Book Review: The World According to Joan Didion, by Evelyn McDonnell (2023)

The World According to Joan Didion, by Evelyn McDonnell, featuring the famous photo of Didion in her Corvette Stingray. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Author Evelyn McDonnell

The World According to Joan Didion, by Evelyn McDonnell, is a study of the much-acclaimed journalist and novelist. The World According to Joan Didion is a difficult book to categorize: it’s not a biography, it’s not a work of literary criticism, and it’s not a memoir of McDonnell’s relationship with Didion’s writing. This loose categorization ultimately hurts the book and prevents it from being an essential work. It’s almost as if the publisher asked Evelyn McDonnell, “Hey, can you write 240 pages about Joan Didion? Great, let’s publish it.” A tighter focus would have helped produce a better book.  

The World According to Joan Didion is organized not chronologically but thematically, which adds to the disjointed sense of the book’s purpose. The chapter titles are all one word long, relating to themes in Didion’s life and work: “Gold,” “Snake,” “Man,” “Girl,” “Hotel,” and so on. There really should have been a chapter about the Santa Ana winds, a continuing obsession of Didion’s. The titles don’t really give you much of a sense of what the chapters are about. Why the generic “Man” and “Girl” for the chapters about John Gregory Dunne and Quintana Roo Dunne, rather than “Husband” and “Daughter”? And while we’re at it, can we please talk about the name Quintana Roo? Didion and John Gregory Dunne named their adopted daughter after a province in Mexico, which is, at best, unbearably precious, and at worst, culturally appropriative.  

While I have no doubt that McDonnell has a deep knowledge of Didion’s work, the book simply does not dig deep enough into Didion’s work to fully demonstrate her excellence as a writer. McDonnell writes about Didion’s preoccupation with style, but the examples she cites from Didion’s own writings are wafer-thin. The examples are: “dirty crepe-de-Chine wrapper,” “cutoff jeans and a denim Levi jacket with metal studs,” and “black silk dress,” which are all pretty basic descriptions. Surely there must be more detailed descriptions of style in Didion’s writings?  

I like Joan Didion’s writing, but I find the whole cultish adoration of Didion as a status symbol of cool a bit annoying. This type of adoration was visible in the 2022 auction of Didion’s estate. Thirteen blank notebooks of Didion’s sold for $11,000. A pair of Celine sunglasses went for $27,000. As McDonnell writes, “the one-day display of materialistic idolatry was hard to watch, even for a Didion fan.” (p.106) Ultimately, this type of fanatical adoration devalues Didion as a writer, and makes her into a status symbol, an avatar of cool and chic sensibility, a commodity—people should be valuing the words she wrote, rather than her sunglasses and her Corvette Stingray.  

Some sloppy editing mistakes occur in The World According to Joan Didion: on the same page, Tracy Daugherty’s biography of Didion is referred to by its correct title, The Last Love Song, and also, inexplicably, as The Last Love Child. (p.81) Later on, it’s noted that Tom Brokaw had a conversation with Didion and Dunne about El Salvador. One the next page of the book, it’s suddenly Dan Rather who talked to Didion and Dunne. So, which 1980’s news anchor was it, really? (p.178-9)  

McDonnell is obviously a great admirer of Didion’s writing, but she also grapples with the complexities and contradictions in Didion’s work and life. She writes: “And yet, despite her influence as a trailblazer, when it comes to being an icon for women, Joan Didion can be deeply problematic.” Didion wrote a vicious takedown of feminism in her 1972 essay “The Women’s Movement.” As McDonnell writes, “the essay was overall a mean-spirited attack on second-wave feminism that revealed more about Didion’s lack of consciousness than the real growing pains of an important and necessary movement for change.” (p.212)  

As I was reading The World According to Joan Didion, I wondered what Didion’s relationship with Tom Wolfe was like. I assume there was mutual respect for each other’s work, as Wolfe included Didion in his collection The New Journalism. But were they actually friends? I don’t know, but I'd be intrigued to learn the answer. There are interesting similarities between the two authors: they both came from backgrounds in journalism before they published books, they excelled at both fiction and journalism, they were both famous for their chic personal style, and they both wrote books about Miami—Didion’s 1987 non-fiction Miami, and Wolfe’s 2012 novel Back to Blood. Stylistically, they were opposites: whereas Wolfe was a maximalist, famous for his liberal use of exclamation points, repeated colons, and onomatopoeia, Didion was a Hemingway-esque minimalist, expressing herself in taut sentences. And while Didion usually inserted herself to some degree or another in her journalism, Wolfe assiduously kept himself out of his journalism.  

