Slouching towards darkness

I am talking here about finding both your husband and your daugher dead, gone from your life within months of each other. Two such deaths, while improbable and unexpected, are not I suppose a coincidence that one could call impossible. Nevertheless they are a coincidence that I somehow find troubling.

Anyone who has read Joan Didion recognizes her style, a style as tempting to parody (mine above) as the style of another superb writer, Ernest Hemingway. I've long loved both Didion's style and her paranoid ability to see the uncanny, the frightening, the apocalyptic in the trivial details of daily life, in the minor crime and accident reports she happens upon in the daily papers, in the frighteningly banal lives of the men we consider our leaders. Her books of essays -- Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album -- represent, to me at least, some of the best and most evocative writing of its kind of the past half century.

This post, however, is not to be an evaluation of Ms. Didion's writing style or her admittedly neurotic obsessions -- although they would make admirable topics for future posts. Instead, I just want to mention that I saw a dramatic interpretation of her memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, at Intiman Theatre last week. I haven't read the best-selling book, but her dramatization of her own work for stage is a powerful reflection on the finality of death, on our inability to accept that finality, and on the secret efforts of our incredulous minds to disregard that finality -- our efforts to reverse death and to restore the dead to life by forcing ourselves to obey invented and self-imposed rules -- efforts similar to those of a kid who thinks he can prevent his mother's back from breaking if he avoids the cracks in the sidewalk.

Of such efforts is magical thinking.

Actor Judith Roberts strides about a sparely but tastefully appointed and sandy stage -- representing Didion's Malibu beach property -- and delivers a stunning monologue -- 1 hour, 45 minutes, without intermission. Before our eyes, she talks her way though the early stages of grief -- denial, guilt, anger, bargaining, reflection. But whereas psychologists see these stages as leading to acceptance and hope, Didion is a control freak. She has never been a woman for whom acceptance has been a normal approach to life. Resolution for her signifies not acceptance and hope, but a bitter concession that the two most important persons -- perhaps the only important persons -- in her life are indeed dead. They are dead, they will stay dead, and they aren't hanging around waiting for her to spring them by posting some form of spiritual bail. There is no action she can take, no threats she can make, no sly bargains she can negotiate, that will ever bring them back.

It's a powerful and devastating play, one that left the audience stunned and deathly silent, a play that demonstrated through the power of the spoken word why Joan Didion is one of the most memorable wielders and stylists of the English language now alive.