After Henry

National Review, June 22, 1992 by David Klinghoffer

More and more during the 1980s, Joan Didion has preferred to stay home and read the newspaper. This is not to say the famous journalist has become a hermit. During the past decade she has kept homes in two cities--New York and Los Angeles--plus a vacation place in Hawaii. Also, rather than the other way around, famous people now pay calls on her. During the recent primary here in New York, Jerry Brown stayed not in a hotel, but with Joan Didion. Nor--again, to be fair--did all her information come from newspapers. She watched TV, too.

Instead of one of the most devastating reporters in America, Miss Didion has turned into a media critic. She can still be devastating, as she is in the best essays in this new collection. Writing about the 1988 presidential election for The New York Review of Books, in a piece called "Insider Baseball," she has a way of slicing effortlessly through the fatty tissue to get straight to the vital organs.

"Insider Baseball" isn't about the election itself, but the coverage of the election. So, for instance, she reports about the "ball-toss" staged at one point by the Dukakis campaign. On an airport tarmac in San Diego, Dukakis tossed a baseball to his press secretary, repeating the "toss" several times in order to get it right for the TV cameras. As witnesses to the "eerily contrived event," journalists then filed stories describing something altogether different: a spontaneous moment of fun for the suddenly "jaunty" governor, as Joe Klein called him in New York magazine. Getting out into the air for what must have been at least a week, and simply comparing reality with reported reality, Miss Didion caught reporters in the act again and again.

"What we had in the tarmac arrival with ball tossing, then," she writes, "was an understanding: a repeated moment witnessed by many people, all of whom believed it to be a setup and yet most of whom believed that only an outsider, only someone too |naive' to know the rules of the game, would so describe it. . . . The narrative is made up of many such understandings, tacit agreements, small and large, to overlook the observable in the interest of obtaining a dramatic story line."

Narratives and story lines--false, sentimental, usually pathetic--are a longtime obsession for Miss Didion. Instead of recognizing the apparent randomness of events, she thinks, people tell themselves stories, to force a meaning on it all. What she finds most disconcerting about Los Angeles, the city that is the subject of this book's middle third, is that its residents lack a common sense of narrative. As she puts it in "Times Mirror Square," first published in The New Yorker, ". . . there is in Los Angeles no memory everyone shares, no monument everyone knows, no historical references meaningful as the long sweep of the ramps where the San Diego and Santa Monica freeways intersect, as the way the hard Santa Ana light strikes the palm trees against the white western wall of the Carnation Milk building on Wilshire Boulevard."

In "Sentimental Journeys," about the rape of the Central Park jogger, she convincingly describes the way the New York papers focused on the ensuing trial as a kind of symbolic theatrical play, depicting the rape of their city by "crime" and its redemption by law enforcement. This was a way of avoiding--by sentimentalization--the things Miss Didion believes are truly wrong with New York: the levels of bureaucracy, corruption, and taxation, which rival those of the most squalid Third World capitals.

Since she began thinking this way, in the late Sixties, Miss Didion has definitely been on to something. Since then, she's been writing the same sort of icily compelling prose--exact, often exhilarating but never exhilarated, baleful but never outraged, or even miffed in the manner of so much liberal political and social reporting. There is in her writing an instantly recognizable personality: somehow disappointed, almost amused. You only have to see a few of her words particular usages she has made almost exclusively her own--a way of using the verb "tended," the adjective "certain," the phrases "it was understood," "it was said," "I recall"--to know you're reading Joan Didion. Among journalists, she remains master of the single, luminous, knock-out detail.

In its opening piece, "After Henry," she dedicates this book to Henry Robbins, her first editor, who convinced her as a young writer that she could "sit down alone and do it." She still can. The difference between Joan Didion now and then is reflected in the startling number of sentences in After Henry that begin like this: "The schedule [of George Bush, on a trip on which Miss Didion did not accompany him] in Israel included, according to reports in the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, . . ." How much time must she spend every day just washing the newsprint off her fingers?

In Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), her first collection, Miss Didion visited Joan Baez's Institute for the Study of Nonviolence and Robert Maynard Hutchins's even more absurd Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. While maintaining her posture as the always-outsider, she hung out with hippies, and observed U. S. military men as they whored it up, boozed it up, and then memorialized the experience with tattoos on Hotel Street in Honolulu. Now for news of the world Miss Didion mainly turns to the New York Times.