Her interview with Huey Newton recounts her largely unsuccessful effort to discover, behind the rhetoric and the issues, Huey Newton to discover, that is, a sense of self-doubt. Joan Didion is detached from politics and political programs she is devoted to trying to perfect the “exploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities” out of an unsparing analysis of herself and of others. Perhaps she is so widely admired because, though she treats of political subjects, she bases her judgments on nonpolitical grounds.
Paul Getty, an affectionate portrayal of water engineers paired with a devastating attack on anti-freeway transportation planners, and a characterization of liberal Hollywood political activism as a “kind of dictatorship of good intentions,” a “peculiar vacant fervor.” And, of course, there is her well-known essay on the women’s movement in which she suggests that there are aspects of feminism that reveal a “narrow and cracked determinism” and numerous feminists who want romance rather than revolution. Her latest collection of essays offers an appreciative look at J. The answer cannot be that Miss Didion shuns political subjects. But talent and accomplishment do not save other writers, or other reputations, from being parceled out into the neat boxes of ideology where they are stored, like munitions, waiting to be picked up by a partisan and hurled at an opponent. Her name has become a kind of restful incantation, the invocation of which permits antagonists who are locked in continuous dispute to pause, smile, and say that, of course, she is a splendid writer.Īnd she is.
Her writing is praised by critics of almost every political hue, by newspapers as different as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, by persons who can agree on scarcely anything else. Joan Didion-or rather the reputation of Joan Didion-is a puzzle.
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