Book Review & Analysis: Democracy by Joan Didion

Democracy

by Joan Didion

      The lifestyles of the rich and well connected aren’t all they are cracked up to be. Take it from Joan Didion, the author who reveals how mundane people actually are by stripping away all the explanatory psychology and decorative frills that go along with literature. Her novel Democracy is about a political family that lives in the public eye. But when it comes to understanding them, the political life is little more than some details in the background.

Joan Didion herself speaks directly to the audience as the narrator in the first person. Her literary persona is immediately collapsed since her role as narrator is the same role she plays in life. Joan Didion was a journalist and as a journalist she plays the part of covering the protagonist, Inez Victor, writing articles about her for magazines and then piecing them together to form this novel which traces her life up to 1975. This postmodernist style isn’t any different from the fragmentary and non-linear style of Didion’s other novels. Along the way, the narrator provides a meta-narration, commenting on how a work of fiction is written and how choices in descriptive language are used to communicate emotions and information about characters and situations. In this way, Didion doesn’t break through the fourth wall by addressing the audience directly; there is no fourth wall to begin with.

Inez grows up in Hawaii with her sister Janet. Both of them marry into powerful families. Inez marries Harry Victor and Janet marries Dick Ziegler. The Zieglers are wealthy and well-connected members of the business class in Hawaii. And Harry Victor is a rising star in the Democratic party. His involvement catapults him into the Senate and in 1972 he runs in the Democratic primaries for president but loses. Because of this, Inez, who bears a passing resemblance to Jacqueline Kennedy, is a glamorous socialite in the public eye. In her home life, Inez is a mother of two.

There is a darker undercurrent to her marriage though. During her younger days, she falls in love with Jack Lovett, a CIA agent and arms trafficker. Throughout their lives they admire each other from a distance. But during a family vacation in Jakarta, Indonesia the two run into each other. The family vacation coincides with anti-American riots breaking out in Jakarta, mirroring the point where Inez and Harry begin losing interest in each other. Jack Lovett helps the family to escape to a cabin in the mountains outside Bandung and while there, Inez and Jack rekindle their interest in each other.

Jack Lovett subsequently gets deeply involved in espionage activities as the Vietnam War escalates and Harry Victor runs his presidential campaign on an anti-war ticket, similar to George McGovern who, as we now know, also lost the election, unfortunately giving Nixon another term in office. Inez’s heart is torn between an anti-war politician and a CIA agent with no political or ideological affiliation. This symbolizes her weak identity and it is something that her persona, fed to the public by the media, in incapable of seeing.

The relationship between Inez and Jack comes to the forefront of the novel when Inez’s father kills Janet and a Hawaiian man in her home. After the murder, the Ziegler family gather for dinner. During the meal, Jack Lovett walks in and from there he reconnects with Inez. The murder is the turning point where Inez and Harry’s shaky relationship falls apart, revealing it to be more a marriage for the public eye as opposed to one of domesticity. As Inez’s sister dies in the hospital, it is Jack who is there for her emotional support.

Other details get revealed through the murder. One is that Janet might have been cheating on her husband and the affair complicates the relationship between the Ziegler family and the established political and economic order of Hawaii. The Hawaiian man killed by Inez and Janet’s father is tied to a powerful Hawaiian family who were about to close a deal selling low-grade swamp land to the Ziegler family for development. Because of the murder, the deal will fall through. Jack Lovett is connected with all this because his arms dealing is somehow tied in with the Ziegler family’s businesses. But all of these interconnections are murky and not fully explained. The whole mess serves to underline the disconnection between Inez’s family and the Zieglers who are all white settlers and intruders in the Hawaiian islands. The theme of disconnection among the wealthy elite is a theme that runs throughout the novel.

Another theme that gets brought into the foreground because of the murder is the dysfunctional relationship between the parents and children in the Victor family. The son Adlai, no doubt named after Adlai Stevenson though I’m not sure why, is an underachieving student who is getting involved in the anti-war movement on his campus. The daughter Jessie works in a fast food restaurant in Seattle after a suicide attempt. She has just gotten out of rehab for heroin addiction. When Harry Victor arrives in Seattle to take his kids to Hawaii for Janet’s funeral, Jessie decides on a whim to move to Vietnam. Her motivations aren’t clear, but she seems hungry for excitement and hasn’t put any thought into her decision.

After arriving in Vietnam, Jessie gets a job as a cocktail waitress in a country club for Westerners just as the embassies begin evacuating all Americans from Vietnam due to their losing the war. Jack Lovett flies to Vietnam to retrieve her, using his CIA connections to find her and transport her out, utilizing a string of secret military bases in the South Pacific and eventually leaving her in Hawaii. Soon after, Jack Lovett dies in the swimming pool of the hotel in Jakarta where he mysteruously met up with Inez and her family while they were on vacation several years before. The important part of Jessie’s naive escapade is that she would have gotten stuck in the danger zone of post-war Vietnam if the Victor family didn’t have connections in the CIA through Jack Lovett. Jessie most likely would have been imprisoned or executed as North and South Vietnam reunited under the communist government.

The murder also brings one other issue out into the open in the character of Billy Dillon, a man whose job it is to manage the public personae of the Victor family. He works behind the scenes to advise the Victors on what to say in order to minimize controversy and maximize their positive public image. When Inez’s father commits murder, Billy Dillon is called in to first help negotiate a lenient sentence with the Hawaiian judiciary and second to control messaging in the media to cut down on the perceived severity of the crime. Didion demonstrates the efficacy of this in the text by making it unclear why the killing happened and what it meant to the killer. There is a direct connection between the first person meta-narrative of Joan Didion, who explains her literary technique in the course of telling the story, and Billy Dillon who uses the same semantic tricks to manipulate a receptive audience’s perceptions. Billy Dillon again carries the theme of disconnection since he symbolizes the fracture between media image and the private life reality of the Victors. On a private level he is even further a representative of disconnection because he is secretly in love with Inez even though she appears not to be aware of it.

