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3.63 AVERAGE
3.63 AVERAGE
Definitely full of Didion's exquisite voice and her pithy skill of capturing life. I just found it to be a notebook, and therefore I am unable to say, "Wow!"
Quick read, great insights from early 1970s south, relevant for today
Didon's description of the south is timeless and all too familiar. Her first chapter on New Orleans made me sink into my seat. Being in the midwest, her writing on the humid, soupy weather and its affect on those who live there rang all too true. She wrote about a time that was a changing thing, race was as much an issue then as it is now, and her candid words proved that even her beautiful writing can't sugar coat an intense political and moral struggle that has spanned decades.
While Joan Didion remains one of my favorite writers, this book is primarily a money-making ploy from her publisher. Published in hard-cover, South and West consists of 126 pages of Didion's notes from two previously unpublished reporting trips of hers: a roadtrip through the South in 1970 and an assignment to cover the Patty Hearst trial in 1976. There is a reason these pieces went unpublished - they lack the unifying intentionality and focus that make up Didion's other published essays. However, that doesn't mean that Didion's iconic wit and beautiful prose doesn't still shine through, and it does, at times. The characterization of the South as a place where "the atmosphere absorbs its own light, never reflects light but sucks it in until random objects glow with morbid luminescence," for instance, is captivating. I particularly appreciated Didion's recurring question of how location and climate can shape regional attitudes: In the South they are convinced that they are capable of having bloodied their land with history. In the West we lack this conviction. Beautiful country burn again. Living now in California, Didion articulates something I have felt so strongly in the periphery but has always remained out of my direct line of sight: At the center of this story there is a terrible secret, a kernel of cyanide, and the secret is that the story doesn't matter, doesn't make any difference, doesn't figure. The snow still falls in the Sierra. The Pacific still trembles in its bowl. The great tectonic plates strain against each other while we sleep and wake. Rattlers in the dry grass. Sharks beneath the Golden Date. In the South they are convinced that they have bloodied their place with history. In the West we do not believe that anything we do can bloody the land, or change it, or touch it.
I just love Joan Didion. To me, she is the best essayist alive.
South and West is different from her other books, in that it is neither a collection or memoir. Instead, it's a notebook she kept as she and her husband traveled through the American South in 1970, plus some bonus reflections on California in 1976.
Because it's a notebook, there are no full-length essays here - not yet. To some, that might be a disappointment, but I found it fascinating to see her ideas take root, develop, turn back on themselves and connect to other observations. It's like taking a peek into her mind, getting a glimpse into her jumbled thoughts before they take on a solid form.
And even here, in these rough drafts and reflections, she manages to conjure vivid scenes and relay experiences in just a few pages.
What stays with me is the derelict reptile house somewhere in Mississippi, muddy and rainy, with snakes in cases. The southern journalists at some press gala for women in the South, who say they keep the TV on all day for "their pieces" and look at Didion in horror when she says she likes to drive around for inspiration instead. The way she is consistently estimated to be younger than she is, because her hair is not done up. A twenty year-old-girl at the manicurist's, who has been married for three years. Snapshots of the South: a black maid playing catch with a little white boy, gullies dense with mosquitoes, low vines, barefoot children playing next to a gas station. Didion's endless desire to return to California.
Among all the unfinished thoughts and random musings there are some really spot-on observations as well:
"In Coffeeville, Miss., at 6 p.m. there was a golden light and a child swinging in it, swinging from a big tree, over a big lawn, back and forth in front of a big airy house. To be a white middle-class child in a small southern town must be on certain levels the most golden way for a child to live in the United States" (81).
I'm also writing this less than a week after the storming of the Capitol (January 2021). I have spent quite some time in the South, and I have to state the obvious and reiterate that not all southerners are extreme right-wingers, or even conservatives.
Still, a sizeable chunk of the population in the South is, indeed, conservative, and yet another percentage of those are currently on the far-right.
Reading this book mere days after the storming of the Capitol, I cannot separate those facts (and those events) from the things I am reading in Didion's notebook.
It's eerie: in these 1970 reflections, you can already see the beginnings of a stark difference between the U.S. coasts on the one hand, and the rest of the country on the other hand.
I am quite familiar with 1970s California.
Reading about 1970s Mississippi feels like reading about a much, much earlier time. This sense of time-warp is also what causes Didion's disorientation, and her homesickness for California. She's never outrightly dismissive of the South, nor is she patronizing. But she is clearly - and unapologetically - uncomfortable.
In this notebook, those in the South are distrustful (and sometimes disdainful) of California and New York, which they view as too individualistic and too progressive.
At the same time, Didion is having dinner with a man who lives on a former plantation, now a regular farm that is still referred to as a plantation. He mostly grows cotton. Two of his tenant farmers are black. He says those people were also "at my dad's place," and calls them into the kitchen to come say hi to Didion.
It's uncomfortable, to say the least.
Meanwhile, in 1970 California, you have the first ethnic studies programs in universities. You have feminism. You have places where being gay is already accepted by some demographics. You have people smoking weed, reading Eastern philosophy, and protesting all kinds of social causes.
It's literally another world - already.
