66 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER2, 2019
BOOKS
OUT IN THE BLUE
American womanhood in Joan Didion’s early novels.BY HILTONALS
A
s the lovely New York spring of 1977
turned into the worst kind of New
York summer, I did two things over and
over again: I watched Robert Altman’s
mid-career masterpiece “3 Women,” at
a theatre in midtown, and I read Joan
Didion’s astounding third novel, “A Book
of Common Prayer.” Released within
weeks of each other that year, when I
was sixteen, these two revelatory pieces
of art shared a strong aesthetic atmo-
sphere, an incisive view of uneasy friend-
ships between women, a deadpan hor-
ror of consumerism, and an understand-
ing of how the uncanny can manifest in
the everyday. Reading and watching—
it wasn’t long before Altman’s and Did-
ion’s projects merged in my mind, where
they constituted a kind of mini-Zeitgeist,
one that troubled, undid, and then re-
made my ideas about how feminism
might inform popular art.
After falling under the sway of “A
Book of Common Prayer,” I turned toDidion’s first two novels, “Run River”
(1963) and “Play It as It Lays” (1970). (All
three novels were reissued in November,
as part of a handsome volume from the
Library of America, “Joan Didion: The
1960s and 70s.”) “Run River,” published
when Didion was not yet thirty, was con-
ventional in a way that reflected not the
fascinating slant of her intractably practi-
cal mind but, rather, her formidable am-
bition: writers wrote novels, so she wrote
one. Still, the book, which is set in Did-
ion’s home town of Sacramento, is not
just a reflexive or academic exercise. Its
protagonist, Lily Knight McClellan, is
a kind of ruined Eve living in relative
wealth in an Eden that the next gen-
eration will want no part of. Lily cries,
drinks, cheats on her rancher husband,
Everett, and aborts a child, because she
cannot forgo the “comfortable loving
fictions”—the story of being a wife and
thus socially acceptable, according to the
rules of her tribe. What no Didion hero-
ine can entirely reconcile herself to is the
split between what she wants and what
a woman is supposed to do: marry, have
children, and keep her marriage together,
despite the inevitable philandering, de-
spite her other hopes and dreams. Did-
ion’s women have an image in mind of
what life should look like—they’ve seen
it in the fashion magazines—and they
expect reality to follow suit. But it almost
never does. In Didion’s fiction, the stan-
dard narratives of women’s lives are man-
gled, altered, and rewritten all the time.
“Play It as It Lays” also centers on a
woman failing to live up to social expec-
tations, and it comes as close as any book
has come to representing what repres-
sion does to the soul. In this slim novel,
where sometimes a few words constitute
a chapter, Didion gives shape to ghosts,
the ghastly, and the ephemeral. Maria
Wyeth, a sometime B actress, suffers a
number of misfortunes, including the
birth of a disabled child, but what makes
her still the best known of Didion’s early
heroines is how she queers the image of
American womanhood even as she pre-
sumably lives it, in her nice house in Los
Angeles, a city where “failure, illness,
fear ... were seen as infectious, conta-
gious blights on glossy plants.” Maria
feels an existential gnawing in her bones,
a dread she can never quite shake, but
instead of clinging tighter to the rules
Didion in 1972. Her women have an image in mind of what life should look like. she has presumably been taught—pol-
PHOTOGRAPH BY JILL KREMENTZ