Didion was a pattern-seeker—a writer with an uncanny ability to scan a text, a folder of clippings, or an entire society and, like a genius eying figures, find the markers pointing out how the whole worked.
In a New Yorker essay about Hemingway, her early influence, she performed an unmatched reading of the beginning of “A Farewell to Arms,” noting how the sudden, pattern-breaking absence of a “the” before the third appearance of “leaves” casts “exactly what it was meant to cast, a chill, a premonition.” It was characteristic of Didion to work this way, in the danger zone between sensibility and objectivity: to be receptive to a passing feeling, a change in cast, and then to bear down, with unsparing rigor, in the work of understanding why.
Didion reported on the hippies—they’re the subject of the title essay of “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” which created a technique, later germane to her fiction, of telling a story through jagged juxtapositions that she called “flash cuts”—but recognized that what she saw in the Haight-Ashbury was less about them than about an “atomization” of communication and connection across America.
Didion often gets identified, along with Norman Mailer, Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, and other snappy dressers, as part of the New Journalism, by which people usually mean long narrative reporting imprinted with a writer’s style and point of view.
Subjectivity was paramount, yet her thinking, as it developed in the pages of The New York Review of Books, was basically systemic: in “Miami” , about the governmental policies supporting California’s frontier image of itself.
“What we learn from doing it is what writing was for.” How to put together a paragraph, whether to add a “the” or not: by the time you’re thirty, the sound of your best writing is already in your mind’s ear, and the hardest part is listening.
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