Inez, in the end, drops out of American society. She only becomes her true self after the failure of her marriage and the death of Jack Lovett. She can no longer depend on others, especially men, to support her. Her epiphany comes when Jessie runs away to Vietnam and Inez’s privilege is used to rescue her. This is paired in the story with televised media images of Vietnamese refugees desperately clinging onto American helicopters as they lifet off from military bases. It is important that these images are shown on TV since this demonstrates how cut off Inez is from the real world. She only knows about the refugees through the news media, just as the public only knows her through the same channel. The refugees don’t have the luxuty of being rescued by their own personal secret agents. They have to risk their lives en masse to even have a hope for survival. And Jessie simply gets rescued because her family has powerful connections. This drives Inez to find self-actualization by running a refugee resettlement program from a mosquito-ridden bungalow in Kuala Lumpur. She abandons her life of wealth, privilege, and fame and finds herself by saving the Southeast Asian people without privilege, wealth, or connections who are becoming displaced from their homelands and way of life. Inez ends up being no longer disconnected, no longer living an empty domestic life, and feeling fulfilled and integrated by using what privilege she has to benefit others.

This novel is not exactly a political drama. In fact, the political drama mostly happens in the background and only emerges into the main narrative at certain points. It is really about how mundane the problems of an elite ruling class actually are. Being wealthy and connected, they have powerful mechanisms to help them manage their dysfunctional relationships, but these mechanisms fracture them as human beings. Incapable of knowing themselves, they become vapid, empty husks without any true purpose. Inez and her familial relations are socially disconnected from the state of Hawaii they have chosen, as intruders, as a place of settlement. Inez is disconnected from her public media persona which is managed by Billy Dillon. She is disconnected from her husband and family. She is also disconnected from Jack Lovett who she loves, but only at a distance. She has no sense of identity because she lives through other people who have only fragmentary ties to her. It is only when she clears away all the debris of her social life and media image that she can begin to relate to herself as herself. If this isn’t a simplified version of Hegelian philosophy, I don’t know what is. The political sides of the story are like shadows in the background, partially shaped by the Victor and Ziegler family relations. The background politics are distorted shapes and only vaguely connected to them. The real politics are those internal to the nuclear and extended families. And their problems aren’t any different from the kinds of problems families outside the ruling elite have on a regular basis.

Stripped of all the political noise, this familial drama is basically a soap opera. It’s a surface level plot with superficial twists about people without much depth. Even more so, it is a soap opera because where else would you find such WASPish rich people with names like Dick Ziegler, Harry Victor, or Jack Lovett? They are such wonderbread bland characters that even the name Inez sounds exotic in comparison. Even the tropical location of Hawaii does nothing to enhance their character. This novel could be set in Ohio, Nebraska, or Iowa and it wouldn’t make a difference. Like all of Joan Didion’s novels, this one takes place almost entirely on the surface, but the interplay of those surfaces reveals something about the hidden truths of the people inhabiting a Didion world. A lot of times the hidden space that gets revealed is filled with little more than emptiness. Until the end of the story, this is true of Inez.

Democracy is the type of novel that needs to be read more than once if you want to pick up on all the subtle nuances. It is also the type of novel that needs to be thought about after you’ve finished reading it. Although its simple plot isn’t hard to follow, it was difficult to connect with during while reading. After finishing and allowing for some distance, it was easier to piece all the fragments together into a whole for clarity so that its themes could be considered. This might be a frustrating process for readers who wish to be spoon fed information with clear explanations. This is too bad because if you take a step back and allow the pieces to fall into place, it makes for a challenging but provocative novel. This isn’t Joan Didion’s best work, but it is good enough and certainly deserves a second reading.

 

Book Review: Language in Exile by Barbara Lalla & Jean D'Costa

Language in Exile:

Three Hundred Years of Jamaican Creole

by Barbara Lalla & Jean D'Costa

      Jamaica has been a troubled place for centuries. From the horrors of slavery and colonialism to the rampant crime and poverty of the present day, it hasn’t been an easy historical ride. But along the way a rich and beautiful culture has grown. One element of that culture is the language of Jamaican Creole, something that deserves much more study than it has already received. With an eye to the future in the field of linguistics, Barbara Lalla and the Jamaican YA novelist Jean D’Costa collaborated on Language in Exile; Three Hundred Yesrs of Jamaican Creole.

Languages don’t emerge out of nothingness. Every language grows out of some pre-existing system of communication. Language is deeply rooted in human necessity and the need for communication. Keeping this in mind, it is easy to see how the island of Jamaica functioned as a crucible for the creation of new forms of linguistic expression. After Columbus arrived in Cuba, he moved on to Jamaica, probably landing at what is now Montego Bay. In his wake came a tsunami of colonialists from Europe, primarily Spanish and Portuguese. Later on it was the Dutch and the French. Eventually came the British Empire which dominated the island until independence in the 1960s. These colonialists built sugarcane plantations and imported slaves for manual labor from the Gold Coast of Africa. While many of the slaves spoke languages from the Kongo-Bantu language group, they were ethnically distinct and spoke mutually unintelligible languages. Since communication is necessary for running a business, even more so for a large scale farming operation like a sugar estate, a pidgin English formed which was supplemented by neologisms and words brought over by the Africans.

This book is primarily a study of etymology. The authors analyze Jamaican Creole syntax, phonetics, and semantics in an attempt to locate linguistic patterns in their languages of origin. This study is framed on a spectrum encompassing Jamaican Creole, called the “basilect”, at one end and the prestige variety of Jamaican Standard English, called the “acrolect”, at the other end. Most Jamaicans speak a combination of the two extremes; this is called the “mesolect”. By extending this continuum, Jamaican Standard English would actually be a mesolect of Standard British English (a.k.a. Received Pronunciation, King’s/Queen’s English, or BBC English). Using this scale helps to flesh out which elements of Jamaican Creole come from the top-down power structure of the colonialists and which ones come from African roots and other languages.

Despite the obvious influence of Chomsky’s Transformational Generative Grammar (TGG), this is not a thoroughly study of linguistic structures. It actually uses TGG to parse structures in order to trace them back to their origins. As such, Jamaican Creole’s origins are bifurcated into two broad categories: that of British English and that of African-origin languages with stray bits of other languages added in. Thus, Arawak, Spanish, and Portuguese elements do show up in Jamaican Creole, the authors claim their contributions are too small to have a major impact on the broader development of the language. Since British English is the source language of the basilect Jamaican Creole, elements of British Standard English dominate. This would make sense since the slaves, being fluent in mutually incomprehensible languages, were unable to speak to each other or the colonialists, and had to rely on pidgin English as a lingua franca for communication. This pidgin morphed into a creole language and fluency in the mesolect largely depended on the amount of social contact a person had with the colonial speakers of British English. House servants would likely be more fluent in British Standard English than field workers who speak on limited terms with a “buckra” or plantation manager. The slaves would speak the basilect Jamaican Creole among themselves. It is through these differing interactions that a new variety of English came to be.

