DIDION'S MAGICAL SALES

In his review of Joan Didion's memoir, "The Year of Magical Thinking," John Leonard writes: "I can't imagine dying without this book." Apparently tens of thousands of readers can't imagine living without it. The book is "flying off the shelves," The New York Times reports, and "some stores already have reported shortages" -- with no small help from The Times.

Is "Magical Thinking" what's called "a fun read"? Sure. Leonard offers the details:

[W]e watch her listen -- to the obscene susurrus of electrodes, syringes, catheter lines, breathing tubes, ultrasound, white cell counts, anticoagulants, ventricular fibbing, tracheostomies, Thallium scans, fixed pupils, and brain death, not to neglect such euphemisms as "leave the table," which means to survive surgery, and "subacute rehab facility," which means a nursing home. But she also consults texts by Shakespeare, Philippe Ariès, William Styron, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Sigmund Freud, W.H. Auden, E.E. Cummings, Melanie Klein, Walter Savage Landor, C.S. Lewis, Matthew Arnold, D.H. Lawrence, Delmore Schwartz, Dylan Thomas, Emily Post, and Euripides. And, simultaneously, she is watching and listening to herself.

As Leonard further explains, Didion has never let herself, or her readers, off easy:

She's an Episcopalian, not a von Trapp -- a declared agnostic about history, narrative, and reasons why, a devout disbeliever in social action, moral imperatives, abstract thought, American exemptions, and the primacy of personal conscience. Inside this agnosticism, in both novels and essays, there is a neurasthenic beating herself up about bad sexual conduct, nameless derelictions, and well-deserved punishments -- a human being who drinks bourbon to cure herself of "bad attitudes, unpleasant tempers, wrongthink"; who endures "the usual intimations of erratic cell multiplication, dust and dry wind, sexual dysaesthesia, sloth, flatulence, root canal"; who has discovered "that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it"; who has misplaced "whatever slight faith she ever had in the social contract, in the meliorative principle, in the whole grand pattern of human endeavor"; who still believes that "the heart of darkness lay not in some error of social organization but in man's own blood"; who got married instead of seeing a psychiatrist; who puts her head in a paper bag to keep from crying; who has not been the witness she wanted to be; whose nights are troubled by peacocks screaming in the olive trees -- an Alcestis back from the tunnel and half in love with death. You know me, or think you do.

Will the book be on Laura Bush's reading list? Sure. She'll be giving it away for Christmas, too.