by John Leonard
As in any gratifying mystery, the answers to these questions are often, although not always, a surprise. It is not surprising, for instance, to find that zealots are still playing what the Israeli novelist David Grossman has called the game of “Blow Up the Dome of the Rock and Wait One Turn for the Arab World’s Reaction.” Nor is it surprising that, with Bina covering Landsman’s back, the red heifer has a harder time fooling anybody. But the red heifer didn’t kill Mendel, and neither did the usual suspects. You will have to keep on reading the delicious prose. Everything fits inside with a satisfying snap, like the hasp on a jewel box or the folding of a fan, and left in the air, like smoke, are ghosts and grace notes. As much as Chabon coaxes us to think about warriors and farmers, Hebrew and Yiddish, “Yids” and Tlingits, Israelis and Palestinians, or, for that matter, Boers, Zulus, Puritans, Iroquois, homelands, land grabs, checkpoints, transit camps, penal colonies, 9/11, and Iraq, he also fishes in the deepest waters. Landsman must eventually defend himself to the puppetmasters and gauleiters and petit-Guignol inquisitors. He is not in the least apologetic for having smudged their papyrus blueprints:
All at once he feels weary of ganefs and prophets, guns and sacrifices and the infinite gangster weight of God. He’s tired of hearing about the promised land and the inevitable bloodshed required for its redemption. “I don’t care what is written. I don’t care what supposedly got promised to some sandal-wearing idiot whose claim to fame is that he was ready to cut his own son’s throat for the sake of a hare-brained idea. I don’t care about red heifers and patriarchs and locusts. A bunch of old bones in the sand. My homeland is in my hat. It’s in my ex-wife’s tote bag.”
Here The Yiddish Policeman’s Union reminds me of the only other north-of-the-border Jewish novel in its major league, Mordecai Richler’s Solomon Gursky Was Here (1989). In Richler’s razzle-dazzle, where the Gurskys bore a startling resemblance to the Bronfmans from whom all Seagrams flows, we got 150 years of arctic sky, black ravens, caribou bones, Old Testament loonytunes, Levi-Strauss creation myths, Karl Marxist confabulations, and Gimpel the Fool on permafrost. Everything that wasn’t Oedipal would prove to be cannibalistic. And Solomon Gursky himself seems to have agreed with Landsman, in his last words in 1978—IN CAPITAL LETTERS, NO LESS!—to an increasingly dubious biographer: “THE WORLD CONTINUES TO PAY A PUNISHING TOLL FOR OUR JEWISH DREAMERS.”
And what are these Jewish dreamers waiting for, if not the Sermon on the Mount or the Communist Manifesto? They are waiting, we are told here, “for the time to be right, or the world to be right, or, some people say, for the time to be wrong and the world to be as wrong as it can be.” For whom are they waiting? The “despised and rejected of men”; “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief”; “A bum. A scholar. A junkie. Even a shammes.” Have we met such a one? Well, yes. To the private eye as Wandering Jew, it seems to me that Chabon has added the superheroics of Kafka and Freud, the ethics of Maimonides and Spinoza, the politics of Emma Goldman and Grace Paley, the mysticisms of Martin Buber and Simone Weil, a paper rose and a magic bat. Landsman himself, abused as much as Jim Rockford and Jesus Christ, is the righteous man of his generation, the Northern Exposure Tzaddik-Ha-Dor.
Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking
1
The most terrifying verse I know: merrily merrily merrily life is but a dream.
—Joan Didion, The Last Thing He Wanted
THREE TIMES THE mother had to repeat herself, telling the daughter her father was dead. The daughter, Quintana Roo, kept forgetting because she was in and out of comas, septic shock, extubation, or neurosurgery, in one or another intensive care unit on the West Coast or the East. Halfway through this black album—Joan Didion’s Life Studies and her Kaddish, her Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg—the daughter is medevacked from the UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles to the Rusk Institute in New York, but the transfer is complicated. Through a guerrilla action by wildcat truckers who have jackknifed a semitrailer on the interstate, the ambulance must feel its way to an airport that could be in Burbank, Santa Monica, or Van Nuys, nobody seems to know for sure, where a Cessna waits with just enough room for two pilots, two paramedics, the stretcher to which Quintana is strapped, and the bench on which her mother sits, on top of oxygen canisters. And they will have to make a heartland stop.
Later we landed in a cornfield in Kansas to refuel. The pilots struck a deal with the two teenagers who managed the airstrip: during the refueling they would take their pickup to a McDonald’s and bring back hamburgers. While we waited the paramedics suggested that we take turns getting some exercise. When my turn came I stood frozen on the tarmac for a moment, ashamed to be free and outside when Quintana could not be, then walked to where the runway ended and the corn started. There was a little rain and unstable air and I imagined a tornado coming. Quintana and I were Dorothy. We were both free. In fact we were out of here.
