Joan Didion
Description:... "Of all the labels affixed to Joan Didion to place her in the context of contemporary American writing - prose stylist, novelist, journalist - perhaps the most beguiling and yet astutely relevant is "entrepreneur of anxiety." In this revised edition of Joan Didion, Mark Royden Winchell observes that Didion is a perfectionist plagued by disillusionment and psychological vulnerability, and suggests that what Didion seeks in the written word is the very thing most people strive for (albeit less deliberately) in their everyday lives: self-knowledge. He proposes that in both her nonfiction and her novels - whose protagonists are often tormented by an acute awareness of moral deterioration - Didion searches for identity and attempts to create a fictive persona with which to impose artistic order upon the randomness of life. Didion's writing career began with nonfiction, but it soon became clear that her exquisite sensibility - her canny, often painful observations of the turbulent sixties - pushed her work beyond the parameters of mere reportage. Winchell separates thematically the essays in Didion's two collections - Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979) - offering readers the advantage of viewing the individual pieces in light of Didion's views on literature, the arts, and morality; on social classes and life-styles; on politics, people, and selected places. In his analysis of her other works, Winchell highlights the importance of place: California in her first novel, Run River (1963); Hollywood in Play It as It Lays (1970); Central America in A Book of Common Prayer (1977), Salvador (1983), and Miami (1987); the westernmost frontier of Hawaii in Democracy (1984). He depicts Didion as a regional writer akin to Faulkner and Steinbeck: with a worldview shaped by the vista of the Sacramento Valley, she became the chronicler of a society in transition, in which the old social order has disintegrated and the individual is suspended in a moral quandary. In this revised edition of Joan Didion, Winchell also discusses the author's three books published since his 1980 study - Salvador, Democracy, and Miami - and a handful of uncollected magazine pieces. Winchell cuts away the despair and suffering of Didion's protagonists to suggest a glimmer of promise, perceiving that, at bottom, Didion adheres to a "moral truth," and that she does not consider life devoid of meaning. He concludes his discussion with an overview of the critical reception accorded her work, and asserts that Didion is a vibrant writer who has by no means exhausted her potential to grow and explore new territories." --
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