Joan Didion’s Blues

I AM A slow reader. And so, because I know that any book I pick up may be with me for a while, I read good stuff. Over decades of reading good stuff, I have developed some ideas about the elements that are at the heart of much if not all great literature, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction.

One such element is a consideration of—an approach to—the idea of the abyss, of the meaninglessness of life. It is present, for example, in Moby-Dick, in which the great white whale is the stand-in for the terrifying concept of nothingness; it is present in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, in which the character Rinehart, able to alter perceptions of his identity by changing his appearance in the most superficial of ways, suggests the limitlessness of human possibility but also the shaky foundations of human knowledge. In her essays, novels, and memoirs, Joan Didion, too, has taken on the abyss, in what I see as four distinct phases—a process that fashioned her into the clear-eyed writer we revere today, the one whose gaze cuts through the rhetoric about the world to see the world itself.

I’d call the initial phase the Sympathy Phase. This is exemplified in Didion’s first book of nonfiction, the 1968 essay collection . “As it happens,” she writes, “I am comfortable with… those in whom the sense of dread is so acute that they turn to extreme and doomed commitments; I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manage to fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.” Why do I call this sympathy and not empathy? Because in this early book, Didion appears to understand the need to fill the void—to sidestep the abyss—without quite feeling that need herself. How is she able to gaze upon the abyss and yet avoid walking, with the glass-eyed stare of the hypnotized, straight to