The way I see it, Joan Didion’s career breaks into three big phases. In the ’60s and ’70s, she made her name as the chronicler of how the dominant culture and counterculture clashed and coexisted – you get this from her famous collectionsSlouching Towards BethlehemandThe White Album(my favorite of hers), as well as her only novel to slip into the canon,Play It as It Lays. Then the global tumult of the ’80s hit, with the Shah and the unholy right-wing alliance of Ronald “Satan” Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and the political unrest in Central America and the Soviet-Afghani War and the Iran-Iraq War and the CIA going all-in on the cloak-and-dagger shit and jesus christ this is getting depressing, and Didion turned her attentions to commenting on the chaos abroad rather than the (far smaller, more contained and less destructive – your average American has no fucking idea how good they have it) chaos at home. This period of her writing has kind of become lost in the shuffle, but it produced some great work as well, like [i]Salvador[/i], [i]After Henry[/i], and [i]Democracy[/i]. In her third and by far most famous phase, she became reincarnated as the widow grieving for her husband, the mother grieving for her deceased daughter. These two books you know, [i]The Year of Magical Thinking[/i] and [i]Blue Nights[/i] respectively, and they’re fine books, certainly quite honest, but I pick up on the whiff of sexism here; the female writer comments on national and world events and Martin Amis bashes her for “not being a good mother” or whatever silly thing he said in his review of [i]the White Album[/i], but when she mourns her husband and daughter, wellllll we can define her as wife and mother now so we’re okay with Joan Didion. Needless to say, I am not having this shit, and I encourage anyone who’s read the two later memoirs and nothing else to get up on their early Didion.

But it’s the first and second periods I want to focus on here, since [i]A Book Of Common Prayer[/i] strikes me as a sort of transition between them, and like many “transitional” works of art, it’s compelling but not always smooth. And yes, I’ll freely admit her work doesn’t always fit into this model as well as I’m proposing, since usually our models are only guidelines anyway (I’d be the first to admit 2001’s [i]Political Fictions[/i], as well as parts of [i]After Henry[/i], kind of scuttle my theory), but it’s a good way into my review so I’m sticking to the model, just so long as you understand that I’m not whole worlds of attached to it or anything. You can probably tell I’m still hedging about whether arranging a writer’s career into an arc is reductive, yet I see some of the concerns of both [i]Play It As It Lays[/i] and [i]Democracy[/i] (her strongest novel out of the three I’ve read) here. From the former, she takes the power dynamics between women and men, the sense of insulation in the upper-middle class intelligentsia, and what happens the moment something unforeseen pokes into that bubble. So far, it might seem like the ideal setting for this book is the vision of either Los Angeles or New York City she articulates so well in her early works, but she didn’t set it in Los Angeles or New York City, she set it in the fictional Central American republic of Boca Grande, and these rich people’s lives are invaded not by addiction or surprise pregnancies but the political tumult and shadowy CIA operations I mentioned above. And I mightn’t need to tell you those latter two invasions are at the core of [i]Democracy[/i]. Oh, and did I mention that this book was released smack in between 1967’s [i]Play It As It Lays[/i] and 1984’s [i]Democracy[/i]? Or that this book features by far the most about political violence, which would soon become a major concern of hers, she’d written up until this point? Like I say, transitional novel.

And like I say, the transition is awkward. This book’s major weakness is it seems to wander away from its central conflict too often, instead wandering into the conflicts between our protagonist, Charlotte Douglas, and her two ex-husbands, both of whom are long on menace and short on pretty much everything else. Which is a goddamn shame, because that central conflict offers us a lot to work with –Charlotte’s daughter joins a terrorist organization, she seeks out to find her and tries to come to terms with her acts of terrorism. Charlotte feels real, hardened in some spots and naïve in others, and it’s fascinating to see her interact with the world, but it would’ve been more fascinating to see her interact with the world of political unrest than her two non-character husbands (one is named Leonard and the other’s name I’ve already forgotten, so he’ll just be “Not-Leonard”) subtly and not-so-subtly insult both her and each other. Insults are the currency Didion invests, if you will, in this novel’s conflict, and they’re fine for the start but when your escalation essentially amounts to “more insults,” maybe it’s time to stop and reconsider where your project’s going and how you plan to get it there. And this, again, is a shame, because Charlotte is a compelling character and Grace, the narrator with substantial connections to Boca Grande’s political and economic elite, is as well; she swears up and down she’s not the story’s protagonist, but by the end I started to doubt that.

So I guess basically my problem with [i]A Book Of Common Prayer[/i] is that it’s so transitional, Didion may have missed the fact that her setting presents a different and more meaningful set of conflicts than what she gives us. A question of emphasis, if you will. It’s sure not a question of prose, as this contains some of Didion’s strongest writing ever. I’d compare her sentences to claw-hammers; she’s got the blunt force of her minimalism and raw honesty when she needs it, but since she’s super intelligent about and insightful into national and world events while at the same time being one of the best writers currently living and in the inner circle of literary figures I admire most, she also has the claw end to pry ideas, characters, sentences apart and dig into what’s inside them. She’s also on-point as ever tonally, striking a nice combination of dread and irony. She is, in other words, a brilliant fucking writer, and that brilliancy shines even on a book like this, which is one of the weaker ones I’ve read by her on a whole. That’s at once comforting and frustrating; I feel such compelling material deserved a better novel. Well, that’s what [i]Democracy[/i]’s for!