The subject of Jamaican Creole’s origins in British English is more complex than you might at first imagine. The colonialists were mostly of lower class or working class status in the UK. They entered the colonial trade for the sake of class mobility. Therefore the English they brought to Jamaica was a variety of mesolects dependent on regional linguistic patterns. The majority of colonialists came from both sides of the border between Northern England and Scotland; this means that Scots English had an influence on the lexicon and phonetics of Jamaican Creole. Other colonialists were Irish, Welsh, or Cornish and this had some influence on the creole as well. Some archaic lexical items from the British Isles are still used in Jamaican English to this day long after they fell out of use in their regions of origin.

A large portion of this book is on the etymological roots of Jamaican Creole in West African languages. Since so little has been studied or written about this linguistic category, it is a more difficult subject to tackle. But separating West African elements from European elements isn’t so difficult. If such elements don’t correspond to anything found in a European language of the time period in question, it likely either came from a native Caribbean or West African language. This book mostly focuses on the lexicon of Jamaican Creole and its relation to West Africa, but it does touch on phonology and syntax to some extent. Some interesting discussion surrounds the influence of Gold Coast Creole English and the origins of the mysterious pronoun “unu” in Jamaican Creole.

Gold Coast Creole English developed because English colonialists set up trading posts on the west coast of Africa. Part of their trade was in slaves and so the creole became a lingua franca for the purpose of enterprise.

In the latter case, “unu” is used in Jamaica as a second person plural pronoun in place of “you” in Standard English. For example, “you (people) must go gome” would be realized in the surface structure as “unu mus home” in Jamaican Creole. The origin of “unu” hasn’t been setttled yet, but most likely it came from West Africa, although, to the best of my knowledge, no equivalent in a West African language, or any other language, has ever been found. This raises an interesting question about Received English as well since the singular “you” is used as both a second person singular and plural pronoun. Some speakers of American Standard English inflect the plural “you” to make “you all” or y’all” and working class people in New Jersey might say “youze” to clarify any confusion when addressing a group of people. That second person plural pronoun appears to be a linguistic problem causing semantic surface structure problems that get solved in various ways. “Unu” complicates Jamaican Creole further because Jamaican Creole uses the same pronouns for nominative and accusative cases. Therefore in Jamaican Creole you can say “We drive him to the store” but also “Him drive we to the store”. Why is this so? This is the kind of problem that keeps linguists awake at night. It’s also the reason we never get invited to parties.

There is one interesting chapter about the source materials used in researching this subject. Until recently, Jamaican Creole has been an oral language only. It wasn’t until the 1960s that people began to write it. But the written record does include some samples and scraps. Mostly they are written by colonialist writers who used eye dialect to inject a sense of realism into their texts. Some of these are ephemera like songs or nursery rhymes. Sometimes there is as little as a line or a passage of dialogue in a story or journal. Often these bits ot Creole are written with the intention of demonstrating the inferiority of the slaves. So one problem with these source materials is a socio-linguistic one in that they are not written by the people who spoke it and the intended purpose of the writing is inherently pejorative. Another problem is that since Jamaican Creole was an oral language in the past, there is no standardized spelling for it. The colonialists who wrote in the creole eye dialect depended on their own phonetics to transcribe sounds and this differed from writer to writer. It also differed according to the linguistic background of the writer so that speakers of different English mesolects heard Jamaican Creole through varied phonetic systems. The spelling of Jamaican Creole is therefore irregular which means deductions as to how Jamaican Creole sounded in the past can only be approximated or sometimes entirely wrong. This makes if further more difficult to study phonetic morphology as phonemes from various languages combined to form new phonemes and new phonetic environments that influence how Jamaican Creole is spoken today.

After the technical chapters in the first half of the book, the second half is a compilation of written source materials included so the reader can apply the linguistic analysis to actual written language. It takes some discipline to follow this section because some of the source material is disturbing due to the socio-linguistic problems mentioned before. Reading the speech of slaves describing their living conditions, and sometimes the torture they suffered for disobedience, is distressing, sometimes even disturbing. On the other hand, there are lighter passages including some entertaining tales of Anancy, the trickster archetype of Jamaican folklore. And once you’ve learned the parameter sets of Jamaican Creole syntax, phonetics, and semantics, it actually isn’t as difficult to understand as you might intitially think. Or “as ye’ fi tink a’ fus”.

This book is academic and written using highly technical language. If you don’t have a background in linguistics most of it will go right over your head. If you do have a background in linguistics, it will be clear what the authors’ intentions are. This isn’t a study that arrives at any strong conclusions. What it does instead is identify unanswered questions about the etymology and morphology or Jamaican Creole and opens up avenues for future research in this subject. It is strictly a scientific book and non-specialists would be advised to look elsewhere to read up on Jamaican language. And non-specialists absolutely should do that because creole languages are a fascinating to study and often easy to catch onto for speakers of Standard English.

Language in Exile isn’t a book that provides answers. It is a book that points the linguistic scholar towards the future for the sake of seeking out answers farther down the road. This isn’t a book for everybody. But one final thought is this: psychologists since Freud have argued that birth is a traumatic experience. Because of slavery and colonialism, Jamaica is a nation that was born in trauma. That trauma is necessary for life to begin though. At least one beautiful thing came out of Jamaica’s traumatic birth and that is the language spoken by its people and all that goes with it.

 

Book Review & Analysis: A Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion

A Book of Common Prayer

by Joan Didion

      She always runs away. She always leaves. This is the observation made by Warren, the ex-husband of Charlotte Douglas who is the protagonist of Joan Didion’s third novel A Book of Common Prayer. Following up on her two previous novels, ones in which the female protagonists suffer because they refuse to take command of their lives, Didion takes a turn in the opposite direction here. Maybe you can say that Charlotte doesn’t end up any better off because of her decisiveness. In fact she gets killed at the beginning of the novel whereas the wives in Run River and Play It As It Lays both survive, albeit under unenviable circumstances.

The narrator, Grace Strasser-Mendana, is an obvious stand-in for Joan Didion. She lives in the fictional Central American nation of Boca Grande where she is connected directly to the government due to her ex-husband’s ownership of a palm oil plantation which happens to be the biggest business in the tiny country. Grace is a former anthropologist who abandons her career because she can never understand human motivations even though she has a sharp perception of human behavior. She changes to a biologist mid-career since organic molecules are easier to understand. They have no subjectivity and only respond to stimuli. This is a clear explanation of Didion’s literary style; in a truly postmodern sense, all her writings concern interactions between surface appearances as opposed to depth and inner meaning. As such, Grace bears witness to Charlotte’s life and death without examining her subjective mind. Yet despite this avoidance of explanation, meaning does emerge in the patterns of Charlotte’s behavior.