And now, here we are. 51 years later - the difference between the coasts and "fly-over country" (to use a pejorative term) is starker than ever.
In addition to merely having different priorities, we now even live in different realities.
Reading about the Didion's experiences in the South in 1970 is like looking back at the inception of a marriage that, by now, has gone horribly awry.
Looking at its beginnings, you can already see the warning signs, the little disagreements, the divergent view points keep causing friction. Now, over fifty years later, the couple has drifted so far apart, it has become virtually impossible to see eye to eye.
The only thing we can hope for, now, is that unlike such a couple, the country is not headed for divorce.
South and West is different from her other books, in that it is neither a collection or memoir. Instead, it's a notebook she kept as she and her husband traveled through the American South in 1970, plus some bonus reflections on California in 1976.
Because it's a notebook, there are no full-length essays here - not yet. To some, that might be a disappointment, but I found it fascinating to see her ideas take root, develop, turn back on themselves and connect to other observations. It's like taking a peek into her mind, getting a glimpse into her jumbled thoughts before they take on a solid form.
And even here, in these rough drafts and reflections, she manages to conjure vivid scenes and relay experiences in just a few pages.
What stays with me is the derelict reptile house somewhere in Mississippi, muddy and rainy, with snakes in cases. The southern journalists at some press gala for women in the South, who say they keep the TV on all day for "their pieces" and look at Didion in horror when she says she likes to drive around for inspiration instead. The way she is consistently estimated to be younger than she is, because her hair is not done up. A twenty year-old-girl at the manicurist's, who has been married for three years. Snapshots of the South: a black maid playing catch with a little white boy, gullies dense with mosquitoes, low vines, barefoot children playing next to a gas station. Didion's endless desire to return to California.
Among all the unfinished thoughts and random musings there are some really spot-on observations as well:
"In Coffeeville, Miss., at 6 p.m. there was a golden light and a child swinging in it, swinging from a big tree, over a big lawn, back and forth in front of a big airy house. To be a white middle-class child in a small southern town must be on certain levels the most golden way for a child to live in the United States" (81).
I'm also writing this less than a week after the storming of the Capitol (January 2021). I have spent quite some time in the South, and I have to state the obvious and reiterate that not all southerners are extreme right-wingers, or even conservatives.
Still, a sizeable chunk of the population in the South is, indeed, conservative, and yet another percentage of those are currently on the far-right.
Reading this book mere days after the storming of the Capitol, I cannot separate those facts (and those events) from the things I am reading in Didion's notebook.
It's eerie: in these 1970 reflections, you can already see the beginnings of a stark difference between the U.S. coasts on the one hand, and the rest of the country on the other hand.
I am quite familiar with 1970s California.
Reading about 1970s Mississippi feels like reading about a much, much earlier time. This sense of time-warp is also what causes Didion's disorientation, and her homesickness for California. She's never outrightly dismissive of the South, nor is she patronizing. But she is clearly - and unapologetically - uncomfortable.
In this notebook, those in the South are distrustful (and sometimes disdainful) of California and New York, which they view as too individualistic and too progressive.
At the same time, Didion is having dinner with a man who lives on a former plantation, now a regular farm that is still referred to as a plantation. He mostly grows cotton. Two of his tenant farmers are black. He says those people were also "at my dad's place," and calls them into the kitchen to come say hi to Didion.
It's uncomfortable, to say the least.
Meanwhile, in 1970 California, you have the first ethnic studies programs in universities. You have feminism. You have places where being gay is already accepted by some demographics. You have people smoking weed, reading Eastern philosophy, and protesting all kinds of social causes.
It's literally another world - already.
And now, here we are. 51 years later - the difference between the coasts and "fly-over country" (to use a pejorative term) is starker than ever.
In addition to merely having different priorities, we now even live in different realities.
Reading about the Didion's experiences in the South in 1970 is like looking back at the inception of a marriage that, by now, has gone horribly awry.
Looking at its beginnings, you can already see the warning signs, the little disagreements, the divergent view points keep causing friction. Now, over fifty years later, the couple has drifted so far apart, it has become virtually impossible to see eye to eye.
The only thing we can hope for, now, is that unlike such a couple, the country is not headed for divorce.
Author Didion is an astute observer of the world that we see every day and bribgs it to life in crisp sentences. There is little fat on the bone, each word having depth for the moment.
This book shows a south that has changed very little over the years and still prefers the past over the future.
The west portion of the book is not as fleshed out but provides a small window of California, during a time in the 50's and 70's.
This book shows a south that has changed very little over the years and still prefers the past over the future.
The west portion of the book is not as fleshed out but provides a small window of California, during a time in the 50's and 70's.
I devoured Joan Didion in college and now want to reread her excellent books. This book is not one of her excellent books. I had no idea that South and West would bed 110 pages of her being annoyingly judgmental about the South and 10 meaningless pages about California. There is beautiful prose here, but I don't see a contribution to her work.
adventurous
informative
reflective
fast-paced
"It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been an eccentric and full of anger, and I wondered what form the anger would have taken. Would I have taken up causes, or would I have simply knifed somebody?"