Political Fictions won the prestigious George Polk Book Award for “investigative work that is original, requires digging and resourcefulness, and brings results.” In her book Joan Didion: Substance and Style, the scholar Kathleen M. Vandenberg examines Didion’s later writings, beginning with Salvador, and argues that far from reifying and representing the ruling class, as other critics have charged, Didion sounded some of the earliest warnings of the Trumpocalypse to come. “She has, in both subject matter and approach, been amazingly prescient about the future of political and cultural discourse and the ways in which patterns of thinking and narratives of ‘fact’ are rhetorically constructed, and grounded both in the past and in the adherence to regional traditions and values,” Vandenberg writes. Joan warned us.
Didion’s writing style changed with the increasing complexity of her subjects. Her articles for The New York Review were much denser, less full of the “white space” she extolled in “Why I Write,” more linear rather than fragmented, and deeply, even maniacally, researched. Rather than giving in to the widening gyre, she was now determined to make sense of the world. She had a profound understanding of the importance of narrative, of finding order in disorder. “I mean total control has always been the reason I wrote anything at all,” she said in a 1972 letter to New American Review editor Ted Solotaroff.
Some of the change in Didion’s writing was mechanistic. Her switch to word processing programs allowed Didion to cut and paste passages in more complex and seamless ways than her old habit of arranging note cards on the floor. She wrote longer, in bigger paragraphs. She also turned less often to first-person narrative. She was now the well-informed expert offering her take on current events—an authority figure. These articles—“In the Realm of the Fisher King,” “Times Mirror Square,” “The West Wing of Oz”—don’t offer the same lyrical, conversational prose of the pieces gathered in Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album. They provide a different kind of pleasure: the thrill of a thorough, precise, relentless, and often unexpected interrogation. (“We are in an interrogation room, and I am interrogating Officer Gerrans,” Didion wrote in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.”) And every now and then, she still gets in a jab so clever and/or ironic, it makes you laugh out loud, such as this one at Reagan in “The West Wing of Oz”: “Two hours before his 1981 inauguration, according to Michael Deaver, he was still sleeping. Deaver did not actually find this extraordinary, nor would anyone else who had witnessed Reagan’s performance as governor of California.”