During one of the frequent revolutionary coups that make Boca Grande’s politics and economy so unstable, Charlotte gets gunned down on the street. The killing is used as an internal narrative frame. The content of Charlotte’s life up until the time of her death is the content of most of the novel.

A second narrative frame is introduced just after the killing at the beginning and closes at the end of the book after the story of Charlotte’s life finishes. This tells the story of Charlotte’s daughter Marin. This introduction of a second framing device that ends outside the parameters of the first framing device is one way that Didion creates a decentered narrative, one that makes the story feel fractured as though it is falling apart rather than coming together. The non-linear narrative that jumps around between different places and times in seemingly random order, along with reoccurring lines of dialog and thought echoing and repeating throughout the text, heighten the confusion and disorganization. It’s like the pieces of the novel are painted onto glass panels that have been shattered and you follow the story by examining each one and trying to imagine how they once all fit together. This is a good example of how a narrative structure can reflect the theme of its subject.

Marin’s presence is absent from the initial passage that introduces her character when Charlotte meets with her husband Leonard and her ex-husband, also Marin’s father, Warren in her house in San Francisco. The FBI is there because they are looking for Marin due to the daughter’s involvement in a terrorist bombing in San Francisco followed by the hijacking and destruction of an airplane in Utah. Marin has gone underground and disappeared, although it is likely Leonard knows where she is all along. Leonard is a lawyer in high standing with revolutionaries because of his dedication to defending Leftist activist groups in court. He has deep ties to revolutionary factions in Latin America. Or does he actually work for the CIA?

The ex-husband Warren, on the other hand, is the worst possible husband. A professor of English literature from New Orleans, he is obnoxious, mean, racist, manipulative, and violent. Chronically drunk, he has a nasty habit of slapping and punching women who don’t cooperate with him. He is the kind of guy who would never have survived the #MeToo movement. But Warren understands Charlotte more than anybody else in the novel. He may not have any insight into her psyche, but he does know one thing Charlotte always does: run away. As we learn more about their marriage, it is clear that he gave her good reason to run away. But he also recognizes that running away is her habitual reaction to any situation she finds herself in. That is why he has an ulterior motive in coming to San Francisco. He wants to reconnect with Charlotte and coaxes her to visit him in New Orleans to see his brother. Warren claims his brother is dying of cancer, but in actuality it is Warren who is dying of cancer. Of course Charlotte goes. Warren knows she will run away from her absentee husband Leonard. She is easy prey and he wants one last fling before he dies. The result is a predictable disaster.

Charlotte ends up in Boca Grande where she makes an effort to be sociable with everyone although she stands out and never fits in any where. It is here that she meets the narrator Grace who befriends her, protects her, and tries to understand her. That task is not easy. Charlotte spends her days at the coffee shop in the airport, believing that her daughter Marin will be arriving by plane even though she never does. Some well-connected people think she is a CIA agent since the embassy alerted them to her presence and warned that she is of protected status by unofficial US law. She also reads propaganda pamphlets distributed by the CIA and makes late night phone calls to San Francisco for Northern California weather reports. The police think these are coded messages although we never find out what they are all about. She is also friendly with a group of Leftist activists that arrive from the USA and other parts of Latin America. Yet Grace observes that she has no understanding of what any of these people are up to. Grace’s most important observation is that Charlotte lives in the mental space of how she wants the world to be which is distinctly cut off from the way the world really is.

As rumors of a coup circulate, Charlotte’s husband Leonard arrives in Boca Grande to convince her to leave before the revolution breaks out. But he fails since Charlotte has decided to stop running away from life and stay where she is, working in a medical clinic that serves the people of Boca Grande. As all Americans are evacuated from the country, Charlotte stays and continues going to work even though a bomb has gone off at the clinic. She insists she is politically neutral in any situation whatsoever and is oblivious to the danger surrounding her. All that remains of her life at this point is the stubborn refusal to not run away anymore. And that is how she gets shot dead in the street. It’s probable that the revolutionaries kill her because they think she is an intelligence agent. Whether or not this is true is unclear, but in this case perceptions matter more than reality. Grace offers no explanation for any of her of this, but as a reader I conclude that Charlotte lived an uninformed life, relying on her instincts alone and in the end her instincts failed. She couldn’t hold her life together and her intuition didn’t save her when it should have.

As for the political situation, Charlotte doesn’t understand it and she doesn’t want to understand it. Neither does anyone else. The coup in Boca Grande is never explained because it doesn’t serve any definite purpose. It’s led by a bunch of bored young people and gets put down by another counter-revolutionary army of bored young people. All these bored young people are attached to the wealthy family that rules Boca Grande. Mixed up in this guerilla warfare are a bunch of American kids and Leonard, the lawyer who got rich by defending political activists in court. None of these people have a coherent ideology. They just have nothing better to do with themselves. Joan Didion, the lifelong Republican, had a low opinion of the American counter culture. If you’ve read “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” you’ll know what I mean.

After fleeing Boca Grande and returning to the United States, Grace tracks down Charlotte’s daughter Marin who is hiding in a safehouse for activists in Buffalo, New York. Sullen and defensive, the young terrorist refuses to discuss her parents, Charlotte and Warren. After learning both of them are dead, she reacts by spewing out rhetoric about the revolution and the defeat of the bourgeoisie. Her rhetoric is a protective armor, sheltering her from the troubles of the outside world by escaping into fantasies about guerilla warfare. When Grace pierces this armor, Marin breaks down in tears. What is revealed is the disconnection between her and her parents who never provided her with the emotional support she needed. The implication is that Warren abused her and Charlotte ran away from her. Most likely, Marin found the support she craved in the politics of Leonard, Charlotte’s second husband, and the activist movements he associates with.

This novel is Joan Didion at her best. She builds on the fractured narrative style of her previous two novels simply by adding in more thematic elements and layers. This is also accomplished by using the first person narrative of Grace as a metanarrative that explains the author’s intentions. Grace’s function is to show without telling. She offers almost no explanations of what happens and allows room for the reader to piece everything together for themselves. The story is all on the surface, but the fragments of the story all point the reader in the direction of its meaning. Grace gives up on anthropology because she can’t understand human motivations. She sees only patterns of behavior and tells the story in this way. She becomes a biologist because she can understand why molecules interact they way they do and, again, she writes about human behavior in this way. Mid-novel she begins using metaphors derived from molecular biology to describe the behavior of the characters. But it is through the reader’s observation of behavioral patterns, how some patterns repeat and then get shattered from outside interference, that explanatory motivations reveal themselves. Grace’s narrative doesn’t tell us what Charlotte’s or Marin’s motivations are, but she does point your attention in the right direction and lets you draw the conclusions. This is a successful way of writing about surfaces so the reader can see through the cracks at what lies underneath. This is showing without telling.

