Unearned Pessimism

...There is even a lovely stanza from Wallace Stevens, so totally unconnected with what follows she has to use as a transition, "Consider that...

...What arewe to make of a formulation like this: "Harry Victor's phantom constituency was based on comfort and its concomitant uneasiness...

...Forallher promptings, the only literary ancestry I can actually discern is a rather unseemly mating of Gertrude Stein and Raymond Chandler...

...Regis Hotel saying "Marvelous" to everyone, Inez checking out her dead sister's closet and finding 14 pink dresses, Inez alone at last with Lovett, holding his hand and talking about Saigon...

...But don't inquire too deeply into motives—it's just the same nasty concentration of unhealthy feelings that Didion understands so well...

...Didion does, however, catch him at windy, insincere speechifying: "Harry would be sitting around in his shirtsleeves expressing admiration ('Admiration, Christ no, what I feel when I see you guys is a kind of awe.') for the most socially responsible generation ever to hit American campuses...

...Inez functions as an alter ego for Didion...

...Reviewed by Isa Kapp The steady drizzle of bitter memories in this novel keeps directing the reader to "one night outside Honolulu in the spring of 1975 . . . when the C 130s and the C 141s were already shuttling between Honolulu and Anderson and Clark and Saigon...

...Play It /Is It Lays, Didion's second novel, was fraught with implications that American society is atomized and loveless...

...Through maddening previews and flashbacks of their ultimate brief union, Didion reiterates his manly words: " 'Oh shit, Inez,' Jack Lovett said to Inez Victor, 'Harry Victor's wife.' " Or, "Take her in out of the goddam rain...

...Primed for disabuse, Didion has swooped like a homing pigeon toward those places that confirm it...

...She is esthetically squeamish, speaks the sort of soppy hardboiled chic that makes one look around for Ava Gardner or Dick Powell, and is given to designating her life as null and void...

...Befriending the disoriented, pathetic hippies of Haight-Ashbury for a magazine article, she writes: "The center was not holding...

...I'm shocked by it," she confided to an interviewer...

...Apt as this kind of observation sounds in a Presidential election year, it goes not to the heart of American politics, but to the heart of what Didion does best, ferreting out ways of talking that we can all feel superior to...

...it might have been a spring of bright hopes and national promise, but it was not...

...It's not the first time we have been privy to Didion's vexations of the spirit, and we have by now grown accustomed to the tone of sad concern for our national well-being that insidiously infiltrates so much of her prose...

...It is about an American family, the Christians, who have prospered in business in Honolulu, and their glamorous-ly attired daughter Inez, unhappily married to a liberal senator...

...Orwell, Hemingway, Adams, Mailer—Didion is always putting herself into imaginary association with the greats...

...You jettison cargo...

...All that seemed clear was that at some point we had aborted ourselves and butchered the job...

...From this string of scornful images we can tell that the American system of government is going to have the ignominious fate of disappointing Joan Didion...

...Give her the weather, the numbers displayed on aircraft, snatches of conversation—the therapist treating Inez' daughter for drug addiction thoughtfully observes, "It might be useful to talk about your own life...

...By her own standard of language as the mark of political integrity, character and accomplishment, Didion must surely at this point be extremely worried about herself...

...Oh sure,' he said then,' It was kind of the place to be.' " If it takes a while to unravel Didion's purpose, we finally realize that Democracy is about her constructing a plot around newsworthy subjects...

...she also likes facts...

...The insinuation of ubiquitous corruption saturates Didion's Democracy—like a bottled salad dressing—yet the book is not about the substance of politics, or even its strategies, at all...

...Like Maria of Play It As It Lays, she has "been out there where nothing is...

...bringing out the dependents, bringing out the dealers, bringing out the money, bringing out the pet dogs and the sponsored bar girls and the porcelain elephants...

...Yet to many readers (and reviewers), eager for the kicks of dissent without its grubby chores, that posture passes for genuine political involvement and, worse still, political wisdom...

...Packed, as if it were a carry-on airplane bag, with divorce, drug addiction, abortion, a neurally handicapped child, vagrant sex, sadism, and mental breakdown, the book testified more clearly to ailments within than without...