I’m not quite sure who I’d recommend The World According to Joan Didion to. If you haven’t read any of Didion’s work, it might be too much, but if you’re a diehard Didion fan, it might be too little. That’s the fundamental problem with the book, it’s not clear what it is supposed to be, and that holds it back from really being an essential work.  

Book Review: Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion (1968)

Cover of the 2008 paperback reissue of Slouching Towards Bethlehem, by Joan Didion, 1968.

People either love Joan Didion or they can’t stand her. She inspires passionate fandom and vituperative criticism. She’s a writer who’s been on my radar for a long time, and with my interest in Tom Wolfe and New Journalism, I figured it was finally time for me to start reading some of her work.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem was Didion’s first collection of non-fiction. Published in 1968, it’s become one of the seminal collections of New Journalism. The book is separated into three sections: “Life Styles in the Golden Land,” “Personals,” and “Seven Places of the Mind.” I found the first section the most interesting, because it features the most actual reporting from Didion.

The first essay, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream” tells the complicated and bizarre story of Lucille Miller, a housewife who was convicted of murdering her husband by setting their Volkswagen Beetle on fire—with her husband still inside of it. It seems like a fairly complicated way to try to murder someone, and the story gets more twisted, as Lucille was having an affair with a married man, whose wife had recently died under, ahem, mysterious circumstances. Adding another layer to the case, Lucille’s husband was a depressed, suicidal dentist. The essay is a fascinating piece that is highly evocative of the landscape of the California desert.

“John Wayne: A Love Song” is an interesting essay, written from the set of the 1965 movie The Sons of Katie Elder, Wayne’s first movie after battling lung cancer. Didion writes of the Duke: “When John Wayne spoke, there was no mistaking his intentions; he had a sexual authority so strong that even a child could perceive it.” (p.30) Of course, John Wayne always spoke with authority, but it had never crossed my mind that his authority carried a sexual overtone. I suppose Wayne’s heterosexuality was just so obviously worn on his sleeve—he was the ultimate on screen embodiment of masculinity for several generations.

I found the strongest piece in the book to be the title essay, a look at the hippies of San Francisco during the beginning of the summer of 1967, the so-called “Summer of Love.” The essay is an interesting companion to Tom Wolfe’s 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, his study of Ken Kesey and the whole wild scene happening around him and his followers in San Francisco.

A man named Steve has a fantastic insight in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” He tells Didion, “There’ve been times I felt like packing up and taking off for the East Coast again, at least there I had a target. At least there you expect that it’s going to happen. Here you know it’s not going to.” Didion then asks Steve what it is that’s supposed to happen. He replies, “I don’t know. Something. Anything.” (p.98) Steve’s observation is strikingly similar to the conclusion of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, in which the Merry Pranksters chant “We blew it!” over and over again. The quest has failed, and all of these grand hippie experiments have not produced the desired revolution in human relationships that they sought.

There’s also a short piece on Las Vegas weddings, featuring Didion’s observation: “Almost everyone notes that there is no ‘time’ in Las Vegas, no night and no day and no past and no future…neither is there any logical sense of where one is.” (p.80) That still rings true for Las Vegas today.

Section I also features an interesting essay examining society’s fascination with Howard Hughes, and the myriad stories and rumors he engendered. There’s also a piece about the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence, a school started by the folksinger and activist Joan Baez.

The more personal pieces in Section II were less interesting to me. Some of them are simply too short to go into their topics in detail. I’m really not that interested in reading Joan Didion’s thoughts “On Morality” in 1,000 words. The setting and introduction of “On Morality” is more interesting than any conclusions Didion ultimately comes to in the essay:

“As it happens I am in Death Valley, in a room at the Enterprise Motel and Trailer Park, and it is July, and it is hot. In fact it is 119 degrees. I cannot seem to make the air conditioner work, but there is a small refrigerator, and I can wrap ice cubes in a towel and hold them against the small of my back.” (p.157)

I found that scene setting of more interest than Didion’s declaration later in the essay: “You see I want to be quite obstinate about insisting that we have no way of knowing—beyond that fundamental loyalty to the social code—what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong,’ what is ‘good’ and what ‘evil.’” (p.162)

Didion’s 1964 essay on the movies, “I Can’t Get That Monster Out of My Mind” was a frustrating read for me. Didion is dismissive of John Frankenheimer’s 1964 Cold War thriller Seven Days in May. The plot of Seven Days in May hinges upon a right-wing general (Burt Lancaster) attempting to stage a military coup to take over the United States government from a liberal President (Frederic March) who has signed a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union. Didion writes that Seven Days in May “appeared to be a fantasy in the most clinical sense of that word.” (p.153) John F. Kennedy, President at the time Seven Days in May was made, didn’t find it to be a fantasy. Kennedy had earned the ire of the more right-wing military commanders due to his refusal to use the full force of the U.S. military during the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1963, Kennedy was also extending something of an olive branch to the Soviet Union, calling for a nuclear test ban treaty in his speech at American University on June 10, 1963.

