Joan Didion

I'm not sure why it startled me to find Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem set so close to home -- not just L.A. or Southern California, but the east-of-Eastside 2nd generation Okie and southwestern folks I grew up with -- and in the 50's and 60's, while I was there.

The inanity of murder in the sort of bilgewater sameness of everything rings just true.

The rest continues as a sort of collage of half-essays in response to popular culture. Didion takes her title, of course, from famous end of Yeat's poem. The 60's was of course a time when many felt that various centers "could not hold," perhaps because certain central facts were finally under some little examination by a portion of the populace.

Didion gives a desultory view of all this, always entertaining. But in some places it seems she wanders from critical points. John Wayne is heroic in his battle with cancer, it seems, but we hear no mention that he and almost all the cast and crew most likely got it from shooting a movie too near the Dirty Harry H-Bomb blast. Likewise there's no comparison of Wayne's nonservice in WWII and his hawkline politics and screen persona.

But maybe this is part of what we pay to allow her to skip blithely to Joan Baez and her school for activists, followed by a glimpse into the apparent chaos of the Haight-Ashbury drug scene in which she manages to render the disorder, but not the order.