Word: essays
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Although many of these essays demonstrate her obsession with control, The White Album's one major flaw is an interior disorder. Each individual essay is superbly crafted, but together they leave no one, coherent impression, no sense of decision about the subjects she treats...
...book resembles what Didion tells us about herself. In the revealing and brilliant title essay, she describes a list of articles she packs when traveling. She meticulously follows the list, but always forgets her watch. She shamefacedly asks people for the time every half hour until she resorts to calling her husband at home. Her passion for asserting control, for putting things--and herself--in order is always foiled...
...same sensitivity and emotional impetuosity that defeat her make her writing so effective. The book's disjointedness is at times a very deliberate reflection of Didion's own reactions to the years she describes. Her first essay, "The White Album," breaks into 15 vignettes; she cuts from image to image, splicing and assembling them. She views the '60's themselves as a series of improvisations on a discarded, script, in a passage that reflects the tone of both the era and her book...
...cinematic organization is perhaps most effective in "The White Album," and most strained in "In the Islands," where she leaps from a resort hotel to a graveyard for Vietnamese soldiers to James Jones, with no clear direction. In this first essay, she describes a Doors recording session, a college protest, a dress she bought for the star witness in the Sharon Tate murder trials, and creates a whirling kaleidoscope. She draws no conclusion because she cannot--her memories are too vivid to allow a comforting generality...
...Sudan described here, Hoagland, 46, had left his spoor in the wilderness of British Columbia, the wooded mountains of Vermont, the scrub of Louisiana and the streets of New York. He carried a supply of solitude in and a supply of observations out. In his essay (Walking the Dead Diamond River) and travel books (Notes from the Century Before), he displayed a gift for elegy that made the city as remote as the boondock, and a knack for seeing the familiar for the first time. In Africa, it is the unfamiliar that moves him. After flying, bouncing and sliding around...