Joan Didion's writing has a particular way of taking root in one's consciousness. Her voice slips into the brain and settles in as a familiar friend, sipping wine and telling stories, and massaging those parts of the cerebral cortex that take the most pleasure in soft rhythms and simple words. For me, this happened while reading "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," her astonishing collection of essays first published in 1968. "I Can't Get That Monster out of My Mind" (a perfect title) has resonated for years, a phrase she borrowed from a schlocky old movie to capture the malaise of Hollywood and moviemaking — a world that eventually became the lifeblood of her career and that of her husband and fellow novelist, John Gregory Dunne.
In that world, Ms. Didion became a celebrity — rich, connected, and envied — until the shattering deaths of her husband and daughter in 2003 and 2004, seemed to deliver a mortal blow to her shimmering life. Who could ever be jealous of Ms. Didion again? But remarkably enough, those tragic events resulted in Ms. Didion's most celebrated work ever: "The Year of Magical Thinking," published in the fall of 2005. It topped the New York Times best-seller list, won a National Book Award, and has now been turned into a Broadway play starring Vanessa Redgrave, opening next week. And with rave reviews from all quarters, it has earned Ms. Didion a status rarely afforded anyone in the world of letters: immunity from criticism.
But do memoirists of personal pain deserve the freedom from negativity that our culture seems to willingly provide them? It's a question that Ms. Didion's latest literary triumph brings to mind, though to express it aloud is to invite shock and horror among anyone who has suffered a similar loss. How, after all, can one criticize a woman, who in the course of one year, lost her entire immediate family, and was forced to confront a level of grief beyond compare? The first time I gently raised this question with a friend — making mention of Ms. Didion's propensity for narcissistic name-dropping, the cold, unemotional tone of her prose, and her sudden conversion to an Oprah-like commitment to personal healing — she burst into tears and accused me of being a beast. "How can you criticize Joan Didion?" she asked angrily. "That's her life. After what she's been through, she's entitled to write whatever she wants."
There's no argument that in the wake of Mr. Dunne's unexpected fatal heart attack, in the living room of their East Side apartment one December evening in 2003, Ms. Didion delivered a yarn more compelling than any she'd ever imagined in fiction. She offered up a searingly honest, deeply painful, and totally true rendering of a year in hell. The night her husband died, they'd come from visiting their daughter in a Manhattan hospital where she lay unconscious from an infection that would eventually kill her, too. Her narrative shares a journey of suffering and sadness that cannot be disputed or diminished.
But can a reader legitimately argue with the book's weaknesses without inviting scorn? Not in mainstream journalism, apparently, where I could find no major reviews that dared take issue with her repeated references to dinner at Morton's and houses in Malibu and Brentwood. But interestingly, a visit to Amazon.comshows a wide spectrum of opinion about the book — much of it harshly negative. Out of nearly 400 reviews, nearly a third of them viciously attack Ms. Didion for her pretentiousness, her coldness, her sense of detachment from events — and some deeply resented her sense of hopelessness in the aftermath of her husband's passing. But more than anything else, many readers rejected the book as little more than a collection of references to names, places, and products that demonstrated Ms. Didion's detachment from mainstream American life.
There's no catharsis in her book, these critics argued — no sense that she has come through her experience with a new passion for life; to these amateur but heartfelt critics, "The Year of Magical Thinking" does little more than confirm that death is, in the end, a painful and grueling ordeal for survivors. And yet (as many of the Amazon commenters point out), it's less of an ordeal for someone with the means to stay at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, or — for distraction — to get an assignment from the New York Review of Books to cover the 2004 political conventions. Even her memories of her husband involve allusions to their exalted social status; at the 2004 Republican Convention at Madison Square Garden, she flashes back to an evening spent there with John and David Halberstam and his wife at a Knicks-Lakers game, in seats provided by the commissioner of the NBA.
I don't entirely share these criticisms; with only her own life to chronicle, there was no way for Ms. Didion to avoid the reality of her friends' celebrity or her own connections. Still, it seems odd for this quirky and personal memoir to have so completely avoided questioning or criticism. I wonder whether book critics such as Michiko Kakutani — so quick to mercilessly attack others for elitist prose — went easy on Ms. Didion out of respect for her pain. While I understand it, I'm not sure the gain for anyone (even Ms. Didion) of this immunity pact. It's the same sort of reverential treatment that led the public to feel so betrayed when James Frey's "A Million Little Pieces" turned out to be false. Both circumstances reinforce the need for a critical community unafraid to question even the most exalted of writers in the most painful of circumstances, or risk a disconnect between readers and reviewers that will serve neither side.