If Didion is reminded of Oz, I am reminded of Didion. We’ve met this runway woman more than once before. In Democracy her name was Inez Victor, and after the death of her lover, Jack Lovett, in the shallow end of a hotel swimming pool in Jakarta, she moved to Kuala Lumpur: “A woman who had once thought of living in the White House was flicking termites from her teacup and telling me about landing on a series of atolls in a seven-passenger plane with a man in a body bag.” In The Last Thing He Wanted, her name was Elena McMahon, a journalist who quit reporting on a presidential campaign to wash up on the wet grass of a runway on one of those Caribbean islands we only pay attention to when they pop up on the Bad Weather Channel, after which she disappeared into the lost clusters and corrupted data of Iran/Contra. The narrator/novelist wonders “what made her think a black shift bought off a rack sale at Bergdorf Goodman during the New York primary was the appropriate thing to wear on an unscheduled flight at one-thirty in the morning out of Fort Lauderdale–Hollywood International Airport, destination San Jose Costa Rica but not quite.”
There is actually another Cessna in Last Thing, single-engined, flying low, “dropping a roll of toilet paper over a mangrove clearing, the paper streaming and looping as it catches on the treetops, the Cessna gaining altitude as it banks to retrace its flight path.” Inside the cardboard roll, whose ends are closed with masking tape, is a message about November 22, 1963. Inside the novel is a message from the novelist, who has become impatient with “the romance of solitude” and lost interest in such conventions of her craft as the revelation of character:
I realized that I was increasingly interested only in the technical, in how to lay down the AM-2 aluminum matting for the runway, in whether or not parallel taxiways and high-speed turnoffs must be provided, in whether an eight-thousand-foot runway requires sixty thousand square yards of operational apron or only forty thousand. If the AM-2 is laid directly over laterite instead of over plastic membrane seal, how long would we have before base failure results?
The Year of Magical Thinking requires her to be more personal, even cracked. In one dream, she will be “left alone on the tarmac at Santa Monica Airport watching the planes take off one by one,” after her dead husband has boarded without her. In another, a nightmare rescue fantasy, she imagines a rough flight with Quintana between Honolulu and Los Angeles: “The plane would go down. Miraculously, she and I would survive the crash, adrift in the Pacific, clinging to the debris. The dilemma was this: I would need, because I was menstruating and the blood would attract sharks, to abandon her, swim away, leave her alone.”
Didion has always juxtaposed the hardware and the soft: hummingbirds and the FBI; nightmares of infant death and the light at dawn for a Pacific bomb test; disposable needles in a Snoopy wastebasket and the cost of a visa to leave Phnom Penh; four-year-olds in burning cars, rattlesnakes in playpens, lizards in a crèche; earthquakes, tidal waves, Patty Hearst. Against the “hydraulic imagery” of the clandestine world, its conduits, pipelines, and diversions, she opposes a gravitational imagery of black holes and weightlessness. Against dummy corporatio
ns, phantom payrolls, rocket launchers, and fragmentation mines, she opposes wild orchids washed by rain into a milky ditch of waste. Half of her last novel was depositions, cable traffic, brokered accounts, and classified secrets. The other half was jasmine, jacaranda petals, twilight, vertigo.
In The Year of Magical Thinking, these conjunctions and abutments—scraps of poetry, cramps of memory, medical terms, body parts, bad dreams, readouts, breakdowns—amount to a kind of liturgical sing-song, a whistling in the dark against a “vortex” that would otherwise swallow her whole with a hum. This then is how she passes the evil hours of an evil year, with spells and amulets. Her seventy-year-old husband, John Gregory Dunne, has dropped dead of a massive heart attack in their living room in New York City, one month short of their fortieth wedding anniversary. She can’t erase his voice from the answering machine, and refuses to get rid of his shoes. Her thirty-eight-year-old daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, has only been married five months before she is out of one hospital into another, a flu that somehow “morphed” into pneumonia and was followed by a stroke. One morning in the ICU Didion is startled to see that the monitor above her daughter’s head is dark, “that her brain waves were gone.” Without telling Quintana’s mother, the doctors have turned off her EEG. But “I had grown used to watching her brain waves. It was a way of hearing her talk.”
So we 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 Aries, 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. How does she measure up to the stalwart grieving behaviors of dolphins and geese?
We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.
Nor did this book have any way of knowing that Quintana would die this August, twenty months after her father. At New York–Presbyterian Hospital where John Dunne is pronounced dead, a social worker says to a doctor about the brand-new widow: “It’s okay. She’s a pretty cool customer.” Little did they know. What she was really thinking was, “I needed to be alone so that he could come back.”
2
I realized that my impression of myself had been of someone who could look for, and find, the upside in any situation. I had believed in the logic of popular songs. I had looked for the silver lining. I had walked on through the storm. It occurs to me now that these were not even the songs of my generation.
—Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
In a 1997 appreciation, practically a CAT scan, of Joan Didion’s novels and essays, Elizabeth Hardwick spoke of “a carefully designed frieze of the fracture and splinter in her characters’ comprehension of the world,” “a structure for the fadings and erasures of experience,” and, to accommodate “the extreme fluidity of the fictional landscape,” a narrative method of “peculiar restlessness and unease.” She cited bereaved mothers, damaged daughters, “percussive dialogue,” and “sleepwalking players”; a martyred “facticity” and revelations “of incapacity, doubt, irresolution, and inattention”; “a sort of cocoon of melancholy,” “a sort of computer lyricism,” and “a sort of muscular assurance and confidence”; a “witchery” of “uncompromising imagination” and “an obsessive attraction to the disjunctive and paradoxical in American national policy and to the somnolent, careless decisions made in private life.”
