The Year of Magical Thinking

Yes, I know, it was published about two years ago but I took a while to get around to reading this. The subject was death and grief and since Joan Didion isn't exactly chipper at the best of times in her writing I wasn't sure I felt up to reading her book when it came out a few months after the death of my maternal grandmother.

But other than a short but striking anecdote in chapter 21 I got through without so much as getting misty-eyed. Not for nothing does Didion seem unusually remote in her personal writing. She's sort of like the oracle at Delphi, neither revealing nor concealing but merely giving a sign, and perhaps like Heraclitus notes that people who search for gold move much earth and find little.

She's the muse of the pointlessness of imposing our narrative on the world as a way for the world to make sense. Her leitmotiff in the closing chapters that no one watches the sparrows is obviously a counterpoint to the idea that "His eye is on the sparrow" as it has been lodged into our receding cultural memory by Mahalia Jackson's rendition of a famous song from the Gospel tradition in America.

Well, I do believe His eye is on the sparrow so Didion chooses to hang out in places I don't go to by profession. Still, I've never felt obligated to agree with a number of authors whose works have fascinated me. I'm hardly a pantheist but a lot of Miyazaki's films and certainly his comic book Nausica resonate with me.

Still, this is a book featuring Didion during what would have to be reckoned a more hysterical or irrational stage of her life dealing with the death of her husband of about four decades and with what she did not yet know at the time of writing would be the death of her only child. Now exactly why she and John Gregory Dunne named their daughter Quintana I don't recall and it's not a name I'd ever pick but it sure is a memorable name.

Well, I could blog about the book in more detail but I don't feel like it right now. It's late, as an old song puts it, and I also need to urinate. Blogging always gets obstructed at some point by biological imperatives and the need to pee is surely one of the more unavoidable ones.