Slouching Towards Bethlehemby Joan Didion
Rating: ★★★½
Publication Date: January 1, 1968
Genre: essays
Pages: 256
ReRead?: No
Project: a century of women
The first nonfiction work by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era, Slouching Towards Bethlehem remains, forty years after its first publication, the essential portrait of America— particularly California—in the sixties. It focuses on such subjects as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up a girl in California, ruminating on the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture.
I haven’t read very much non-fiction for this project, which might be a bit of an oversight. However, when I was looking for a book for 1968, I noticed that this one qualified.
I have not read much by Joan Didion and have always been vaguely bemused by her cultural importance because her body of work seems insubstantial to me. I did read her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking last year for a book club that ended up getting cancelled, and, while I didn’t dislike it, I didn’t find it to be some sort of grief rosetta stone, worthy of the hype.
So, I went into this with minimal expectations. And, overall, that’s about where I ended up. There were certain essays that really resonated – I especially liked the one about keeping a notebook.
“See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do… on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there…”
I thought that the title essay was very good, although the poem that lent it the title is better. The essay about Hawaii, I found weird, and ill-fitting to the collection overall.
The essays that touched on L.A. in the 1960’s were the most interesting to me, from a purely historical perspective.
“The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.”
And quotes from her piece on the Santa Ana winds have been everywhere recently, with the fires in L.A.
“It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself; Nathanael West perceived that, in The Day of the Locust; and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end. Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.”
Anyway, I remain somewhat bemused by her cultural importance, but Didion can definitely construct a sentence.