THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER2, 2019 67
ish the furniture, make an apple pie, pre
pare her husband’s Martini as he rolls
up the driveway—she makes a list of the
things she will never do: “ball at a party,
do SM unless she wanted to,... carry
a Yorkshire in Beverly Hills.”
“Play It as It Lays” was published not
long after the Stonewall riots, in New
York, at a time when there were few sto
ries about gay male life out there, repre
senting. The book, which features a
significant gay male character, could be
read both as a metaphor for queerness—
the girl who doesn’t fit in—and as an
early, uncamp depiction of the fag hag,
a woman who questions convention by
avoiding it and finds safety in the com
pany of gay men. I admired “Play It as
It Lays”—there isn’t a closeted gay ad
olescent on the planet who wouldn’t iden
tify with its nihilism played out in the
glare of glamorous privilege—but it didn’t
thrill me like “A Book of Common
Prayer,” which has a fullbodied pathos
and yearning that Didion’s other early
fiction lacks or suppresses.
W
hen “A Book of Common Prayer”
came out, the country was still
drunk on Bicentennial patriotism; 1976
had given us a big dose of pomp and
ceremony. Over the receding jingoistic
din, Didion’s voice told another story,
about women’s inner lives formed in a
nation that was, as Elizabeth Hardwick
put it, in a 1996 essay about Didion,
“blurred by a creeping inexactitude about
many things, among them bureaucratic
and official language, the jargon of the
press, the incoherence of politics, the di
sastrous surprises in the mother, father,
child tableau.” The first three items listed
have to do with language generally and
rhetoric specifically—how we fashion
the truth, and why. In Didion’s novel—
and in most of her fiction, including her
1984 masterpiece, “Democracy”—believ
ing that empirical truth exists is like be
lieving that the water in a mirage will
satisfy your thirst. What interests her is
why people still want to drink it. Cer
tainly Charlotte Douglas does. Char
lotte is the person whom the book’s
narrator, Grace Strasser Mendana, is re
ferring to when she says, at the start of
the novel, “I will be her witness.” When
I first read those words, that longago
summer, I was struck, as I am now, by
the feminist ethos behind them: I will
remember her, and therefore I, too, will exist.
I had grown up with the art and pol
itics of such early heroes as Toni Morri
son, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and
Ntozake Shange, but Altman’s potent
film and “A Book of Common Prayer”
were the first works I encountered that
embodied the secondwave white femi
nism that mattered to me as well. Not
that Didion—a graduate of Berkeley and
a staffer at Vogue during the age of Ei
senhower, who was already writing pieces
steeped in originality—was part of the
feminist movement. In her 1972 essay
“The Women’s Movement,” she objected
to several of the movement’s tendencies,
including its “invention of women as a
‘class’” and its wish to replace the ambi
guities of fiction with ideology. It was
clear from Didion’s writing that not only
was she allergic to ideology, which she
avoided like a virus in most of her work,
but her ways of thinking and of express
ing herself were unlike anyone else’s. In
a 2005 essay in The New York Review of
Books, John Leonard recalled how star
tled he was, in the sixties, by Didion’s syn
tax and tone: “I’ve been trying for four
decades to figure out why her sentences
are better than mine or yours ... some
thing about cadence. They come at you,
if not from ambush, then in gnomic hai
kus, icepick laser beams, or waves. Even
the space on the page around these sen
tences is more interesting than could be
expected, as if to square a sandbox for the
Sphinx.” Still, in “A Book of Common
Prayer,” Didion tried to close the gap be
tween herself and others, to write about
the responsibility inherent in connecting.
To me, “A Book of Common Prayer”
was feminist in the way that Toni Mor
rison’s “Sula,” published four years ear
lier, was feminist—without having to de
clare itself as such. But, whereas the two
friends in “Sula” live inside their rela
tionship, Didion wrote about a woman
trying to enter into a friendship and a
kind of love with another woman who
is ultimately unknowable. A sixtyyear
old American expatriate living in the fic
tional Central American city of Boca
Grande, Grace inhabits an atmosphere
of “opaque equatorial light.” Boca Grande,
a sort of ersatz movie set, has no real his
tory; its airport is a way station between
more desirable destinations. A stomp
ing ground for arms dealers and rich
people with offshore accounts, BocaGrande is as good a place as any for Grace,
who has cancer, to live and die. Not once
during the course of the novel does she
ask who will remember her when she’s
gone. Grace, who shares some of her cre
ator’s moral rigidity—“In order to main
tain a semblance of purposeful behavior
on this earth you have to believe that
things are right or wrong,” Didion told
an interviewer—is always looking out,
rarely looking in. In a way, by moving to
Boca Grande, Grace sought to escape
life, or, at least, the life she was supposed
to have as an American woman. And yet
it followed her across the sea, in the real
and ghostly presence of Charlotte, who
died before Grace began telling this story.
Born in Denver, Grace was orphaned
at a young age: “My mother died of in
fluenza one morning when I was eight.
My father died of gunshot wounds, not
selfinflicted, one afternoon when I was
ten.” Until she was sixteen, she lived alone
in her parents’ former suite at the Brown
Palace Hotel. Then she made her way to
California, where she studied at Berke
ley with the cultural anthropologist A. L.
Kroeber, before being tapped to work
with Claude LéviStrauss, in São Paulo.
But make no mistake: her pursuit of an
thropology was not the result of an in
tellectual passion, or any kind of passion.
“I did not know why I did or did not do
anything at all,” she says. After marrying
a tree planter in Boca Grande, Grace “re
tired” (quotation marks hers) from an
thropology. She gave birth to a son, and
was eventually widowed and left, she says,
with “putative control of fiftyninepoint
eight percent of the arable land and about
the same percentage of the decisionmak
ing process.” Grace’s inheritance makes
her the head of the household, but money
isn’t everything—it isn’t even a start, when
your real interest lies in something other
than profit and waste. The flesh and the
spirit are on Grace’s mind; her terminal
illness no doubt contributes to our sense
that, for her, the day is a long night filled
with questions about being, questions she
attaches to her memories of Charlotte.
Referred to by the locals as “la norte
americana,” Charlotte, during the brief
time that Grace knows her, is a perfect
denizen of Boca Grande. Pretty, ginger
haired, she seems to have no past, though
she has an intense interest in the past,
which spills over to the present and infects
the future. She believes in institutions