The White Album

"Yes, but also her filmic ability to lead the reader into a landscape and then fill the reader’s mind with it, to let it spool out. She is the great American road-trip writer, to my mind. She has that great widescreen filmic quality to her work. One of my favourite pieces from this book, The White Album , is ‘At the Dam’—about the Hoover Dam—which was written in 1970. I’ve got it here. She writes: There was something beyond all that, something beyond energy, beyond history, something I could not fix in my mind. When I came up from the dam that day, the wind was blowing harder, through the canyon and all across the Mojave. Later, towards Henderson and Las Vegas, there would be dust blowing … but out at the dam there was no dust, only the rock and the dam and a little greasewood and a few garbage cans, their tops chained, banging against a fence. I walked across the marble star map that traces a sidereal revolution of the equinox and fixes forever, the Reclamation man had told me, for all time and for all people who can read the stars, the date the dam was dedicated. The star map was, he had said, for when we were all gone and the dam was left. I had not thought much of it when he said it, but I thought of it then, with the wind whining and the sun dropping behind a mesa with the finality of a sunset in space. Of course, that was the image I had seen always, seen it without quite realizing what I saw, a dynamo finally free of man, splendid at last in its absolute isolation, transmitting power and releasing water to a world where no one is. There’s a lot of zooming in and zooming out in her writing. There’s also an essay in The White Album about Georgia O’Keeffe. I quote O’Keeffe in the final chapter of my book, about the things she saw through the prism of pelvises when she was drawing; the different blues—she was talking about how it’s the blue of the world after all people are gone . . . So there’s this idea of an unpeopled reality, which chimes with things discussed in The White Album. Joan Didion is in California when the Manson murders are happening, and she says the strangest and scariest thing was that no one seemed to find it odd they were happening, because people knew something was going to happen. It had been a febrile atmosphere for too long. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . So there is this idea of the unpeopled landscape, or the over-peopled landscape, or the landscape peopled with the wrong people, and the strangeness of the movie industry. All of this going on, on top of California, you know, only scratching the surface. The impermanence of people just perched on this land, like birds ready to fly off at any moment. A really troubling short-termism about the art, about the people, about the place itself—built on its fault, on this ocean with its storms, and the cultural storms and race storms that were happening at the time. I feel that Joan Didion is the patron saint of a maelstrom of culture and environment of a particular time. She is the still point in the middle. I absolutely agree, and also I think she has that idea that I was talking about earlier of being a curious, childlike, questing questioner. There isn’t a lot taken for granted, and what is taken for granted is done so with a sidelong look at the reader, and the comment, ‘I took that for granted.’ So, again, quite filmic. The way she writes is signalling the trouble to come, signalling the fact that this is all temporary. All of her writing is in some way of the moment, in the sense that it could be returned to and in some way revised. She lives in that ongoing moment; she is a chronicler in that way, like Dylan is a chronicler. Her voice changes, the songs change, it’s not always going to be this way. But this was absolutely how it was then."

"My list is still bright white and western, but yes, thank you. I originally had Philip Roth’s Letting Go here, in the social anxiety and neurosis corner, but my stack of Didion made me wonder if non-fiction might be allowed, which would at least address the gender gap. With her gaze on California of the late 60s and early 70s, Didion gives us the Black Panthers, Janis Joplin, Nancy Reagan, and the Manson follower Linda Kasabian. She also gives us her psychiatric report, her migraines, her diagnosis with multiple sclerosis. There are many good profiles in here (a whole section on women, in fact) but she has her nervous areas of attention. From her famous opening line – ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live’ – onwards, she makes a persuasive case for the notion that we are fooling ourselves by seeking too much narrative in reality. Chaos reigns in these pages and she seems to relish the telling detail that proves it: Nancy Reagan’s cameraman telling her to fake picking a flower for the camera; the boys who majored in shop in high school, worked in gas stations and later held them up; an acquaintance from her time in Berkeley who tried to kill himself in Mexico, survived, and returned home to join the Bank of America’s three-year training program for executives. Wonderful, awful details that paint a portrait. She had the journalist’s access to many, many people. The book could have been anything, from celebrity worship to offbeat cool, but her deadpan observations and her staccato organisation of the facts manage to cut in between. As a distillation of the moment, it works like the movie Nashville : critically observant, fabulously detached and just a bit mesmerised and horrified by the chaos."