Joan Didion’s A Book of Common Prayer

 A Book of Common Prayer, Joan Didion, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Living in a cloud, Lack of Attachment

This book infuriated me.  When I articulate my fury, you will see that it stands on a very tippy base, but that doesn’t take anything away from the strength of that fury.  Perhaps it can be redirected.  Initially, I was furious with Joan Didion herself.  She went to a South American country in the 1970s, spent four weeks there, came down with a fever, went home and wrote, as if in a fever, about an imaginary South American country that was run by American Ex-Pats.  In this book, A Book of Common Prayer, she created layer upon layer of characters, all interacting in complicated ways and, despite it being set in a South American country, none of the characters that were focal, no one that we got to know and be disgusted by or care about, was indigenous to that country.  It was as if the natives mattered not a hoot.

OK, so I could be just indignant in a very general way about American exceptionalism and our assumption that when we take care of other countries that’s what we do, without ever getting to know those countries or the connecting with and valuing their native ways.  We believe that the American way of doing things is the right way and our self-righteousness blinds us to the virtues of those we interact with.  The irony here is that my self-righteousness is fueled by one week – one week – spent in the country of Nicaragua, something that I chronicled when I first started blogging over ten years ago.

I believed Joan Didion to be a careful writer and chronicler based on her being a journalist as well as a fiction writer and her having carefully chronicled her grief in The Year of Magical Thinking and, posthumously, her relationship with her husband and daughter in Letters to John.  I was puzzled, as I was reading the second book, by Didion’s comfort with being told what to do by her therapist.  

The character in this book that most closely resembles Didion is Grace, a woman whose family money was made in the mines of Colorado, but who was raised in California – as was Didion.  Grace married into the ruling family of the imaginary country, Boca Grande – the big mouth, so named for the bay that is on the coast of the capitol town.  She was trained as a social scientist and as a biologist, and she takes a position of reserve from the political intrigue between her two brothers-in-law who are vying for supremacy in the country, all while Grace, now a widow, controls the majority of land, wealth and power.

Grace, as narrator, defines her task in the first paragraph of the book as a chronicler of Charlotte’s life.  Charlotte is a beautiful and sexually evocative woman who lands in Boca Grande after her daughter, in a Patty Hurst like moment, has blown up an airplane and gone underground.  Charlotte has been married twice, and her daughter’s death has summoned Charlotte's first husband who takes her, with her second husband’s permission – indeed encouragement – on a cross country odyssey after their daughter’s disappearance, sleeping with Charlotte and whoever they pick up along the way, while Charlotte is pregnant with her second husband’s child – a child who is born premature and hydrocephalic, and to whom, after he is born, Charlotte becomes as attached to as any character in the book, holding him as he dies against the wishes of those at the hospital who would have disposed of him for her. 

Grace’s attempt to describe Charlotte’s life – with Grace demonstrating more interest if not attachment to her than to anyone else in the story – feels empty.  She is precise in her description – and, in an interview with Studs Terkel, Didion describes her characters as if they were not her product, but people who emerged on the page for her, in whom she takes interest and who reminds others (and perhaps herself) of people they have met in their lives.  For instance, when she talks about Charlotte’s first husband, who is brilliant, but an intrusive, self-absorbed, know-it-all who initially charms and eventually alienates everyone he comes in contact with, she notes that many people say, “Oh, he is just like my first husband.”  And when Turkel asks her if Charlotte is aware of her provocative sexiness, Didion responds that she doesn’t believe she is aware of that but would miss it if people didn’t respond to her sexuality when she was in a room.  And it is this emptiness - the sense of being defined by others react to her - that seems to lie like a blanket over the book as a whole.

And I found the interview even more infuriating.  Don’t get me wrong – it is a great interview.  Turkel has clearly closely read the book and clearly enjoyed it – they read sections of it together – the book came to life for me in different ways as a result of the interview – but they did not put the book into context.  They never once talked about the impact on a country of being ruled by people who had essentially no connection with or concern for the people over whom they ruled.  They accepted the emptiness of all of the characters, not just Charlotte, as a fact - as a feat - of good writing.  These people were all self-concerned – wrapped in their petty interpersonal squabbles and their lives lived in Paris, New Orleans and San Francisco, and their lives in Boca Grande were largely vacuous and disconnected from the people they were ruling.  It was as if the clear painting of the characters absolved them of talking about the implications of these people running the world - as if we all know that this is how the world runs...

