This book is okay, some pieces more than that, some less, but I certainly didn’t encounter the shimmering revelation it’s reputed to be. In a couple places it bordered on approaching its reputation. But only a couple. And by the end (of a short book) I was tired of her somewhat affected style and her grasping for something to write about, rather than writing because she really had something of value to say that really merited being communicated to others. As opposed, for example, to Leo Strauss in his The City and Man. (I read the two books at the same time so I can’t help comparing them, as odd as that might be.)

I guess this is what journalists do, but a good journalist isn’t a Montaigne just because she’s considerably better than the low average. Yes, it’s rather interesting that she was in but not of the 60s generation, and that her critique could be labeled “conservative” while no one adopting that label would ever adopt her. Moderately interesting, like her writing and her insights. Nothing more.
( )

I am honestly shocked by the rhapsodizing I've heard concerning her over the years. But I guess I shouldn't be. This smug sophisticate is precisely placed to give the establishment what it wants. It's very sly the way Didion guilelessly slouches through each scene, pulling out rugs, trying to spotlight ironies. She's the high-society poet of ennui, the vanquisher of unstylish rebels.

Viewed through the lens of her privileged bubble, challengers of the establishment, those rabble-rousing political types, are simple grotesques, naive child harbingers of chaos. This is because the ravages of inequality, injustice, state violence are faraway abstractions for her, unpleasantries to ruin a cocktail party (where she might show up just to look waifish, hide and judge people). Her heroes are figureheads of the capitalist fantasy machine like swaggering John "The Duke" Wayne and mega-rich playboy Hughes.

I finally had to stop after her nauseating ode to those 'self-loving' pioneers of the American frontier. You know the ones who swarmed the continent like locusts so we can have shopping malls instead of forests. Genocide can be wholesome fun as long as the victims are brown. Whoop-dee-doo for self-love. Her only previous mention of anyone of color is her painfully awkward and derisive depiction of a few faceless "negroes" in a crowd.

Does Didion deliver an insight or clever bon mot here or there? Hell, she spends every moment of her (stilted/shoe-gazing/chain-smoking/coke-swilling) life racing to jot down her every thought. She's bound to kick over a shiny pebble or two. But always she holds herself at a safe distance from life, never fathoming it in its essence. ( )

New England is infinitely better than California, always has been always will be ( )

The first essays are great, but the last ones only so-so. ( )

I've awarded five stars to Joan Didion's remarkable Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays, a very rare rating from me for any work of nonfiction. I probably can't add anything to the acreage of praise her work has garnered through the years, latecomer that I am to this author's work. So instead I'll try to say how it makes me feel.

One thing I love about good writing in any genre is that I feel as though I were trying on somebody else's head. The view from Didion's head has crisp, bright edges and an underside of unsparing vulnerability. She has a way of turning--turning not magically but gyroscopically--keen observation into still meditation. I feel that I'm experiencing a crystalline vision of whatever she sees, in all its rounded and jagged reality, and also the echo of pain in the tender being of the observer.

And yet she never fully exposes her mind and its secrets. Instead she steers us toward our own, bringing clarity as well as deeper questions.

In this volume, images of the 1960s in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere are served with a quality of moving air that makes me feel that I am breathing in these scenes as the author experiences them. In the title essay in particular, the poignancy of her depiction of the Haight in the summer of 1967 is almost too vivid for my sensory imagination. I wasn't there. I was in Boston that summer, Boston's own summer of love. A summer that bridged the nation.

I've already read and drunk in The Year of Magical Thinking, which helped me greatly in my first months of widowhood. I'll be seeking out the rest of her work. ( )