After finishing A Book of Common Prayer it may be obvious that Joan Didion wrote the same kind of book over and over again. Her stories are all about a shallow woman who lives by her wits and instincts alone. She has trouble making decisions and gets tossed around by unseen forces that are remote and yet more powerful than she is. She sees the world solely from her own flawed point of view. And to what extent is Joan Didion writing from an autobiographical perspective? I don’t know. Her novels are without heroes, but maybe there is some kind of strength in their weaknesses. But I do know you might be tempted to cast a critical eye of judgment on her characters. Then the question remains: aren’t her characters a lot more like us than we would like to admit? By reading her novels, aren’t we looking at ourselves in the shards of shattered mirrors whether we like it or not? How many of us truly understand ourselves or the world we live in? Maybe she’s telling us to be more cautious in our approach to other human beings.

 

Book Review: Jamaica Talk by Frederic G. Cassidy

Jamaica Talk:

Three Hundred Years Of the English Language in Jamaica

by Frederic G. Cassidy

      If you’ve ever been to Jamaica, or if you’ve spent any time around members of the Jamaican diaspora community, you might have had a certain type of experience. As the conversation starts you notice the Jamaican accent. Some words are pronounced differently, Some of the grammar is different from what you ordinarily hear although you can still understand what is being said. The language is musical and you’ll probably be charmed by the easy going and friendly manner of the person you’re talking to. I’ve seen many women swoon when they hear a handsome Jamaican man speak. And then another Jamaican person comes along and, without warning, they’re speaking in some language you can’t comprehend even though you think you might be hearing some words that sound like English. What has happened is that they have codeswitched from Standard English to Jamaican Creole, also called “Jamaican Patois” or “patwa” as it is sometimes spelled.

Many speakers of English as a first language find Jamaican Creole to sound cool 0r interesting. Closed minded people, on the other hand, will think of it as a corrupted form of “pure” or “proper” English. Jamaicans simply think of Jamaican English as their normal way of speaking while linguists see it as a fascinating source of scientific study for a wide variety of reasons. The latter two catagories are of high importance for Frederic G. Cassidy, the half-Jamaican and half-Canadian linguist who wrote Jamaica Talk, a pioneering study of this subject matter.

A creole language is defined as deriving from a standard language spoken by the dominating colonial class. Creoles can start as pidgin languages, develop their own rules of grammar and pronunciation, and then get passed down to the following generations as a first language. Creole languages never fully separate from the original language and so something like Haitian Creole is classified as a non-standard variety of French even though native speakers of French might not be able to understand it. The same can be said for Jamaican Creole. But Cassidy explains that the dividing line between Standard English and Jamaican Creole is not easy to pinpoint. The two varieties exist as end points on a continuum rather than being distinct entities unto themselves. Eductaed Jamaicans will be more fluent in Standard English while rural, uneducated Jamaicans will be more fluent in Creole. Most Jamaicans speak the mesolect, a mixture of both, adjusting their linguistic styles according to who they are speaking to.

It would be impossible to discuss Jamaican language without exploring its etymology in the context of Caribbean history. The original inhabitants of Jamaica were Arawaks. Later on, colonialists from Spain and Portugal imported African people, mostly from the west coast and the Kongo river basin. Many of these slaves did not have a common language since they came from tribes or villages speaking mutually exclusive languages. British colonialists came later, bringing over larger and larger numbers of slaves over two centuries of rule. Since work, especially in the sugarcane farming and processing industries, depended on communication for the purpose of instruction and domination, the colonialists and Africans had to negotiate linguistically by combining elements of African, English, and some other European languages to functionally run plantations. Colonial Jamaica was like a laboratory for the creation of new linguistic patterns, utilizing chance, trial and error to birth Jamaican Creole as we know it today.

Cassidy provides a good explanation of Jamaican prosody and pronunciation. The languages spoken by the West African people brought to Jamaica, like Twi or Ewe, are phonemically tonal whereas English isn’t. English is, however, a syntactically tonal language. Similar to Asian languages like Chinese, Thai, Lao, and Vietnamese, the meaning of a word in African tonal languages changes according to variations in rising, falling, neutral, or wavy pitches. A word like “ma” in Chinese can have four different meanings according to the tone used by the speaker. English uses grammatical tones to mark things like questions which are marked as such by rising tones at the end of the sentence. West African languages do not have these syntactic tones. So when speakers of languages using phonemic tones speak a language that doesn’t, but does have tones in its syntax, the result is a spoken language that some might say has a musical quality to it as Jamaican English does. Cassidy comments on the way Jamaican English has lilts and drawls. And since tones in West African languages are mostly carried by the vowels, this effects the phonetics of consonants in their linguistic environments too.

I don’t like to say that this linguistic environment corrupts Standard English pronunciation because that implies that speakers of Jamaican Creole are peaking an inferior variety of English whereas they are actually speaking the language they learn from birth, a language that has developed over three centuries to meet the needs of the people who speak it. The scientific view is that there is no right or wrong English, no good or bad English, and no pure or impure language of any kind. There is only English as it is spoken according to the needs of the people who speak it. It is that organic, pragmatic form of spoken language that interests linguists rather than an idealized version of a pure language that no one actually speaks.

Cassidy also examines other aspects of phonology like ellipsis or intrusive sounds. Notable is the absence of the voiced and unvoiced /th/ that occurs in Standard English. A word like “with” thereby gets pronounced as “wid” or “wi” in Jamaican Creole. Combined with the ellipsis, or absence, of consonant clusters, “thing” is pronounced as “tin”. Consonant cluster ellipsis, intrusive glides, and vowel shifts also can make a word like “going” become realized as “gwine” in spoken Creole, while “boy” becomes “bwai”.

