it no longer exists...
...Such careful identification has served a number of purposes for Didion during her career...
...This means, we eventually learn, that Charlotte abandoned her first husband, Warren Bogart, a drunken and violent instructor of English who scrounged on the fringes of academe, to marry Leonard...
...At 18, together with four friends, Marin detonated a crude pipe bomb in the Transamerica Building, hijacked a plane from San Francisco Airport, and landed it in Utah?where they burned it in time for the story to interrupt the network news and disappeared...
...There are few religious references in this "profane" novel: only Charlotte's visit to a San Francisco church, where she thinks of a yellow light Marin had liked there as a child, and the report that just before Charlotte died she cried "not for God, but for Marin...
...and her snobbish, cynical son—Didion has created not merely another family, but an image of one of the real oligarchic Central American clans: the Somozas in Nicaragua, the "Big 14" in El Salvador, the Rabiblancos in Panama...
...Leonard's recognition that in leaving him, Charlotte was "abandoning a temporary rental...
...the burial of the infant in Yucatan...
...Grace seems very unlike her "subject," Charlotte Douglas...
...their idle wives...
...The New York Times, for example, has recommended it is a "novel that searches the wreckage of the 1960s...
...Swamps off airport runways "are littered with the fuselages of cannibalized Fairchild F-227's...
...The child lost to history is Marin, her daughter by Warren...
...It is that, but it is also much more: a witty and oddly moving work that requires a slow reading, a kind of "shaking down" to be appreciated...
...In Didion's Hollywood novel, Play It as It Lays, details become compulsive: the heroine's precarious—and unsuccessful—defense against breakdown...
...D idion has written in an essay that her own generation, bom in the '30s, was "the last to bear the burdens of home, to find in family life the source of all tension and drama...
...It is not, as they say, because she "writes too well," but because they are defending themselves against this Rosemary's Baby dread she sometimes generates...
...her murderous brothers-in-law, jockeying for the ministry of defense...
...Grace says she never before encountered such an "unexamined" life...
...She lost one child to 'history' and another to 'complications...
...She dreamed her life...
...This is the case, I think, with Joan Didion's A Book of Common Prayer (Simon & Schuster, 272 pp., $8.95), a book whose generally favorable yet somewhat confused reception may unfairly doom it to the status of period piece...
...Grace was orphaned at 10, and lived alone in her parents' Denver hotel suite until she was 16...
...It may be novelistically right for Charlotte's second baby to die, but why make her hydrocephalic...
...Warren's solitary death in New Orleans...
...When, for instance, members of the San Bernardino Central Homicide Division turned up October 7, 1964, at 8488 Bella Vista to arrest Lucille Miller for the murder of her husband the previous night, a babysitter, trying to dress her, "got some Capris on her, you know, and a scarf...
...The section of the eloquent old prayer book the author probably had in mind is that devoted to various family rituals—matrimony, baptism, the "churching" or Thanksgiving of women after childbirth, the order for the burial of a child...
...Grandson of two American wildcatters...
...They are discussed too quickly for their bearing on contemporary issues, read too hastily as investigations of the modern condition...
...This "witness," as she calls herself, is Grace Strasser-Mendana, a norteamericana of 60, widow of a wealthy coconut planter in the Central American republic of "Boca Grande...
...on cleared ground and away from any brush where it might coil unnoticed...
...This is the True Confessions-style exploitation of lost or disfigured children...
...There is, however, a quite different set of connotations that tends to chill it, one that might be called not religious, but superstitious...
...Associations of these and other episodes with rituals that recognize suffering seem to me to enrich and "warm" the novel...
...she learned early "to keep death . . . under surveillance...
...I think I understand why some readers find Didion's work unfeeling...
...In the Boca Grande cast—Grace herself...
...A more obvious parallel is that Grace also has "lost" a child, although she sees her son, Girardo, "all too often...
Vol. 60 • May 1977 • No. 10
