Joan Didion - Slouching Towards Bethlehem

 

Rating: 3/5

 

Review:

Excellent writing, less good content 

 

I find it hard to rate this collection of essays. In many ways they are excellent because Joan Didion was a very fine writer; her style is clear, precise, unsensational and very readable and she took a lot of trouble to talk to her subjects so there is real content here rather than a lot of authorial waffle as in a lot of such essays.

Nonetheless, I found the collection a bit unsatisfactory. I think this is because behind Didion’s flat style there is a lot of editorialising in her focus. There’s nothing wrong with that in an essay, of course, but there was a pretty persistent focus on a slightly mocking tone and on quotes which she chose to damn people out of their own mouths. For example, Where The Kissing Never Stops is a portrait of Joan Baez and her Institute, which Didion makes very damning without ever explicitly saying so. The same is true of the essay which gives its title to the book and of most others here. There may have been a good deal to criticise, but the persistent mocking and damning tone applied to people whose intentions were very decent, if naive, began to get me down in the end.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem is worth reading for the quality of the writing and it does give a picture of an age, but it’s a very one-sided and cynical picture so approach with caution.