Democracy

 Democracy by Joan Didion is her favorite piece of writing according to a recent interview. I'd read it years ago, but was clearly at a place then to not comprehend any of it: I'd forgotten the novel. (This happens a lot when I reflect on English classes I can't remember whose subjects are fascinating to me now. I should have gone to college two decades later.) Anyway, it's terrific. The protagonist Inez Victor, a distracted wife of a failed presidential candidate, makes her way through political scandal and family turmoil against the backdrop of America's failure in Vietnam and the evacuation of Saigon. As a daughter of Honolulu, Inez grew up assuming that American entrepreneurial spirit would colonize the frontiers of the Pacific. Her disillusionment with Vietnam parallels the failures in her personal life, to the point where she recognizes "history, or more exactly the particular undertow of having and not having, the convulsions of a world largely unaffected by the individual efforts of anyone in it." 

One of the pleasures of Democracy is that it contains many of Didion's greatest hits in one volume. It has the above-mentioned thesis about humanity: mechanistic, like in "Los Angeles Notebook"; unable to interpret events, like in "The White Album"; and producing a nihilistic ennui, like Play It As It Lays. In a fun postmodern twist, Joan Didion herself is a character, a reporter like from her essay collections, producing precise scenes but offering little by way of assurance or narrative. The messaging among some characters is focus-grouped and meaningless, like all of her subjects in Political Fictions. There's the vague global business deals and bargaining, like in Miami or Salvador--it does not come as a surprise that a major character is really trafficking opium more than "democracy." And droning persistently behind much of her work is the eerie specter of American militarism, whether it's an Army base in Colorado in "John Wayne: A Love Song" or a Pacific island obliterated by atomic tests in Democracy. The novel absolutely stands alone, and yet it can also serve as a good prologue to her tremendous oeuvre. 

Last Evenings on Earth

 Last Evenings on Earth by Roberto Bolaño is a fine short story collection that drifts between Chile, Mexico, Spain, India, the United States, and more. Like W. G. Sebald, Bolaño often writes around catastrophic events, putting the aftermath of the crisis in the forefront and only hinting at the crisis itself. For Sebald, it's the Holocaust; for Bolaño, it's the Pinochet era in Chile. Last Evenings on Earth, then, is a generally plotless collage of aimless protagonists and unexplainable happenings. The effect that begins to emerge, story by story, is one of dislocation, grief, and Hemingway's "grace under pressure." As readers we become forced to fill in the gaps in understanding--the ambiguity--with our own interpretation of that mood.  

My first attempt reading Bolaño was his most celebrated work, the novel 2666. That book also circled around a horrifying event--the murders of women in Mexico's Ciudad Juárez--until it didn't. For the first 400 pages, 2666 only hinted at the violence. After that, he plunged in and described, in clinical detail, the discovery of hundreds of bodies of sexual assaulted women. I was engaged with the first part of the text, but I was so nauseated by the second half that I had to put it down. I may or may not finish 2666, but I acknowledge that Bolaño is a tremendous talent. His work is serious, global, and insightful. His plot structures are surprising and well crafted. For me, he bridges the structural innovation of European fiction with the landscapes and romanticism of the Americas, and I'm excited to read more.

Dune

Dune by Frank Herbert is sometimes called the greatest science-fiction novel of all time. I have not read many science-fiction novels, but I have read a few that are, in fact, greater than Dune. Ursula Le Guin, for example, is a stronger writer with a better knack for multi-layered characters. Dune characters are distracting with their silly names, like Duncan Idaho or Princess Irulan; their gravely sophomoric dialogue; and their single-minded, unambiguous motivation. Too many times to count, one character would say something ominous, only to have his listener "swallow" in fear. There was a lot of swallowing. Unfortunately, Dune had many of the clunky problems that has kept me away from science fiction in the past. 

However, while distracting to read page by page, the novel as a whole is a successful exercise in imagination and world building. Like Le Guin, Herbert blends space travel with religion, anthropology, government, economics, and ecology. His universe is comprehensive and, once you get past the individual characters, believable. There's quite a bit of backstory in Dune that is at times alluded to and at times fully explained in the appendix, and it's legitimately interesting. This Fall, a film version of the novel will come out, and I will go see it, so engaged was I by the world Herbert created. If the screenwriters improve on the dialogue, it should be a good one.