In a Time of Posturing, Didion Dared 'Slouching'

"They feed back exactly what is given them. Because they do not believe in words -- words are for 'typeheads,' [one guru] tells them, and a thought which needs words is just one more of those ego trips -- their only proficient vocabulary is in [their] platitudes. As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from 'a broken home.' They are sixteen, fifteen, fourteen years old, younger all the time, an army of children waiting to be given the words."

The ability to dissect the naive and self-indulgent without merely mocking them is rarer than one might think, but it's characteristic of Didion's work. Over and over again, she declines to take the easy way out or to accommodate received opinion. It was fashionable at the time in certain circles to mock John Wayne for any number of reasons, but Didion was honest enough to admit that "when John Wayne rode through my childhood, and perhaps through yours, he determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams," and her portrait of him is, as she subtitles it, "A Love Song." In one sentence, she hits just about all the right notes about Las Vegas, "the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification, a place the tone of which is set by mobsters and call girls and ladies' room attendants with amyl nitrite poppers in their uniform pockets." California? ". . . time past is not believed to have any bearing on time present or future, out in the golden land where every day the world is born anew." And:

"California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent."

Didion has had a lifelong love-hate affair with her native state, as most recently demonstrated by "Where I Was From," a superb essay collection published in 2003, but there can be no question that she understands California as keenly as anyone ever has. This can be said of only a few other writers -- Nathanael West and Raymond Chandler come immediately to mind, along with Robert Towne, author of the screenplay for that masterful movie, "Chinatown" -- which is, when one considers the place California has in U.S. history and mythology, no small distinction in and of itself. What "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" tells us, though, is that California was only the beginning for Didion. Then as now she had her eyes on the nation itself, and few people, then or now, have seen it so clearly.

"Slouching Towards Bethlehem" is available in a Farrar, Straus & Giroux paperback ($14).

Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address isyardleyj@washpost.com.