Syntax is another matter. The bigots and conservatives have made the claim that Jamaican Creole has no grammar; the defenders of the language argue that it is just as grammatically complex as Standard English even though it follows different syntactical structures. Some differences are the absence of possessive plural case markers, the /’s/. Instead the gender neutral pronoun “him” is used as a possessive marker attached to the noun. “Bob drives John’s car” in Jamaican Creole is “Bob drive John car him”. Creole also has an absence of word-final /-s/ inflections to mark plurality. Instead the pronoun “them”, pronounced “dem” is inserted after the pluralized noun so that “Bob has bananas” becomes “Bob ha banana dem”. Plurals can also be formed by repeating the noun so that “He has cars” is realized as “Him ha car car”. Creole doesn’t account for nominative or accusative cases with either case markers or syntactic order and accusative pronouns are used for nominative nouns. Pronouns are also gender-neutral with no distinction for the “he/she” dichotomy. The masculine “him” is used universally. Therefore “He goes home” in Standard English is “Him gwine home” in Creole can also mean “She goes home” depending on context. A sentence like “Him dri fi home him fi ca him” would be confusing to a non-speaker of Jamaican Creole, but those who speak the language would hear “He/she drives to his/her home in his/her car”.

Jamaican Creole verbs also have no inflection, nor do they have tense or conjugation. Auxiliary verbs like “is”, “go”, “have”, “could, “can” and so on are also absent with the exception of those used as time markers such as “will”, pronounced “wi” to mark future tense. Thus “Bob will walk to his house” gets spoken as “Bob wi wak fi hass him”. Rather than using gerunds, or the word-final /-ing/ verb forms, to indicate continuous action, verbs are instead repeated. So “Bob is eating mangoes” becomes “Bob nyam nyam mango dem”. “Nyam” is the Jamaican Creole verb for “eat” and is probably of West African origin.

And there is so much more. Syntax in Jamaican Creole bears a lot of similarity to some languages in Southeast Asia especially to Bahasa Malay-Indonesian which itself is an invented language based on a Creole that was spoken by sea merchants around the Malaysian peninsula and the archipelagos of the Philippines and Indonesia. Such similarities raise questions about the formation of creoles as to whether there are universal patterns in their formation or not.

The beginning chapters on history, etymology, syntax, prosody, and phonology actually take up a thin section of this book. More than half of its chapters are categorical documentations of the Jamaican Creole lexicon or vocabulary. Each chapter accounts for a sub-category of the lexicon such as occupations, medicine, farming, tools, food, plants, animals, and geography. Some explanations are given for the probable etymology of words in English, Spanish, Portuguese, or one of the many West African languages brought over during colonialism with Twi and Ewe being those that Cassidy cites most often. While these chapters on the lexicon are endlessly fascinating to read, they are less scientifically rigorous than the other chapters at the beginning of the book. Some of these vocabulary items are now obsolete since Cassidy depends heavily on written texts from the colonial era to catalog and document the Creole lexicon.

Frederic G. Cassidy maintains a fine balance in Jamaica Talk. Parts of it may be challenging for the non-linguist because of the technical language he uses in the earlier chapters. But this technical language is not overused and some of it is well-explained and illustrated with diagrams to make it more clear. Most of the book, especially the sections on the Jamaican Creole lexicon, are easy to read and use very little technical language. It is successfully written for linguists and non-linguists alike. It is also of historical value since Jamaican Creole is such a tragically under-represented language in the linguistics field and little has been written about it before or after the publication of Jamaica Talk. Also it was researched and written around the time Jamaica gained its independence as a nation from England and the pride in this West Indian island nation’s culture radiates out of Cassidy’s writing.

He would definitely say that Jamaican Creole, like reggae and jerk chicken, is a national treasure. Jamaica is a beautiful country with its beaches and jungles. Even the alligators have a relaxed approach to life providing you aren’t around them at dinner time. But it’s also worth visiting for the people with their melodic language and easy going ways, at least as long as you don’t go wandering around Kingston alone at night and are careful around gangster war zones like Trench Town or Tivoli Gardens.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion

 

Play It As It Lays

by Joan Didion

      There’s an old joke that goes, “How do you say ‘I love you’ in New York? Fuck you. How do you say ‘fuck you’ in California? I love you.” That’s the cultural climate in which Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays takes place. But while that cultural climate is important for the story, it isn’t the main point the author addresses.

Maria is one problem of a woman. She addresses the reader directly in the first person during the opening monologue. From that we learn about the novel’s two elemental metaphors: gambling and rattlesnakes. Maria approaches life as a game of chance. The gambler at the roulette wheel acts without agency over the ball; it just lands where it lands and the player has to accept the result whatever that may be. The gambler “plays it as it lays”. The other, more subtle metaphor is that life will bite you whether you like it or not. Rattlesnakes are hiding, biting anyone who is unlucky enough to cross their paths. But rattlesnakes don’t ordinarily attack people. They only bite when provoked so the best way to avoid getting bitten is to play it as it lays. Just avoid getting involved. Knowing this puts Maria into a permanent state of anxiety. After getting bit once, she is expecting another bite to come at some random time. One other detail we learn from Mariah’s opening monologue is that she doesn’t care at all about motivations or explanations. What happens happens and the reason behind it doesn’t matter. Everything is on the surface. Joan Didion, as a master of irony, uses Mariah’s monologue to explain what motivates the protagonist to approach life without the understanding of her own motivations.

Maria’s opening monologue is followed by two other monologues. One is that of her closest friend Helene. The other is that of her husband Carter. From these two we learn that neither of them understand Maria, but they both perceive her as mentally unstable. And although they are the two closest people in her life, both of them are emotionally distant and more like caretakers who put up with her out of a sense of duty more than from genuine interest. There are also subtle foreshadowings of the affair between Helene and Carter, as well as the death of Helene’s husband BZ, all of which culminate at the end of the story.

As a writing technique, the three separate introductory monologues function effectively in presenting three separate perspectives on Maria. This may sound too obvious to be worth mentioning, but what is unique about it is the way the novel shifts back to Maria in the first person throughout the rest of the book. Keeping this in mind, the reader follows Maria’s subjectivity through the lens of two other characters who see her from inaccurate perspectives she can not see herself. Considering that Didion’s style in this novel is called minimalist by some, the perception of depth and multi-dimensionalism in the narrative are heightened. This minimalist irony is taken a step further in that the people surrounding Maria in her life aren’t much more introspective than she is. They aren’t deep thinking. They aren’t analytical people. They just do what they do and when Maria doesn’t make sense to them, they leave her to herself and do soemthing else.

So who are these people? Carter is a film maker. Maria is his wife. They live in Los Angeles. Maria has starred in two movies, but mostly she doesn’t do much. In a haze of tranquilizers and alcohol, she lays by the pool or drives endlessly on the LA freeways in her corvette while listening to the radio. The main source of meaning in her otherwise pointless life is her daughter who lives in a home for mentally disabled children.

