and conventionality, but they don’t be
lieve in her. She has a daughter, Marin—
modelled on Patricia Hearst—who has
disappeared after participating in a plane
hijacking. Charlotte fills that absence
with invention: she makes up a version
of Marin who is forever a child. Char
lotte’s husband, Leonard, isn’t around
much, either. When asked about him at
one of many cocktail parties, Charlotte
says carelessly, “He runs guns. I wish
they had caviar.” That Charlotte is a
mystery to Grace is part of the story:
what sense can be made of a woman
who spends half her time at the airport,
watching planes take off for other places?
Grace tries to shape these fragments and
images of Charlotte into a coherent
whole because she loves her, though she
has no real language to express that love
and Charlotte isn’t around to receive it.
“A Book of Common Prayer” is an act
of journalistic reconstruction disguised
as fiction: a Graham Greene story within
a V. S. Naipaul novel, but told from a
woman’s perspective, or two women’s per
spectives, if you believe Charlotte, which
you shouldn’t. In a review of “The Exe
cutioner’s Song,” Norman Mailer’s 1979
book about the Utah murderer Gary
Gilmore, Didion writes, of life in the
West, “Men tend to shoot, get shot, push
off, move on. Women pass down stories.”
This is true of life in Boca Grande, too.
Grace wants to pass down what she knows
about Charlotte and, thereby, what she
might know about herself. And yet some
of the drama rests, of course, in what she
can’t know. After marrying, Grace says,
she pursued biochemistry on an amateur
level. The field appeals to her because
“demonstrable answers are common
place and ‘personality’ absent.” She adds:
I am interested for example in learning that
such a “personality” trait as fear of the dark ex-
ists irrelative to patterns of child-rearing in the
Mato Grosso or in Denver, Colorado.... Fear
of the dark is an arrangement of fifteen amino
acids. Fear of the dark is a protein. I once di-
agrammed this protein for Charlotte. “I don’t
quite see why calling it a protein makes it any
different,” Charlotte said, her eyes flickering co-
vertly back to a battered Neiman-Marcus Christ-
mas catalogue she had received in the mail that
morning in May.... “I mean I don’t quite see
your point.”
I explained my point.
“I’ve never been afraid of the dark,” Char-
lotte said after a while, and then, tearing out a
photograph of a small child in a crocheted dress:
“This would be pretty on Marin.”
Since Marin was the child Charlotte had lost
to history and was at the time of her disappear-
ance eighteen years old, I could only conclude
that Charlotte did not care to pursue my point.
Also, for the record, Charlotte was afraid
of the dark.
Facts don’t necessarily reveal who we
are, but our contradictions almost always
do: it’s the warring self—the self that’s
capable of both caring for others and in
tense selfinterest—that makes a story.
And if Grace is drawn to anything it’s a
story; narrative—investigating it, creat
ing it—gives her something to live for.
Part of what so captivates me about “A
Book of Common Prayer” is that, on
some level, it’s a book about writing,
which captures Didion’s love of cerebral
thrillerromances, such as Joseph Con
rad’s 1915 tale “Victory” or Carol Reed’s
1949 film version of Graham Greene’s
“The Third Man,” in which a man tries
to piece together the story of his friend’s
life. But the dominant ethos of the novelis one that Didion discovered as a teen
ager, while reading Ernest Hemingway.
Writing about Hemingway in this mag
azine in 1998, Didion noted:
The very grammar of a Hemingway sen-
tence dictated, or was dictated by, a certain
way of looking at the world, a way of looking
but not joining, a way of moving through but
not attaching, a kind of romantic individual-
ism distinctly adapted to its time and source.Charlotte’s failure is that she attaches.
She can’t move through in the way that
Grace can, or believes she can. Charlotte
has her own stories to tell, but how can
you give force or form to a piece of writ
ing when you’re immune to veracity? You
can only write fantasy, tell the world not
who you are but who you want to be.
Charlotte’s fantasy includes the convic
tion that her strange and troubling fam
ily is a family. “In many ways writing is
the act of saying I, of imposing oneself
upon other people, of saying listen to me,
see it my way, change your mind,” Didion
noted in her wonderful 1976 essay “Why
I Write.” “There’s no getting around the
fact that setting words on paper is the
tactic of a secret bully, an invasion.” Char
lotte composes several “Letters from Cen
tral America,” with a view to having The
New Yorker publish her reportorially soft,
inaccurate work, but the editors decline.
Charlotte’s ineptitude doesn’t keep us
from rooting for her, though, because,
despite it all, she doesn’t complain and
never loses heart, and how many of us
could do the same, if, like Charlotte, we
loved a child who couldn’t love us, or
married a man who was indifferent to
our pain? Grace’s sometimes smug re
sponses to Charlotte’s highheeled strolls
into political and emotional quicksand
are more upsetting than Charlotte’s mis
takes, because Grace believes she knows
better, when, in fact, no one does. What
Charlotte teaches Grace, directly and in
directly, is that, no matter how much you
want to tell the truth—or, at least, your
truth—the world will twist and distort
your story. Didion closes her most love
lorn and visceral novel with Grace say
ing, with sad finality, “I have not been
the witness I wanted to be.”I
don’t think it’s necessary to read
chronologically through the Library
of America volume—which, in addi
tion to the novels, includes Didion’s
“It’s not nuts she stores up as much as resentment.” seminal essay collections “Slouching