Research Guide to American Literature

through California history, she evokes the vitality of events (the wagon trains,
the railroads, the gold rush) and people ( Josiah Royce, Jack London, the Bohe-
mian Club) that have given the thirty-first state its glorious and tragic history.
She then takes a hard look at how California has changed in the post–World
War II era, reporting on the rise and fall of Lakewood, a Los Angeles suburb, a
growing prison system, and the economic downturn in the 1990s. She closes her
memoir with a return to her family roots, in particular the death of her mother,
who embodies in many ways “the confusions and contradictions in California
life.” Didion leaves us then not with a resolution to her initial confusions about
her home state but with a much deeper understanding of the reasons for those
confusions.
Although Didion mentions politics in her early writing—Communism in
“Comrade Laski, C.P.U.S.A. (M.-L.)” in Slouching towards Bethlehem and the
Black Panthers in the title essay of The White Album—her engagement with poli-
tics did not become pronounced until the 1980s, with the publication of Salvador
(1983) and Miami (1987). Both were based on essays commissioned by the New
York Review of Books. In Salvador Didion uncovers the “dreamwork” or ideological
fictions that promote the involvement of the United States in the violence and
human-rights abuses perpetrated in El Salvador. In Miami she implicitly criti-
cizes successive U.S. administrations who have “repeatedly used and repeatedly
betrayed” exiles from Cuba.
Didion returns to politics in Political Fictions (2001). The eight essays
included range historically from Ronald Reagan’s presidency (1980–1988) to the
2000 campaigns of Al Gore and George W. Bush. The format departs from her
earlier essay collections: the essays are longer and less personal. Didion turns what
she calls “a somewhat doubtful eye” on the Right (“Newt Gingrich, Superstar”),
on the Left (“Clinton Agonistes”), and on such journalists as Bob Woodward
(“Political Pornography”) and Michael Isikoff (“Vichy Washington”). Her obser-
vations of such figures aim higher than exposing individual foibles. Her goal,
instead, is focused on “the ways in which the political process did not reflect but
increasingly proceeded from a series of fables about American experience.” Her
real scorn is directed at those who spin fables for the sake of staying in business,
“the nation’s permanent professional political class”—the politicians, the political
machines, the press—all of whom she feels are out of touch with the American
people.
“Style is character,” Didion wrote about Georgia O’Keeffe’s art in The White
Album. Didion’s own style, sharp as a scalpel, reveals as much about the author’s
ongoing attempt to clarify the murky waters of her identity as about society,
California, or politics. Her writing continues to be a valuable resource because
her deep sense of personal fragmentation has captured an essential element of
our cultural history.
In addition to the criticism cited in RESOURCES, students interested in
general comparative studies are advised to consult Lynne Hanley’s Writing War:
Fiction, Gender, and Memory (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991),
which focuses on Didion, Virginia Woolf, and Doris Lessing among women writ-
ing about armed conflict, and Barbara Lounsberry’s The Art of Fact: Contemporary

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