Thirty Second Book Review

I’m still not done with Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, even though I’m probably less than two essays from the end. I keep thinking that if I put off finishing it, I’ll blog about it right when I’m done and it’s still fresh in my mind, but of course it’s no longer fresh anyways. So what the hell:

I just started Zadie Smith’s On Beauty this morning, and it is something that Slouching Towards Bethlehem isn’t, at least not as a whole—compelling. Didion’s first essay, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” was the exception. It grabbed me by the toes and pulled me in (which perhaps unfairly set my expectations for the tone in the following essays). “Some Dreamers” is a murder-mystery story with all the necessary ingredients: love affairs, betrayal, denial, drugs. Didion’s spareness is especially intriguing in this context, because she’s not as chatty or as judgmental as your best friend might be in telling you the same story, but nor is she writing cold hard journalism. California, she says, “is the last stop for all those who come from somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways. Here is where they are trying to find a new lifestyle…” After the sets the scene, she weaves, Memento-like, from the scene of murder backwards to the events leading up to it. It was the only essay I had to force myself to set aside when my Metra ride ended.

The rest of the essays are good—they’re well-written, and they’re a weird and fascinating window into the 1960s. Joan Baez, fuckin’ hippies, drug culture, it’s all there. Didion is sort of the antithesis to other, more contemporary writers I’ve read in the past few years, the kind of writers whose prose is so thick and lush that you have to gasp for air every other sentence. In that sense she’s refreshing. And while “compelling” isn’t a quality required of everything I pick up, and while Slouching Towards Bethlehem was still far from being a chore… well, maybe it’s just the kind of book I appreciate—for her swift insights and deliberate writing—more than I love.

(That took me longer than thirty seconds to write, but that’s still about the amount of time I devoted to thinking things through. Take it as you will.)

* * *

current book: I suppose now I’ll have to blog something about On Beauty, since I’ve already mentioned that I’m enjoying it…

current music: It’s my own damn fault that The Shins’ “Phantom Limb” is running a loop in my head. Better that, however, than the campfire song “Lloyd George Knew My Father,” which wormed its way into my ear whilst fact checking a bit on David Lloyd George earlier today. It is more annoying and even more pointless than “The Song that Never Ends.” If you don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, consider yourself a lucky, lucky person.