South and West: From a Notebook

"By building up a picture, snippet by snippet, observation by observation, she captures a sense of America’s instability and its differences. There’s a lot, too, of the sense that humans haven’t really been able to claim these places for their own—she writes about all these algae-covered ditches, the mosquitoes, and so on. But what’s really interesting about Didion is the way she lets people speak for themselves. I think when you go somewhere you want to write about, you have to go in with no preconceptions. I know when I was writing my book, I was aware that there were things people were saying that were quite ‘problematic’ sometimes but that’s part of who we are—in censoring everything you lose truth and truth isn’t always right and beautiful. It’s tempting to go around casting judgement on things, but what Didion does is, she’s just a pair of eyes through which we see these different places. There’s a sort of detachment. There’s a wonderful subtlety to how she captures place. There’s a haunting, Gothic sense through which she sees everything, but it’s never editorialised. Like: this is how you’re meant to see this place, because this is how I see it. Which I think is how a lot of contemporary writing about place can go wrong. I think it would be an intellectual shortcoming if she did that. So her cold detachment is interesting to me. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I was reading a new book recently, which is based on the writer’s ethnographic research. The writer cites a code of ethics for academic research; everyone who appears in the book is identified only by first name, and they all come off as just… really nice. Whereas in the Didion or the John McPhee books, there’s some pretty cutting stuff that they say about people. I really respect them for that. Because how can you capture a sense of place without the darkness? If you avoid the awkwardness, people become two dimensional."