Chekhov’s Mistess

A Good Book About Death?

Book jacket summaries do little for me, but when you’re standing in a bookstore for no good reason and your sifting through all the books about reading forbidden books in oppressive countries or the books about how bad Wall Street is or how to make your fortune on Wall Street and other detritus, what is there left to do but to read jacket summaries.

So I’m sifting. I look at Indecision for the 100th time, I don’t know why; I look through the staff picks, then over to the new release table, and among the Best of X, Y or Zs there it is, a book I’m sure I have no interest in: Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking.

I couldn’t put it down and I couldn’t not put it down – it was physically wrenching to read just that little inside summary and I put that book down, frightened of what was inside. Here’s why:

This 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, with 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.”

I don’t read that sort of thing. I’ve been through my share of hospitals and funerals and manifestations of grief – my mother died of a brain tumor a decade ago this week; I fed my grandfather through the tube in his throat before he died two years before – I’ve written in cathartic spurges (one short story I remember being particularly bad) but I don’t think I could step away from (nor write as well as Didion) these things that happened to Me and see them as a writer. Most of the things I write come from daydreaming, not from me.

So, frightened yet intrigued I came home – without the book – and read Robert Pinsky’s New York Times review:

I NEED to explain here that “The Year of Magical Thinking” is not a downer. On the contrary. Though the material is literally terrible, the writing is exhilarating and what unfolds resembles an adventure narrative.

Encouraging, so I read John Leonard’s review in the New York Review of Books that included this passage:

John was talking, then he wasn’t.


You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.


On takeoff he held my hand until the plane began leveling. He always did. Where did that go?


I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome.


I had to believe he was dead all along. If I did not believe he was dead all along I would have thought I should have been able to save him.


No eye was on the sparrow.


When someone dies, I was taught growing up in California, you bake a ham.


In the sense that it happens one night and not another, the mechanism of a typical cardiac arrest could be construed as essentially accidental: a sudden spasm ruptures a deposit of plaque in a coronary artery, ischemia follows, and the heart, deprived of oxygen, enters ventricular fibrillation.


After that instant at the dinner table he was never not dead.


Shine, Little Glow Worm.


The votive candles on the sills of the big windows in the living room. The té de limón grass and aloe that grew by the kitchen door. The rats that ate the avocados.


I had allowed other people to think he was dead. I had allowed him to be buried alive.


The craziness is receding but no clarity is taking its place.


We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.

Let them become the photograph on the table. Let them become the name on the trust accounts. Let go of them in the water.

Leonard concludes:

If Joan Didion went crazy, what are the chances for the rest of us? Not so good, except that we have her example to instruct us and sentences we can almost sing. Look, no one wants to hear about it, your death, mine, or his. What, as they listen, are they supposed to do with their feet, eyes, hands, and tongue, not to mention their panic? If they do want to hear about it—the grief performers, the exhibitionists of bathetic wallow, the prurient ghouls— you don’t want to know them. And maybe craziness is the only appropriate behavior in front of a fact to which we can’t ascribe a meaning. But since William Blake’s Nobodaddy will come after all of us, I can’t think of a book we need more than hers—those of us for whom this life is it, these moments all the more precious because they are numbered, after which a blinking out as the black accident rolls on in particles or waves; those of us who have spent our own time in the metropolitan hospital Death Care precincts, wondering why they make it so hard to follow the blue stripe to the PET scan, especially since we would really prefer never to arrive, to remain undisclosed; those of us who sit there with Didion in our laps at the oncologist’s cheery office, waiting for our fix of docetaxel, irinotecan, and dexamethasone, wanting more Bach and sunsets.


I can’t imagine dying without this book.

And I think he’s right, except what he might mean is I can’t imagine experiencing death without this book. It’s different.

I would love to hear from Didion fans what you think of this book because I’ve never read any of her work, but I was attracted to a lot of things that Leonard said in his review, or Pinsky’s context:

Frank Bidart in his poem “The Arc” has a character say, “I tell myself: ‘Insanity is the insistence on meaning.’ ” That unreasonable insistence seems to rise like an involuntary cry when we step into the landscape of loss. In Didion’s formulation:


“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.”

So, it was the subject matter that got my attention in the first place, but these reviews really put Didion on the map for me. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work? I’ll have to report back after I’ve, inevitably now, read the book.

comments

It is a stunner of a book, literally.  I find it difficult to talk about the book or praise it simply because any word I can come up with-- “moving,” “beautiful,” “exquisite"-- seems not just inadquate but actually irrelevant.  (It’s also a strange thing to say “what a great book!” when it is a book of the most horrible part of the author’s life and a part she is still living in (her daughter died this August)).

I love all of Didion’s book.  There are certain scenes and images that are always with me, that pop up at odd times, that give me consolation or something.  Even if you have not, like I have, idolized Didion since eleventh grade when you first read Democracy, read The Year Of Magical Thinking.  It is a book about grief but also about writing and literature and what it is like to live as a writer. 

Even if you end up not liking it, it will not have been a waste of your time.

    – Hissy Cat (10/14  at  12:46 AM)

This is the post I’ve been wanting to write. I read Ed’s satire of the NYT Sunday Magazine piece over at Return of the Reluctant & it was so devastating that I almost didn’t read the essay. But I did and I loved it. You’re right about the Pinsky review, though. It’s moving and beautiful and presents a real, thoughtful case--with lots of good reasons to pick up a book whose subject doesn’t sound all that promising. Haven’t read the book yet, I must say, but I will, I’m sure. It’s really down to Pinsky, though--we should make him write more reviews--he put her back on the map for me. I read her with great enthusiasm ten years ago and then put her behind me. Not any more. Thanks for a great post, Bud!

    – Anne (10/14  at  05:36 AM)

I just started reading Didion’s book last night. At first, I was apprehensive, even though I have always admired Didion’s prose and the way she often pulls meaning out of things. Having had tragedies of my own, I didn’t think it was possible to capture grief and loss in words without sounding trite or platitudinous, but Didion has written an intense, incisive, touching, appropriate book (granted, I’m only a third of the way through, but I suspect the amazing strengths so far in the book will continue). What’s interesting about it is that, while she writes about these harrowing experiences and about death, the book is as much about life as it is anything else. And Didion manages to take the “ordinary” and give it great power (her descriptions early on about all of the mundane things she had to do right after her husband died reveal how ineffectual those things were in the wake of such a tragedy, and yet how appropriate and right they were at the same time). It hits home in many direct, discomforting ways, but I told myself that such discomfort might lead me to a little wisdom.

    – Michael (10/14  at  01:00 PM)

OK, I have to admit that I haven’t read any Joan Didion before this book.  I may have read an article or two, but that’s it.  I couldn’t put this book down either.  The one thing I noticed is that it feels immediate.  And she has some beautiful writing in this book.  I am glad that I read this book. 

I am also excited because in less than an hour, I am going to hear her speak!  I’m going to try and record it and post it eventually.

    – Megan (10/14  at  05:33 PM)

Well we went back to the bookstore and picked up a copy. As so often happens, my wife got to it first and she’s having a hard time not telling me anything before I’ve read it.

I’ll be looking, Megan, for what you have to say about her talk.

    – Bud (10/15  at  10:58 PM)

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: October 13, 2005
• Filed Under:
  Wise Men Fish Here: Literature

Tags: Joan Didion

• Comments:5
• Links to this Post: Technorati

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