When JFK’s friend Red Fay asked Kennedy if he thought the events depicted in the novel Seven Days in May could ever actually happen in the United States, Kennedy had an interesting response.

“It’s possible. But the conditions would have to be just right. If the country had a young President, and he had a Bay of Pigs, there would be a certain uneasiness. Maybe the military would do a little criticizing behind his back. Then if there were another Bay of Pigs, the reaction of the country would be, ‘Is he too young and inexperienced?’ The military would almost feel that it was their patriotic obligation to stand ready to preserve the integrity of the nation and only God knows just what segment of Democracy they would be defending if they overthrew the elected establishment. Then, if there were a third Bay of Pigs it could happen. It won’t happen on my watch.” (The Pleasure of His Company, by Red Fay)

Didion is also dismissive of another Cold War classic from 1964: “Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, which did have a little style, was scarcely a picture of relentless originality; rarely have we seen so much made over so little.” (p.154-5) Regardless of whether you like Dr. Strangelove, I think most people would have to admit that it’s original. It’s a comedy about nuclear war and the end of the world, hardly a topic that was often addressed in the movies. Didion doesn’t even mention the brilliance of Peter Sellers playing three roles: Group Captain Mandrake, President Merkin Muffley, and of course, the titular German scientist.

The essays in Section III are a bit of a mix of the first two sections: personal essays combined with reporting. They cover a variety of subjects: Sacramento, Pearl Harbor, Alcatraz—just after it had closed as a prison and before it became a tourist attraction—the mansions of Newport, Rhode Island, and making it through your twenties. 

My favorite line in “Goodbye to All That,” Didion’s essay about her life in her twenties is this: “One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.” (p.226) That’s a brilliant summary of the intense self-absorption most of us go through during our early twenties. 

I enjoyed Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and Didion is an excellent writer. I suspect part of the dividing line about her writing is the degree to which she intrudes as an author into the narrative. You might think Didion intrudes unnecessarily into the narrative, or you might find it really interesting to read about her own thoughts and feelings. I go back and forth with it, sometimes it’s fine, and sometimes I found it frustrating and distracting. Didion consistently uses first person in her essays and reporting, whereas Tom Wolfe was loath to insert himself into his own reporting, even going so far as to invent euphemisms to refer to himself in his own writing without resorting to using first person. Wolfe wrote: 

“Sometimes I would put myself into the story and make sport of me. I would be ‘the man in the brown Borsalino hat,’ a large fuzzy Italian fedora I wore at the time, or ‘the man in the Big Lunch tie.’ I would write about myself in the third person, usually as a puzzled onlooker or someone who was in the way, which was often the case…anything to avoid coming on like the usual non-fiction narrator, with a hush in my voice, like a radio announcer at a tennis match.” (The New Journalism, by Tom Wolfe, p.17)

Of course, there’s nothing about Didion’s writing that is reminiscent of an announcer at a tennis match. She’s more like a friend whispering witty asides to you as you both watch the action transpiring.

Book Review: Tom Wolfe, by William McKeen (1995)

The cover of Tom Wolfe, by William McKeen, 1995. (Standard photo on the Tom Wolfe bookshelf, by Mark C. Taylor)

William McKeen’s 1995 book on Tom Wolfe, titled simply Tom Wolfe, and part of the Twayne’s United States Authors Series, was the first book-length examination of the career of one of the most important American writers of the last fifty years. McKeen’s book is not a biography of Wolfe, although he does include biographical information about Wolfe’s life. Like many other sources on Wolfe, McKeen gives the incorrect year for Wolfe’s birth, 1931, instead of the correct year, 1930. (Even Wolfe’s obituary in The New York Times originally had the wrong year.) 

McKeen’s book follows Wolfe through his career, as he moved from newspaper reporter to freelance journalist to best-selling novelist. McKeen obviously did his homework, and one of the most interesting parts of the book was his coverage of Wolfe’s 1959-1962 stint working at The Washington Post. Wolfe covered a variety of topics for the Post, and while most Washington reporters wanted to cover politics, Wolfe enjoyed writing stories about off-beat subjects. Thanks to McKeen’s bibliography, we’re given a long list of Wolfe’s articles for the Post, which range from the banal-sounding “Holiday Gets Cold Start, Mild Finish,” to a 12-part series titled “The Dispensable Guide,” Wolfe’s “mock Michelin Guide to the cities President Eisenhower was visiting overseas.” (McKeen, p.20) 

One of the things that’s so striking about Tom Wolfe’s work is its range. Wolfe certainly had a consistent lens through which he viewed the world. It’s all about status! How people acquire status and how they choose to display it are two questions that are central to Wolfe’s work. Wolfe’s interest in status was already highly developed by the time he published his first book, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby in 1965. But within that lens of status, Wolfe covered a huge range of subjects—from his early pieces for Esquire magazine chronicling new movements among American teenagers, to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, to the adventures of the Mercury 7 astronauts, to book-length essays on modern art and architecture, to his fiction, where he brought the reader inside the world of New York City bond traders who thought themselves to be “masters of the universe,” to Atlanta in the 1990’s, and to the diverse ethnic groups in Miami. 

