The White Album

Any work by Joan Didion is inherently difficult to summarize in a short review. Didion herself has what every honest writer desperately wants: she actually makes a living from her writing, and she lives a glamorous lifestyle full of traveling and mingling with artists, rock stars and other culturally influential people. While maintaining that hip visage, Didion still presents herself as a shockingly accessible person. She peppers her prose with sensual descriptions of furniture, the green fragrance of a kitchen garden, the feel of the California breeze gently flowing through the living room, and the way the design and decor of a house has the profound ability to influence the moods of its occupants.

This is a woman who appreciates a well-planned kitchen and the bounty of food that is prepared in it. (I started a kitchen journal because she had offhandedly mentioned she kept one in The Year of Magical Thinking. What better way to remember holidays or impromptu parties than with descriptions of the food everyone savored that night?) But she's not just a pretty face. Didion is a masterful writer who possesses a blazing intelligence and the capacity to link the esoteric with the commonplace. Her pieces are never lightweight essays on the sex life of a vapid actress or the lengthening ability of one brand of mascara over another. She is a hard-core reporter who manages to present mundane subjects --Caltrans (California Department of Transportation), The Getty, orchids -- with a necessary critical perspective. For her interpretation of more salacious stories -- crazy James Pike, the Manson trial -- she personalizes them and, in an often intimate and vulnerable way, manages to fit them in to her own human experience for all to see.

The White Album is Didion's love letter to California. In this space, she uses a series of essays to work through the contradictions and disparaties inherent in her beloved home, while at the same time addressing her own insecurities revolving around her struggles with various mental afflictions. Her tales of the excessively proletariat governor's mansion, the artifice-lacking-edifice lifestyle of Hollywood, and the suburban onslaught of sprawling new shopping centers takes a snapshot of late 1960s and early 1970s materialistic California as only one who had a front-row seat to the tumultuous time can. Didion strips the gilt of California and lays bare the true essence for all to see, and she invites the reader to live vicariously through her writing. She wants you to sit in the mind-numbing traffic of "the 42-Mile Loop"; she persuades you visit her bedroom to share the blinding pain of one of her migraines; she asks you to wait with her in a recording studio for the sexified Jim Morrison to join the rest of the Doors for a session. Didion covers an unexpectedly broad range of topics in this collection, but when viewed in hindsight, it adeptly encapsulates the vast panorama of life in California during a short few years. Often, it is uncomfortably revealing, but just as frequently it captures the beauty and exhilarating possibilities the state has grown to represent in our collective mythology. Through her obsessively cerebral scrutiny for places and events, Didion has summed up the big beautiful paradox that is California.