...He is involved in an incredible number of intricate activities, provides air carriers, and shows up at crucial moments in strategic places...

...Eject the crew," she tells a baffled interviewer...

...Perhaps that is why her main characters are represented in space-saving code words and significant phrases ("water under the bridge," "en un mot bye-bye," "colors, moisture, heat, enough blue in the air...

...Why did this series of disasters recommend themselves to her imagination as a likely fictional plot...

...lacked faith even in my own technique...

...You loved it, didn't you...

...But when it comes to herself—she constantly pops up in the narrative— Didion pulls a real switch, resorting to full-length sentences, and earnestly briefing us on her state of mind, her favorite authors, her progress on her novel: "I began thinking about Inez Victor and Jack Lovett at a point in my life when I lacked certainty, lacked even that minimal level of ego which all writers recognize as essential to the writing of novels, lacked patience with the past and interest in memory...

...That kind of accusatory rhetoric is pretty much the extent to which she responds to any social predicament that distresses her...

...In life, lack of pretense appeals to her...

...Indeed, she first hoisted herself to public attention on the bootstraps of one of the world's best-known pessimistic poems, Yeats' "The Second Coming," explaining that she called her book of essays Slouching Toward Bethlehem because "The widening gyre, the falcon which does not hear the falconer, the gaze blank and pitiless as the sun: these have been my points of reference...

...For Democracy she shamelessly lifted the title of Henry Adams' still timely Washington novel...

...When a physicist questions his approach to an energy problem, his automatic answer is "You talk down to the American people at your peril...

...Such story as Democracy can boast centers on Inez' non-touch, 20-year romance with Jack Lovett, a Hemingwayan hero at home on airplanes, an expert reader of information on shipments of laser mirrors to unfriendly "actors" and on sudden changes in maps signifying wiped-out populations...

...A realist, he views countries as "assemblies of armaments on a large board...

...But give her a novel to write and she turns coy, smug, fashionable, imitative, distraught— a chameleon, and a great pretender...

...I don't think I have any acceptance of the evil of mankind...

...Although pessimism is no doubt an inalienable right, we sense that hers is not only borrowed but unearned...

...You drop fuel...

...Or, "no unequivocal lone figure on the crest of the immutable hill" ? (It was amusing to read in Mary McCarthy's review in the New York Times Book Review that she was tormented for weeks by the paragraph containing the latter...

...Adams was at least knowledgeable about social and political relations in the capital during Grant's Administration, and about the particular temptations a susceptible senator might fall prey to...

...She goes on to furnish a fond recollection of a course she gave at Berkeley "on the work of certain post-industrial writers...

...Eventually he participates in shady arms deals, but his image remains untarnished, by virtue of his laconic speech...

...We see Inez dancing on the roof of the St...

...We do not catch the senator, Harry Victor, in any real malfeasance...

...and she gets them just right...

...An irrepressible narcissist, she loves the first person...

...Didion starts hinting early on that a murder will take place, and in time, Paul Christian, father of Inez, goes haywire and shoots his daughter Janet and her lover, a congressman from Hawaii...

...She collects (and sells) ominous symptoms as if they were sea shells...

...You could call this a few mots de trop—or a premonition of reviews to come...

...Actually, there is no story—only spatters of disillusion and distaste...

...She becomes mournful over trifles, and has obviously persuaded herself that mourning becomes her...

...Family feelings are acrid, competitive and pitiless all around, and their language is generally vulgar, either intellectually or on some lower level...

...Didion's main writing success has been in pieces of first-person reportage...

...Though Didion apparently feels it would be indelicate to come out and say so, Lovett is a CIA agent...

...A curious mix of detachment and bathos, Democracy reads as if some loner had clipped out all the newspaper stories and fan magazine gossip about a film star, and then imagined the star to be a close friend...

...There's a tremendous focus on photos, interviews and clothing, with the author simultaneously disdaining voyeurism and lapping it up...

...In fact, apart from her two weeks in El Salvador (the basis for her previous nonfiction work, Salvador) and her interviews with sometime revolutionary celebrities like Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton, Joan Didion has few credentials as political journalist, and even fewer as moral critic...

...How you perceive it...