Looking back, it makes perfect sense that Wolfe’s Ph.D. was in American Studies. Wolfe was interested in everything about America, and that’s reflected in the range of his writing. In his best writing, Wolfe was combining elements of history, politics, sociology, economics, and sometimes religion as well. 

Wolfe’s move to the New York Herald-Tribune in 1962 allowed him the space and freedom to write the kinds of stories that intrigued him. During this time, he was also writing for New York, the Sunday supplement of the Herald-Tribune. Wolfe also started writing longer articles for Esquire, and it was his piece for that magazine about a car customizing show in California that proved to be a breakthrough in his writing style. “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby” found Wolfe up against a deadline with a serious case of writer’s block. Wolfe sat down at the typewriter to bash out his notes for Esquire editor Byron Dobell, which someone else would then tart up into some kind of a story. Except Wolfe sat there all night long and bashed out a 49-page memo to Dobell. When Dobell finished reading it, he merely struck the “Dear Byron” off the beginning of Wolfe’s memo, and a new voice in American journalism was born. 

McKeen examines the most significant essays that appeared in the first two collections of Wolfe’s non-fiction, but there are interesting pieces of writing from these books that McKeen didn’t write about. 

An amusing story is that when Tom Wolfe first burst on the scene, people thought he might be the novelist Thomas Wolfe, of Look Homeward, Angel and You Can’t Go Home Again fame—even though Thomas Wolfe had died in 1938. McKeen writes: “He received many letters from admirers who professed admiration for his journalism as well as his earlier literary works, Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River. The letter writers often wondered why there had been such a long gap between publication of his books.” (McKeen, p.11) Adding to the confusion was the fact that Tom Wolfe was actually Tom Wolfe, Jr. His father was an agronomist and also a writer and editor. Wolfe said of his father, “I always thought of him as a writer. He kept the novels of Thomas Wolfe on his bookshelf, and for years I thought he’d written them.” (Conversations with Tom Wolfe, p.201) In an effort to head off any possible confusion, the first edition dust jacket of The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby specifically said that Tom Wolfe wasn’t related to Thomas Wolfe.

In his coverage of what came to be called New Journalism, McKeen offers brief sketches of other important figures in that literary movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s, like Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, and Hunter S. Thompson. These sketches are helpful for setting Wolfe’s own work in a historical context, and showing how controversial the New Journalism movement was at the time. Capote, for example, disdained the term, famously calling his book In Cold Blood a “non-fiction novel,” whatever on earth that was. What Capote had actually done was to use techniques that fiction writers used and applied them to a non-fiction subject. Although the caveat should be added that we now know that Capote did invent some scenes—like the last one in the book, in which investigator Alvin Dewey visits the graves of the Clutter family. 

McKeen’s chapter about The Right Stuff is excellent, and he even quoted from the same long description of Gus Grissom and Deke Slayton that I used in my review. McKeen gives a too-long plot summary of The Bonfire of the Vanities, and I wish instead that McKeen had more to say about the Rolling Stone version of The Bonfire of the Vanities. Wolfe serialized the novel as he was writing it in 27 issues of Rolling Stone in 1984-5, and then made some significant changes before publishing the novel in 1987. Wolfe even changed the occupation of the main character—in the Rolling Stone version Sherman McCoy is a writer, rather than a bond trader.

The book doesn’t pry into Wolfe’s private life, but that seems fitting. Despite Wolfe’s great fame and his flamboyant sartorial splendor, he never made headlines for his private life. As McKeen astutely writes, “Wolfe embodies Flaubert’s advice to writers to be regular and orderly in their lives in order to be wild and original in their work.” (McKeen, p.130) McKeen also grasps Wolfe’s iconoclasm, and his willingness to go against popular opinion and attack the hypocrisies of both the left and the right. There were never any sacred cows for Tom Wolfe. 

McKeen’s book is an excellent examination of the works of Tom Wolfe, and McKeen’s writing and insights about Wolfe are sharp throughout. The used copy of Tom Wolfe that I bought is a former library book, from the Fairfax County Public Library, in Wolfe’s home state of Virginia. According to a stamp in the back it was withdrawn because of low demand, which is a cruel fate for such a fine book about a great writer.