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Political Fictions, by Joan Didion, New York: Knopf, 2001, 352 pages.
I could write about Joan Didion all night. Her novel, "Play It As It Lays," was, for me, the defining statement of the 1970s, and there was a time when I awaited each new book of hers like another man might await the opening of football season or spring itself.
Once, when I was fired from a job I didn't want anyway, I think it was 1980, and I couldn't think how to go home and tell my wife about it, I ducked into a little branch library on the east side of Cleveland to try to sort things out.
I found a copy of Didion's first novel, "Run River," which, at the time, was out of print and difficult to find.
I read it cover to cover that morning and, once I was done, my own problems didn't seem so bad and I cheerfully went home and told the missus I'd been sacked.
Didion was never what you'd call prolific and, after she married John Gregory Dunne, she wasted a lot of time working at such seemingly ridiculous projects as the screenplay for the Barbra Streisand-Kris Kristofferson remake of "A Star Is Born."
But she still churned out journalism, which -- if you're a "serious" writer -- they call essays, and her 1979 collection, "The White Album," was original and stylized to the point that it was successfully parodied in the National Lampoon.
She had a knack then for asking the tough questions: "What makes Iago evil?"
And also an eye for detail that makes good journalism great. In her 1967 essay, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," she wrote about San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury scene. One memorable passage saw a hippie-chick mother scolding her daughter for chewing on an electrical cord. "You'll fry like rice," the mother told the little girl.
Of course, that little girl is 35 years old now, if she made it.
Which goes to the heart of journalism's ephemeral nature. Didion's most recent book, "Political Fictions," is another case in point.
A collection of eight essays she wrote for the New York Review of Books between 1988 and 2000, "Political Fictions" attempts to explore the disconnect that exists between presidential politics and the lives of the vast majority of Americans who have little interest in it.
What a difference a year makes, or even a couple of months.
In the wake of an election many Democrats still believe was stolen, and a terrorist attack which caused the vast majority of those same Democrats to rally around the beneficiary of the alleged theft, the vagaries of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the candidacy of Bob Dole, and the folly of Al Gore distancing himself from one of the most popular presidents of the 20th Century now seem remote, hard to remember and, ultimately, small beer.
Didion writes as well as she ever has, but what she's writing about -- Iran-Contra, the religious right's suicidal vendetta against Bill Clinton, the obscene fund-raising practices of both parties and the fact that the "little guy" has absolutely no voice in the process -- seem now, in November, 2001, trite and far beneath her talents.
Much, in fact, like the screenplay for "A Star Is Born."
I'm reminded of Larry Holmes, the most underrated great heavyweight champion of the last 100 years. He fought everybody who was around, but the problem was there weren't a tremendous number of guys around who were worth fighting. People still talk about Dempsey, Louis, Marciano, Ali and even Tyson, but Holmes is mostly left out of the mix.
In "Political Fictions," Joan Didion has written about the period in question as well as anyone could have.
The book will likely be a best-seller, a success for both her and her publisher. Except for this one, all the reviews have been glowing.
But I heard last night that the Northern Alliance took Mazar-e-Sharif.
Who was Kenneth Starr, anyway?