Mad moth
Brandon Russell
'Making the world safe for democracy', is the much-vaunted, self-righteous justification Americans give for military intervention in foreign disputes. It is, therefore, apposite, if ironic, that the Vietnam war should form the backdrop to Democracy. Nothing else immediately sug- gests why this particular title was chosen. But then, to the tips of her I. Magnin shoes, Joan Didion is a Californian, and as such does not recognise the rules. Instead, she prefers to make them up as she goes along, favouring a form of innovative reportage popularised in the Sixties.
'Call me the author,' the second chapter begins, but it is Trollope, not Melville, she is imitating. 'Let the reader be introduced to Joan Didion, upon whose character and doings much will depend of whatever in- terest these pages may have . . .' She presents herself as a breaker of images and narrative structures, and as an inventor of atmosphere and effect. As an earlier parody of The Star-Spangled Banner has suggested, however, nothing is sacred. She plans to rub up against the reader like a cheese grater. Even the tone is unnatural, lacking cadence, forced and sexless.
The Christian family inhabits a world of privilege, inequality, self-serving aggran- disement and strict codes of conduct. Operating out of Hawaii, the only thing that distinguishes them from the Mafia is their surname. After selecting and then discarding several family members on which to focus, Miss Didion settles on Inez Victor (née Christian). It is an apparently arbitrary choice — an accident of oppor- tunity, interest and circumstance.
Although the dust-jacket describes her as Didion's 'most memorable heroine', Inez has the least amount of character of anyone in the story. She sheds personality like skin. Leaving her protected life on Honolulu, she enters, pregnant and aim- less, into a loveless marriage with a char-
ismatic presidential hopeful, Harry Victor. The utter vulgarity of American political life shines on every page, while Inez moves in and out of the limelight like a demented moth. Between Washington and New' York, Honolulu and Southeast Asia, the characters move with little regard for chronology or the exigencies of travel.
But then this is not a proper story, though it has all the necessary ingredients: a double murder, adultery, drug addiction and sexual transactions effected as casually as exchanging hellos. Throughout, the Vietnam war spreads its tentacles, colour- ing what passes for the action. Those who benefit from, yet depend on, war emerge as heroes (of a sort): the wheeler-dealers, the politicians, the emotional misfits who enter war zones bent on good works, and the reporters, especially the reporters.
Flickering in the background, a shadowy figure occasionally thrown into relief by the fortuity of time and place coinciding, is Jack Lovett, an itinerant arms dealer-cum- military adviser, a man who views informa- tion 'as an end in itself. Meeting only occasionally, for 23 years Jack and Inez have nursed a relationship whose salient feature is unacted-upon passion. 'We were together all our lives. If you count thinking about it,' Inez tells Joan Didion: author, narrator, journalist and inventor of literary nuances so delicate they disintegrate if looked at too closely.
Can someone with Didion's chilly un- emotionalism comprehend, let alone approve of, such obsessive devotion: 'those twenty-some years during which Inez Vic- tor and Jack Lovett refrained from touching each other, refrained from ex- hibiting undue pleasure in each other's. presence or untoward interest in each other's activities, refrained most specifical- ly from even being alone together, to keep the idea of it quick.' In a story about getting what one wants, such pockets of prose as these ring false.
At one point, an Associated Press repor- ter asks Inez what she believes the major cost of public life to have been. 'Memory, mainly,' Inez said. '. . . you lose track. As if you'd had shock treatment.' A state to be desired, no doubt.
Privacy, on the other hand, is where memory and passion can meet, and such seclusion can only exist in Inez's head — a refugee camp in a nether world outside the scope of literary experiment. Privacy, however, is anathema to the writer. He, or she, seeks to lay bare, not protect, what- ever particular soft underbelly is being served up for the reader's delectation. Didion offers up a novel of passion which transcends description, a story which re- sists form.
'She did not say anything at all as she danced, did not even dance as you or I or the agency that regulated dancing in bars might have defined dancing. She only stood with her back against the jukebox and her arms around Jack Lovett.' Can Miss Didion define Irottage' perhaps, if frisson is denied her?
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