Didion passed on December 23, but that has nothing to do with why I chose to read her acclaimed 1979 essay collection. The White Album had been on my reading pile for months, even necessitating a quick return/checkout at the library to reset the long-past due date. While I am on this topic, it's amusing to me that since the BPL stopped charging fines, I seem to have become more concerned with returning items on time. I don't think there is any necessity for a deeper analysis of this issue, except to point out the possibility that, having lost the ability to pay my end of the bargain, I find myself filling up with guilt each time an "overdue notice" hits my email. Or maybe, I am simply realizing that paying the fine never solved the issue, and this moment is my struggle to find another story I can tell myself in order to justify hoarding so much of a public resource.
The White Album by Joan Didion (December 2021)
The book opens with "The White Album", and I understand that the first line in the title essay - we tell ourselves stories in order to live - has gone on to become among her best-known sayings. This implies a certain thesis-statement quality to the quote, and indeed as I review my notes I see the way this comment underlies much of the collection. But I also recognize the many ways that the quote might not mean exactly what it appears at first glance - for example, that the act of telling is more important than the contents of the story, or that "to live" should be interpreted in the most mechanical sense. I felt that the latter perspective in particular summarizes the sense of detachment that ambushed me as a reader at various moments in The White Album, as I could do nothing but absorb these snapshots of life stories coming untethered from their respective plotlines.
My favorite essay, and the only one I bothered to reread a second time, was "Bureaucrats", which details certain selected moments from the early days of HOV lanes appearing on LA freeways. Longtime TOA readers will know that transportation discussions are among my favorites, evidenced perhaps by the thousands of words I've written about local cycling, but this piece merely describes details without necessarily immersing itself in them. Didion is far more interested in the people, observing the effect of the change as it was experienced on a daily basis by drivers, who were struggling to articulate exactly the problem they had with the HOV lanes. In my interpretation, they resented the unstoppable gravity of the transportation system, which like the many other faceless institutions of modern society has a habit of exchanging individual autonomy - in this case, a certain freedom of the open road - for the good of some imprecise yet earnestly pursued societal benefit.
This kind of insight comes across in many more ways - for example, the comment that certain people have a way of speaking which precludes further discussion, or in the note about how some avoid the personal or specific like "oratory minefields", preferring the safety of generalities. There is a feeling that if we are eventually going to be pulled under, then better to tread water with an air of dignity rather than thrash hopelessly for the distant shore. I suppose the problem is that in some waters ignorance can masquerade quite effectively as dignity. The passage that keeps coming to mind is when Didion describes the moment of life's previously improbable misfortune finally reaching your door, which is compared to the moment of realizing the oncoming stranger is holding a knife. I get the sense that the collection's overall point is that at some level we all know (or should know) the truth - there is no narrative, no overriding arc, which makes for some kind of saving grace to our lifetime. The theme is no theme. There is no exception to the rule that at some point, the knock comes to our door, and wisdom means we know to greet the stranger as if we've been expecting the arrival. And yet, we are never going to be quite ready for the knife, which creates these interesting interactions wherever unready people, living happily within the illusion of safety, are suddenly confronted by the fact of life's danger.
The comment that I suspect will stay with me from this book describes a moment on a flight, which Didion writes has the quality she perceives in short stories - the moment of epiphany, or perhaps a larger meaning of life extracted from the perfect sliver of a fleeting interaction, often a result of reckoning with a previously unquestioned view of life. And yet, do we really want life reduced to a series of these short stories? It is already too short. Didion suggests that for her the struggle is always a moment of condensing, when another piece of life gets snipped into a neat little lesson, and takes us a step further away from a life with the expansive possibilities of a novel.
TOA Rating: Three lanes out of four.
