Books: American Death Trips

• Share

THE WHITE ALBUM by Joan Didion; Simon & Schuster; 223 pages; $9.95

She stands there in her dust-jacket photograph, a tiny woman of 95 Ibs., with the figure of a spare 14-year-old. She stares out with the enormous, haunted eyes of a Keane waif, of a wounded bird, menaced and fragile. Readers who have grown over the years to admire the superb moody intelligence of Joan Didion's prose have first had to learn that this alarming vulnerability is an affectation and a part of her strategy as a writer. Despite all the fits of weeping and the killer migraines and the California dreads that blow across her novels and essays like the Santa Ana winds, Didion is on the whole as tough as a bounty hunter, and about as fragile as a brick of molybdenum. The wounded bird is even something of a predator.

Didion's novels (Play It As It Lays, A Book of Common Prayer) are less interesting than her collections of magazine pieces; paradoxically, the novels do not exert the dramatic force of her journalistic essays. Didion is best when the literary transaction is personal and direct, when she is a live character reporting her own wanderings through the splendidly strange California of the late '60s and the '70s, a California that elaborately belongs to her because it is in part her own invention, like the persona that describes it.

There are moments when Didion overdoes her performance of journalism-as-nervous-breakdown. "I was in fact as sick as I have ever been when I was writing 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem,' " she wrote about the title piece of her brilliant 1968 collection. "The pain kept me awake at night and so for twenty and twenty-one hours a day I drank gin-and-hot-water to blunt the pain and took Dexedrine to blunt the gin and wrote the piece." Her new collection of magazine articles, The White Album, contains a disagreeably calculated column she wrote for LIFE in 1969. "I had better tell you where I am, and why," Didion begins. Uh oh. The student of Didion is not surprised to learn that she is sitting with her husband in a room in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu (a favorite stage setting), waiting for a tidal wave (which somehow acquires added metaphysical meaning from the fact that it never shows up) and trying to avoid the subject of whether to get a divorce.