THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER2, 2019 69
Towards Bethlehem” (1968) and “The
White Album” (1979). Almost any
page of this invaluable book will take
you somewhere emotionally and offer
a paramount lesson in the power of
Didion’s voice. Some readers came to
Didion later in her career—through
her National Book Award-winning
memoir, “The Year of Magical Think-
ing” (2005), about the death of her
husband, the writer John Gregory
Dunne, for instance, or “Blue Nights”
(2011), about the death of her daugh-
ter—and it’s interesting to go back
and explore the origins of the impulse
that drives those memoirs. Indeed, in
“The Year of Magical Thinking,” Did-
ion confesses a Grace-like tendency
to try to distance herself from the un-
fathomable through writing and re-
search: writing, for her, can be a means
of controlling the uncontrollable, in-
cluding grief and loss.
A story that’s as interesting as the
ones Didion tells in important works
like “A Book of Common Prayer” is how
she found and developed that authori-
tative literary voice. In her review of
“The Executioner’s Song,” this daugh-
ter of California wrote:
The authentic Western voice ... is one
heard often in life but only rarely in literature,
the reason being that to truly know the West
is to lack all will to write it down. The very
subject of “The Executioner’s Song” is that
vast emptiness at the center of the Western
experience, a nihilism antithetical not only to
literature but to most other forms of human
endeavor, a dread so close to zero that human
voices fadeout, trail off, like skywriting. Be-
neath what Mailer calls “The immense blue of
the strong sky of the American West” ... not
too much makes a difference.
So what’s out there in the blue?
What words can we try to grab and
shape as they’re fading away? How can
we describe intimacy, or the failure of
intimacy, without getting too close to
it? Part of Didion’s genius was to make
language out of the landscape she
knew—the punishing terrain of Cali-
fornia’s Central Valley, with its glaring
hot summers and winter floods, its stark
flatness, its river snakes, taciturn ranch-
ers, and lurking danger. “Those ex-
tremes affect the way you deal with the
world,” she said in a 1977 interview. “It
so happens that if you’re a writer the
extremes show up. They don’t if you
sell insurance.” ♦
BRIEFLY NOTED
Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, by László Krasznahorkai,
translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet (New Direc-
tions). With an immense cast and wide-ranging erudition,
this novel, the culmination of a Hungarian master’s career,
offers a sweeping view of a contemporary moment that seems
deprived of meaning. In eastern Hungary, a famous scien-
tist known as the Professor renounces his comfortable life
for a hut on the outskirts of town—only to be bothered by
the news media, his daughter, and a Fascist biker gang. Mean-
while, the town expectantly prepares for the return of a scion
of its long-absent aristocracy from Argentina, hoping that
he will bring prosperity with him. When his arrival proves
disappointing, inexplicable events begin to beset the town.What Is Missing, by Michael Frank (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).
The odd triangle of attractions that underpins this novel
arises in Florence among vacationing Americans. A di-
vorced fertility doctor and his teen-age son are captivated
by Costanza, a recent widow nearing forty who yearns for
a child. She and the father embark on a romance and, in
New York, on taxing rounds of fertility treatment. As the
novel probes relationships laced with curiosity and resent-
ment, what stands out is Costanza’s restive questioning of
her impulses. The result is a penetrating examination of
how a life can be defined by contingency and surprise,
marked both by the absence of things long dreamed of and
by unexpected presences.Maoism, by Julia Lovell (Knopf ). Examining revolutionary
movements across five continents, this history emphasizes
the global reach of Maoist ideology. Mao Zedong’s theo-
ries inspired many groups fighting for decolonization and
minorities’ rights, giving Beijing an opportunity to wield
international influence. In the nineteen-fifties and sixties,
China, though ravaged by turmoil and famine, spent bil-
lions of dollars on aid in Southeast Asia and Africa, and
hosted revolutionaries from as far afield as Latin America
for political and military training. Although China achieved
its current dominance by abandoning Maoism for market
reform, similar tactics now characterize Xi Jinping’s bid for
global clout.A Month in Siena, by Hisham Matar (Random House). After
completing a Pulitzer-winning memoir about his father’s
disappearance in Qaddafi’s Libya, the author travelled to
Siena to see paintings that had fascinated him for most of
his life. In this account, he spends his days in front of mas-
terpieces from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries,
becoming familiar and then invisible to the museum guards;
he walks around the walled city, pressing himself against its
edges and feeling the “sort of rare freedom that only comes
from limits.” Matar’s discussions of art encompass both the
paintings’ histories and his own, and his grief that he will
never know where or how his father died subtly colors his
powerful descriptions of architecture and space.