LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS: Thomson on Didion

This was easily the best thing I read all week, and easily the best thing ever on Joan Didion (don't think the AJ "access" password works, though):

She has admitted coming of age in the time of male novels - 'big fish, Africa, Paris, no second acts' - and of feeling disconcerted at the scant space allowed for women. 'I dealt with it the same way I deal with everything. I just tended my own garden, didn't pay much attention, behaved - I suppose - deviously. I mean I didn't actually let too many people know what I was doing.' There's that obliqueness again, and some hint of the difficulties it may face whenever it opts to handle 'sincerity'. Didion does not like to be taken by such approaches. I think one reason so many people find Maria Wyeth anything from a slut to a zombie is her dedicated commitment not to fall into earnestness and candour. She does a back-talk act with herself to flatten out lofty moments and insights: 'What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.' Indeed not, but only on the innate and even elitist assumption that we ought to know what is evil and what is true. Maria's life is a mess but she does not suffer from inner muddle - she knows the inside stuff.

Here is something that goes back to the best in Hemingway. That while he sought a style as cold and clear and shriven as the river water coming down from the Pyrenees where you could see a trout and its loveliness as if it were the fish of fishes, and while he and Didion aspire to that fuss-free prose, still they remain stricken by feelings - the very object of their exercise. And they therefore developed writing as a code and a cult in which all the feeling was to be kept between the lines (in the white zone - or The White Album). Thus the serene spaciness in dialogue, and Didion's steadfast devotion to blankness. It is a tricky way to go. Shyness can seem like snobbery or aloofness, or even poker-faced intimidation. The constant struggle between courage and fear can make you daft. After all, snakes are not truly biblical serpents - not if you can't credit Jesus as the Son of God. For forty years her attempt has been the most absorbing modern reading I know. Where I Was From is one of her best and is like that fine trout - pristine and clear, yet flickering with movement and the uncertainty you can see in a snake's eye. It's never been caught yet. Let alone eaten...

--David Thomson in the current issue of the London Review of Books.