The person who, in the book, connected most closely with the people of Boca Grande was Charlotte.  She was a tourist – a tourista – but Grace calls her, in reality, a sojourner.  She volunteered – first in the planned parenthood clinic, where she insisted that women use an American form of birth control – the diaphragm – even though the women would be unlikely to persist in using it and should be given an IUD, and then in the clinic that inoculated people against malaria, but she expressed no concern when a guerilla general destroyed box after box of sera just because he could.  She was interested in the concept of helping, but not really in helping.

As I have talked to people who know much more about Joan Didion that I do, it has become clear to me that she meant to be joining me in my judgmental attitude towards these individuals who were so casually living lives as if they didn’t impact others.  She wanted us – the US – to get upset about our trust that our government was doing good overseas – and that we always have the best interests of others on mind when we intervene. 

This book felt very much like a book of its time.  Though I was a teenager in the 1970s, and a pretty cloistered one living in the Midwest and largely unaware of the world stage, the hippie drop-out attitude, one that I was enamored of more because it was in style, and I was able to align my values – love of others, love of the land – with the ungrounded principles of the movement, is an attitude that Didion was vehemently opposed to, but clearly depicts.  She intended, I think, to be lampooning it in this set piece, that, to me, rings very true about the moment (but also speaks to the shallowness of our current concern about climate change that we espouse while driving around in SUVs).  But I think Didion puts too much trust in the reader to get that she is criticizing rather than simply reporting on the current state of affairs.

I know that this is inconsistent of me.  I frequently rail against directors who don’t trust their audience to think through the material and to have their own emotional reactions to it.  I hate it when I am manipulated into feeling something.  But in this case, I think that Grace’s comfort with her own role – and her inability to see that something may be going on that is beyond her ken – is too subtly portrayed.  I think we may need to be hit a bit over the head in order to get the message.

My friend who knows much more about Didion than I do maintains that part of her preparation as a writer was to write out by hand copies of Hemingway books.  She was sudying his spare still.  She is imitating it here, perhaps, and she, like the good analysts of old, is being intentionally removed - letting us react to her as we choose.  Perhaps I have been manipulted into being furious, but subtly, without her ever acknowledging her own fury, simply, by pretending to be neutral, she has evoked in me the partisanship she wants me to feel.  Or I am giving her too much credit.  I don't know.

So, here’s the real spoiler – I am about to talk about the end of the book.  If you haven’t read the book and intend to, you might want to stop here.  In either case, here we go:

The petty squabble, played out as a war, between Grace’s two brother-in-laws, one of whom is sleeping with Charlotte (under the nose of his wife), and the other of whom uses the worst sort of disdainful language to dismiss her as a human being, is not spooling out according to the usual plan where the guerillas come into town, are used as a screen to allow for a transition of power that isn’t really a transition but a shift, and then killed or chased back into the jungle.  Instead, the guerillas are better armed, they are more focused on their own aims, and they aren’t about to be quelled.  The armed dispute goes on much longer than it is scripted to.

Grace gets that this is unusual and prepares to leave the country until everything is sorted out.  (After all, as the chief landowner, wealthiest citizen, and de facto leader of a country she has nothing to do with, she must needs find safety rather than manage a situation that is spinning out of control).  Grace is concerned about Charlotte, but it is clear that space-cadet Charlotte, who has a Tennessee Williams like confidence in the good nature of strangers, actually does see what is going on, and decides to stay on, effectively committing suicide.

Some suicides can be understood as the execution that follows a judgment of a guilt in a capital crime.  What crime did Charlotte commit?  Was it failing to connect with her daughter so that she became so lost that she killed people based on a hazy sense of right and wrong?  Was it that she never asserted herself and ran her own life but simply bounced from experience to experience trusting that her good looks would lead men to “care” for her?  Charlotte trusted Grace to deliver family heirlooms to her daughter, and the question at the end of the book was whether Charlotte was the one who knew all along…  And Grace wonders if she is more like Charlotte than she knew.  

The weird thing is that, in letters to John, it was clear that Didion’s relationship with her daughter would end of being not entirely unlike Charlotte’s relationship with hers.  There was a seemingly unbridgeable gap between the life that Didion led and the life that her daughter could lead – and her daughter seemed to fill that gap with drugs and alcohol. 

In so far as Didion is setting Grace up to be us - hoping that we, like Grace, recognize our complicity in a corrupt system, she does this - based on my understanding of my friend's depiction of her - from a high horse.  You hippies should learn from us Beatniks, that we really need to have an intellectual basis to the movements that we engage in.  We need to be disciplined.  If we do it right, everything will be alright.

Perhaps the question that his book ultimately asks is whether any of us can wake from our dream, quit floating through life, and engage in a way that is substantial.  And the question after the book is, that even if we do this, life is going to be hard - and much more complicated than even the best observers observations will allow us to be free from.

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