One movie Maria starred in was a short experimental film made by Carter. The whole film is close up shots of Maria going about her daily life. She is the only element of the film. The other movie she starred in was made by BZ, Helene’s husband who is also a film maker who sometimes delves into directing pornography. The latter movie stars Maria as the woman in a biker gangbang. BZ describes it as a movie where the female subject is nothing more than a prop since the gangbang is all about the bikers using her body to fulfill their homosexual desires for each other.

Both films are pivotal in understanding Maria because they negate her as a human being in two fundamentally opposing ways. Carter’s film is entirely about her surface, showing only how she appears and what she does with no examination of her subjective life. In the other film, her humanity is negated because, as BZ describes it, she disappears in a screen full of cocks. Inexplicably, Maria claims that BZ’s biker movie is her favorite because it is the one in which her character has the most agency. It is an ironic statement coming from a woman who convinces herself she is refusing to exercise agency in her own life. I say “convincing herself” because she actually does display agency all throughout the book.

Maria does exercise agency when she goes to visit her daughter unannounced at the home for disabled children. The caretaker at the home, however, berates her for not making an appointment because a spontaneous visit like that disrupts her routine and can upset the girl’s stability. Maria also chooses to take her daughter to a Christmas celebration at her ffriends’ mansion, but this results in disaster when her daughter becomes violent.

Maria also exercises agency when she takes trips to Las Vegas to escape from the miseries of life in Los Angeles. On one trip, she randomly encounters her godfather in a casino. The man gives her his phone number and post office box address so she can contact him later. On another trip back to Las Vegas, she tries calling him only to find out the number is invalid. She tries to contact him again by waiting at the post office for several days in hopes he will show up to retrieve his mail from his PO box. But after waiting, Maria learns that the box is rented, not by her godfather, but by an insane woman who doesn’t know him.

Another significant example of Maria exercising agency is when she gets pregnant while cheating on her husband. Carter gives her a choice between having an abortion or divorce. He qualifies the latter option by telling her that he will get custody over their daughter if she chooses to break up with him. Although Carter’s intention is manipulative, he does offer a choice. Since Maria’s daughter is the only thing she cares about in her life, she chooses the abortion. That procedure, illegal at the time of publication, proved to be psychologically traumatic for Maria. Here we see how a pattern in her life emerges: every time Maria tries to exert control over her circumstances, something rotten happens as a result. Every time the rattlesnake bites.

That is a pattern that explains why Maria is the way she is. She runs away from choices and responsibilities because every choice she makes damages her. She numbs the pain with drugs and alcohol in an attempt to erase her mind and emotions. She becomes anhedonic, unable to feel pain or pleasure, living the life of a lobotomy victim or a zombie. For her this is a defense mechanism against the entanglements of the world; for the others in her life, it is a sign of mental illness in a woman having a nervous breakdown. Probably both perspectives are accurate.

And yet another side of Maria is revealed when she visits the supermarket. In the store, she recognizes a crowd of other Southern Californian women whose lives are just as empty and pointless as hers. She recognizes them because they all pirchase the same grocery items. Therefore she consciously chooses to buy groceries that differ from them in an attempt to differentiate herself. It is a form of camouflage. She wants to conceal her similarities to the other lonely shoppers, but there is also a touch of pride in her cover as though she wants to individuate herself in some way. Since the other people in the store can’t see her motivations, if they even notice her at all, this can be little more than a private pleasure. No matter how trivial it is, it is still an attempt at clinging on to some sense of self-worth. Maria also takes a small turn in her rejections of casual sex in Las Vegas towards the end of the novel.

But any subtle changes in Maria are destined to go unnoticed by Helene, Carter, BZ or anybody else around her because they are inattentive to her feelings to begin with. Her husband and friends go out to a remote location in the desert of Nevada and drag her along with them because Carter worries she is losing her grip on reality. Once there, they leave her in the hotel room during the days when they are on a movie set filming a western. Maria mostly stays in a drugged stupor while staying in bed. She finds common ground with BZ who comes to her in despair because Helen and Carter are having an affair and not trying to hide it. Both BZ and Helene have hit rock bottom and BZ tries to convince Maria to overdose on pills with him. He dies in bed beside her but she lives because she refused to kill herself. Suicide would entail taking control over her situation so she does nothing. Ironically, playing it as it lays is what saves her in the end.

On one level, this novel is about the shallow lives of rich people in Hollywood working in the film industry. Maria is surrounded by friends and family acting out of self-interest and brute instinct without any awareness of what is going on with the people around them. Maria’s relationship to them is toxic and dysfunctional. It is through their ignorance that they negate her humanity, treating her like little more than an appendage. And yet they say they love her. Joan Didion’s opinion of the upper crust in California is made clear. On another level, this novel is a character study of a woman who doesn’t have much character whilE in the middle of an existential crisis. But Maria isn’t really on a downward spiral because she was at the bottom to begin with. That’s a shocking statement about somebody with wealth, privilege, and an endless amount of leisure time. She also tries to negate her own humanity by refusing to take control by avoiding choices and letting life happen to her. Despite that, her humanity keeps emerging. Her attempts at self-negation are deliberate, but what I think Joan Didion is demonstrating is that there is something about humanity that can’t be submerged, negated, or denied out of existence no matter how hard people may try. Maria attempts to delude herself into thinking she has no self-awareness or capacity to choose, and yet she keeps making choices in matters that reveal she does have some kind of self-knowledge, albeit self-knowledge that is partially hidden from her conscious mind.

Play It As It Lays could be a 1970s American echo of Albert Camus’s The Stranger, the novel I would argue is the most sadly misinterpreted book of the 20^th century. Maria is a lot like Mersault in that she lives the life of a nihilist. It is a life that lacks quality because, like Mersault, she avoids taking control and minimizes her willingness to make choices. Both characters live a pointless, empty existence. But just as so many readers misinterpret Mersault as being some kind of hero, I fear a lot of readers will misinterpret Maria as being a woman who is hopelessly lost in the world. It all depends on how conscientious you are in paying attention to subtle details. If you pay close enough attention, you will notice the abundance of times Joan Didion mentions rattlesnakes in this story. If you read quickly and don’t pay attention, you won’t. If you read carefully enough to be aware of all the rattlesnakes, you should be able to see all the subtle signs that Maria has more agency than you realize. In that there is humanity and in that there is hope. If you only see Maria through the eyes of Helene and Carter then you haven’t understood Joan Didion’s message. The less like them you are, the better off you will be in life anyhow.

