Read this for the superbly nasty Warren Bogart, a villain righteous in his contempt, critically intricate in his abuse, and for that worthy of the narrator's single sympathetic glance his way. Charlotte Douglas, his ex-wife, is the kind of female character Didion is known for: numb, baffled, drifting in and out. I don't find characters like Charlotte very interesting, but Didion does milk a kind of poetry from their stunting and disappointment, their air of unfulfillment; and Didion's portraits

Didion is one of those rare authors that pens hypnotic sentences that weave into paragraphs that make you struggle to recall where you are and why there's drool on your chin. It doesn't matter if she's writing about a fictional banana republic or a non-fictional bout of depression from having outlived her husband and daughter, JD writes sentences that I want to climb into like a warm bed. Ones like this: As a child of the western United States she had been provided as well with faith in the va...

Maybe there is no motive role in this narrative.Maybe it is just something that happened.Then why is it in my mind when nothing else is.IN SUMMARY the above quote explains the entire novel. Of course “novel” is a loaded word when it comes to Didion; her journalistic essays and her fiction-prose always blur, which makes for awesome journalism and perplexing prose. I am perplexed as to why this novel exists. When I was finished with it – and I was glad that I was; too much time spent in such a sti...

Like Play It As It Lays, this is a supremely disillusioned novel -- in people, in politics -- but the theater across which it plays out is sprawling and unique, from the pitch black personal-destructive recesses of the deep south to the revolutionary conflagrations of a small South American dictatorship. Ostensibly the story is Charlotte's, a complexly-shaded women adrift in her life until she washes up in Boca Grande, but equally fascinating, and obsessively observed, is our narrator, Grace, an...

If _Play It as It Lays_ was Didion doing Chandler, this is her version of a Graham Greene novel, whereby a sophisticated viewer in a small former colony (in this case the Latin American Boca Grande) learns that the naivete of a stranger is the proper way to encounter the world.Here, the sophisticate is the American-born wife of a former dictator of Boca Grande, and the innocent abroad is Charlotte, mother of a girl gone radical terrorist in the sixties, who has washed up in Boca Grande for, well...

This starts out feeling like one of those Deborah Eisenberg stories set in a made-up Central American country, but pretty soon you orient yourself and realize you're in deliciously dated late-1970s Didionland. This entails being surrounded by characters who think, speak, and behave only like Joan Didion characters and not remotely like anyone in actual life, and reading gorgeously crafted and sometimes embarrassingly dramatic sentences. The novel is narrated by steely, Didionesque observer Grace...

As I had recently read The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion, I decided I' wanted to read some of Joan Didion's novels. This is the first one I read.It's mainly set somewhere in Central America, about an American woman who is living there, for reasons which are never really fully explained, and narrated by another woman who owns almost the whole place.It's really kind of a strange novel, without much in the way of a discernible plot, and the dialogue is really weird, with most of it not...

Several times during Joan Didion's Book of Common Prayer, one character will tell another that they "were wrong." In what almost seems irrelevant. Causes, love, politics, are all compromised. Wrongness is an empty term hardly worth the air it takes to utter the word. Nearly everyone is on the make. Lawyers can champion radical movements one day, hobnob with the beautiful people that night, and fly to Miami the next in order to seal a deal for Mirage jets. Air head college students join revolutio...

I can't remember the last time I was as grateful for a book to finally end. I think the author gave us a hint on page 164: "Maybe there is no motive role in this narrative." I really, really didn't enjoy the assumptive characters or their privileged drama. I wouldn't spend ten minutes in the company of anyone in this book in real life, so I'm not sure why I did spend so much time reading about them.

The way I see it, Joan Didion's career breaks into three big phases. In the '60s and '70s, she made her name as the chronicler of how the dominant culture and counterculture clashed and coexisted - you get this from her famous collections Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album (my favorite of hers), as well as her only novel to slip into the canon, Play It as It Lays. Then the global tumult of the '80s hit, with the Shah and the unholy right-wing alliance of Ronald "Satan" Reagan and Ma...

Wonderful book. Didion is a genius. It's interesting to read something that was written so long ago, it seems another lifetime--and yet I was alive when it was written. The times were a-changing and the world that they lived in was so very different from what it became by the time I was an adult.At some point, I was struck by some similarities between this book and another book that I really loved, Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett. Neither is a real, named place (although Bel Canto seems to be based o...

I’ve read a lot of Joan Didion in my life, but sometime in November after seeing her nephew’s documentary about her, “The Center Will Not Hold,” I decided to read her again from start to finish. I like how she writes and I think she’s an enigma. I mean, do these stories have a touch of autobiographical? I’m dying to know. The Joan Didion Project is essays, novels, rewatching the movies she co-wrote with her late-husband. So far what I’ve learned is that “Play it as it Lays” is a better book than...

In some ways, similar to American Pastoral by Roth. Both with psychologically tormented protagonists, both with demented terrorist daughters. The drawback to A Book of Common Prayer is that Joan Didion's characters and narrator are lofty and bourgeoisie, but are also cold and hard to identify with. Charlotte Douglas is not as tormented nor driven as The Swede, and Marin never develops into a character with any substance, let alone the brilliance, like Merry's.Maybe I am daft, but I did not feel

I just, didn't get it. Yes, it's a eulogy and there's a lot going on and Charlotte was kind of a crack pot of a person and her life was a reflection of that, but, I just, didn't get it.I was excited to read Didion's acclaimed fiction after having been passed an essay she wrote that I found particularly vivid. However, I was disappointed in her storytelling, which, honestly is likely only personal preference.The past few novels I've read have been epic-realistic-tales. I got frustrated reading Ke...

The first time I read this, the Latin American scenes stayed with me, but this time I was knocked out by the travelogue section set in the Deep South, which weirdly kept evoking moments from the banned Rolling Stones tourfilm 'Cocksucker Blues.' Then there's the great New Orleans dinner party scene, which is as vivid as anything in 'The Moviegoer.' There's so many loaded cultural details packed into the prose and the story accumulates in such odd spasms that this isn't nearly as immediate as 'De...

This was originally published on The Scrying Orb.Joan Didion is one of my favorite authors and working through her fiction, I can basically bullet-point what a book will contain: - A detached heroine, probably in her thirties. A woman becoming unhinged. - Cruel men in positions of power over the heroine, who have jobs that give them financial and social clout that allow them to be 100% assholes without much consequence (lawyers, producers, etc). The men may be just as detached as the women, but

A skillfully written but oddly unlikeable book detailing the crossed paths of a cold, analytical narrator and the star of the show, Charlotte Douglas. Charlotte is puppet and heroine, burned out trophy wife and battered survivor, ignorant of history and literature, but constantly reading. She drifts in and out of stores, in and out of beds, and in and out of reality. I will probably add a star or two as I realize that I am continuing to think about the book long after finishing it, but I did not...