From a Washington Post book review by Charles Arrowsmith headlined “Joan Didion’s ‘Let Me Tell You What I Mean’ shows a writer ahead of her time”:
Joan Didion has been consecrated in her own lifetime. In the five decades since “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” her work, particularly her nonfiction, has been widely celebrated. . . .
Partly the chilled prose — ahead of its time, anticipating both the personal essay boom and the numbed affect that would become typical of Generation X. But also her extraordinary insight. Nathaniel Rich, prefacing “South and West,” wrote that she “saw her era more clearly than anyone else, which is another way of saying that she was able to see the future.” In his introduction to “Let Me Tell You What I Mean,” her slim new volume, Hilton Als suggests that it’s Didion’s “feeling for the uncanny” that distinguishes her contribution to American nonfiction. . . .
The clarity of Didion’s vision and the precision with which she sets it down do indeed feel uncanny. Her writing has often revealed what was previously hidden, parsed what was unconscious, be it the miasmic unease of the late 1960s or the subterranean structures of national politics. Reading her now, she does seem prophetic, as manifested, for instance, in her concerns in 1968 about the weaknesses of the “traditional press,” whose unspoken attitudes and “quite factitious ‘objectivity’ ” come “between the page and the reader like so much marsh gas.” Perhaps those iconic sunglasses were really X-ray specs.
“Let Me Tell You What I Mean” collects 12 pieces written between 1968 and 2000. . . .The Saturday Evening Post articles are bite-size, trailers rather than the whole movie, and some later articles have been conspicuously overtaken by the passage of time — an essay on Martha Stewart in the New Yorker, for instance, written four years before her prison time. Meanwhile, the absence of anything post-2000 is cause for regret. Oh, for Didion’s take on the Obama years. The alt-right. The Trump presidency. . . .
There are wicked reminders, for instance, of her acid humor. In an account of a Gamblers Anonymous meeting, she observes, “I had not heard so many revelations of a certain kind since I used to fall into conversations on Greyhound buses under the misapprehension that it was a good way to learn about life.” In “Pretty Nancy,” a swipe at then-Gov. Ronald Reagan’s wife, a taciturn, almost Beckettian exchange between Nancy and her 10-year-old son is gleefully transcribed by a Didion waiting to pounce on “a woman who seems to be playing out some middle-class American woman’s daydream, circa 1948.”. . .
Writing about the evolution of that immaculate style in “Telling Stories,” she recalls her time writing captions for Vogue: “We were connoisseurs of synonyms. We were collectors of verbs. . . . Less was more, smooth was better, and absolute precision essential to the monthly grand illusion. Going to work for Vogue was, in the late 1950s, not unlike training with the Rockettes.”. . .
Didion once wrote that her advantage as a reporter is that “people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests.” This is also an incalculable advantage to her readers. Her bewitching blend of humility and disdain and her unsentimental yet compassionate eye are welcome tonics for frenzied times.
—
Also see a review in the New York Times by Durga Chew-Bose headlined “Joan Didion Revisits the Past Once More”—from the review:
In five decades’ worth of essays, reportage and criticism, Didion has documented the charade implicit in how things are, in a first-person, observational style that is not sacrosanct but common-sensical. Seeing as a way of extrapolating hypocrisy, disingenuousness and doubt, she’ll notice the hydrangeas are plastic and mention it once, in passing, sorting the scene. Her gaze, like a sentry on the page, permanently trained on what is being disguised. . . .
The essays in “Let Me Tell You What I Mean” are at once funny and touching, roving and no-nonsense. They are about humiliation and about notions of rightness. About mythmaking, fiction writing, her “failed” intellectualism and the syntactic insides of Hemingway’s craft. . . .
Didion’s pen is like a periscope onto the creative mind — and, as this collection demonstrates, it always has been.
Speak Your Mind