All quite true, but Hardwick missed that finding “the upside in any situation.” Me, too. Didion and I were neophytes in Manhattan during the late-fifties Ike Snooze, both published by William F. Buckley, Jr., in National Review alongside such equally unlikely beginning writers as Garry Wills, Renata Adler, and Arlene Croce, back when Buckley hired the unknown young just because he liked our zippy lip and figured he’d take care of our politics with the charismatic science of his own personality. Later, ruefully, he called us “the apostates.” So I’ve been reading Didion ever since she started doing it for money, have known her well enough to nod at for almost as long, have reviewed most of her books since Play It As It Lays, and cannot pretend to objectivity. Even when I take furious exception to something she says—about Joan Baez, for instance: “So now the girl whose life is a crystal teardrop has her own place, a place where the sun shines and the ambiguities can be set aside a little while longer”; or such condescension as “the kind of jazz people used to have on their record players when everyone who believed in the Family of Man bought Scandinavian stainless-steel flatware and voted for Adlai Stevenson”—I remain a partisan, in part because she’s a fellow westerner, like Pauline Kael, and we must stick together against the provincialism of the East. And in part because I’ve been trying for four decades to figure out why her sentences are better than mine or yours… something about cadence. They come at you, if not from ambush, then in gnomic haikus, ice-pick laser beams, or waves. Even the space on the page around these sentences is more interesting than could be expected, as if to square a sandbox for the Sphinx.
Still, I wouldn’t have thought looking for the upside was a big part of her repertoire. 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 dyaesthesia, 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.
Although this Alcestis may have sometimes fudged the difference between fatalism and lassitude, what she does believe in, besides “tropism[s] towards disorder” and the dark troika of dislocation, dread, and dreams, is Original Sin. She tells stories in self-defense: “The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea.” Over and over again in these stories, wounded women make strange choices in hot places with calamitous consequences. This, admit it, is Didion the closet romantic, who actually rooted for the journalist Elena McMahon and the American diplomat Treat Morrison to make it in The Last Thing He Wanted: “I want those two to have been together all their lives.”
But it’s personal—intuition and anxiety, frazzled nerves and love gone wrong: nothing to do with the rest of us or the world’s m
ean work. As she explained in The White Album, “I am not the society in microcosm. I am a thirty-four-year-old woman with long straight hair and an old bikini bathing suit and bad nerves sitting on an island in the middle of the Pacific waiting for a tidal wave that will not come.” To which she added in A Book of Common Prayer: “Fear of the dark can be synthesized in the laboratory. Fear of the dark is an arrangement of fifteen amino acids. Fear of the dark is a protein.”
Thus she’d seem the unlikeliest of writers to turn into a disenchanted legionnaire “on the far frontiers of the Monroe Doctrine,” at the porous borders of the American imperium. Somehow, though, she went left and went south, to discover in the Latin latitudes more than her own unbearable whiteness of being. In El Salvador between “grimgrams,” body dumps, and midnight screenings on video cassettes of Apocalypse Now and Bananas, Didion decided that Gabriel García Márquez was in fact “a social realist.”
In El Salvador one learns that vultures go first for the soft tissue, for the eyes, the exposed genitalia, the open mouth. One learns that an open mouth can be used to make a specific point, can be stuffed with something emblematic; stuffed, say, with a penis, or, if the point has to do with land title, stuffed with some of the dirt in question. One learns that hair deteriorates less rapidly than flesh, and that a skull surrounded by a perfect corona of hair is not an uncommon sight in the body dumps.
So the essayist who in Slouching Towards Bethlehem liked Howard Hughes and John Wayne more than Joan Baez and the flower children, who in The White Album found more fault with Doris Lessing, Hollywood liberals, and feminism than with mall culture and Manson groupies, ends up in Salvador, Miami, and After Henry savagely disdainful of Ronald Reagan and the “dreamwork” of American foreign policy—“a dreamwork devised to obscure any intelligence that might trouble the dreamer.” The daughter of conservative Republicans who’s told us that she voted “ardently” for Barry Goldwater in 1964 will describe in Political Fictions the abduction of American democracy by a permanent political class, an oligarchy consisting not only of the best candidates big money can buy, their focus groups, advance teams, donor bases, and consultants, but also the journalists who cover the prefab story, the pundit caste of smogball sermonizers, the spayed creatures of the talk-show ether, and the apparatchiks in it for career advancement, agenda enhancement, a book contract, or a coup d’état. And the writer of fiction who started out with Play It As It Lays, a scary manual on narcissism, leaves town for Panama instead of Hawaii, for Costa Rica and “Boca Grande,” and other tropics of “morbidity and paranoia,” where, as if she had graduated overnight from the middle school of Raymond Chandler and Nathanael West to a doctoral program with Graham Greene, Octavio Paz, Nadine Gordimer, and André Malraux, she writes postcolonial NAFTA novels.