Book Review & Analysis: Cuba by Irene A. Wright

Cuba

by Irene A. Wright

      There is no shortage of information about Cuba in the 20^th century up to the present, especially regarding the post-Revolution years. If you want on-the-ground impressions of the post-independence, turn of the century era, fewer options exist. One source of information might be Irene A. Wright, a journalist and historian who lived on the island in the 1910s. Her first book, Cuba, is more or less a travelogue around the former Spanish colony. It isn’t a book of great insight though.

Wright starts off the book in Havana, the capital city of Cuba, where she worked several years for an American news agency. She begins by describing some landmarks and tourist sights, providing background historical information about each one. This could have been more interesting, but her writing style is like what you would find in a standard travel guide. By that I mean she doesn’t write as well as a Lonely Planet writer would. For some odd reason, the chapter on tourist attractions ends with a long divergence into the subject of Cuban funerals. The subject might be of interest to social scientists or travelers who are less interested in tourism and more interested in cultural experiences. This is actually one of the most interesting parts of the book. But it is certainly misplaced in a chapter on tourist sights. This book overall is poorly organized, especially in its paragraphing.

Wright goes slightly deeper as she writes about Havana. This is mostly a written description of a city map that doesn’t give a sense of what it feels like to be there. She tries a couple times though. One passage is about the evening corso and concerts in a city park. Another part is about carnival when the streets fill with masked revelers. Her description, however, is shallow and patronizing. Rather than participating in the celebration, she stands aloof on the sidelines and watches as if she is too proper to participate. She writes about carnival as though it is a crowd of drunken simpletons having fun by throwing paper streamers at each other. She never takes into consideration what this might mean for the participants.

Her other assessments of Havana’s population aren’t any better. Her opinion of the people are that they are nice and generous, but not very bright. Of course, she doesn’t go into great detail about why this is so. And her assessment of who is Cuban is a bit off too. I don’t know the actual demographic breakdown of Cuba in the 1910s, but I do know the population had a visibly large Afro-Cuban population. But Wrights statistics of Cuban citizens only account for the white population as if the Afro-Cubans are stateless people who just happen to be there for some inexplicable reason.

Throughout the book, Wright barely ever mentions Afro-Cuban people. They are strangely absent in the same way they are absent from American TV shows like Leave It to Beaver where one or two of them might pop into view for a brief moment.

There is one exception though when she gets taken to a Santeria or Nanigo ceremony. If my information is correct, this is the first written account in history of an African diaspora religious ceremony in Cuba. The description is basic though and doesn’t give any real insight. She also conflates Santeria with Abakua which are actually two different practices, but she doesn’t investigate deeply enough to understand that. For her it’s all just some exotic entertainment like something you’d see at Disneyworld. The urban legend that Abakua societies perform human sacrifices also gets mentioned even though that is something that has been disproven long ago. Those were actually rumors spread by colonial Spanish police who wanted to destroy the Abakua societies for being pro-inedepndence. Wright wouldn’t have known that in her time however.

The strongest part of this book is the evaluation of Cuban politics at that time. The 19^th century in was marked by slave rebellions and the Wars of Independence sparked by Jose Marti. In the 1890s, the United States sent troops to Cuba during the Spanish-American War fought in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. After Cuba’s liberation and granting of statehood, the American government stayed in Havana to prop up a national government. After writing the contentious Platt Amendment into Cuba’s constitution, granting America the right to intervene in Cuban politics at will, the American diplomats returned to the North, leaving Cuba to its own affairs. The problem was that the Cuban government attracted politicians who were more concerned with graft and corruption than they were in governing the country. What little infrastructure that got built in Cuba was in the hands of American and European businessmen who had vested interests in making money as opposed to developing the nation. Wright’s assessment of this dilemma is verifiable in other histories of Cuba.

After time spent in Havana, Wright travels by boat around the west coast of the island and onwards to the Isle of Pines. Her descriptions f the beaches and coves along with the interior lands are about what you would expect from tropical Caribbean islands. There are a couple stories about pirates using the Cuban coast for their lairs and folkloric hunts for buried treasure. There is also a brief mention of the coral reef that impeded John F. Kennedy’s disastrous failed Bay of Pigs invasion in the 1960s. If only the CIA knew what other people knew, history would have been a lot different. In the lands beyond the coast, Wright comments more about farming than she does the jungle and natural vegetation. This is somewhat interesting, but not enough to carry the whole book.

Wright’s travels along the coast going east and back west along the southern edge are more of the same. She says little about the sugarcane and tobacco plantations that made Cuba so famous. Instead she writes about the citrus farms, emphasizing those that grow grapefruit and lemons. Most of the farmers she writes about are white Americans, Canadians, or Europeans. Cuban farmers are almost completely absent from the narrative and when they do appear, it is mostly to comment on how poor they are. As patronizing to Cubans as that might be, she isn’t without sympathy for them. She uses the poverty of the farmers to make an argument that Cuba needs to open up to international markets in order to thrive economically. That doesn’t necessarily sound bad on the surface, but what she is actually arguing is that the USA should colonize or annex Cuba for the benefit of the American food industry. She explicitly names the United Fruit Company in her sales pitch, one of the most destructive American corporations to ever do business in Latin America. Most of the second half of the book reads like a solicitation to American land buyers and investors. She writes like Cuba is a ripe fruit ready for the picking by wealthier nations. That might not have seemed so bad in her time, but with hindsight it certainly was a dangerous idea. She is right that Cuba got off to a bad start politically and economically, but her solution is nothing but short sighted and naive considering that Cuba was an emerging nation when she was there and what came later.

The last half of the book is dull. The writing is so monotonous that every town, village, city, and jungle all sound about the same. She uses the same language to describe different places and that doesn’t make for good reading.

Irene A. Wright’s Cuba has some high points, but ultimately is a lifeless book. The author fails to capture the heart and soul of the island and its people. It is of historical importance though since Cuba is the first book written in English about this Latin American nation located just ninety miles south of Miami. I suppose that makes her the first woman to write about Cuba too. That could be a source of pride for feminists even though her writing sucks. Beyond this, Wright went on to write the first comprehensive book on the history of Cuba in any language and it was all based on bone fide methods of historical research, or at least whatever those methods were in her time. This book isn’t great but it is of historical importance. At least it deserves some credit for that.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Run River by Joan Didion

Run River

by Joan Didion

      Anybody familiar with popular culture in America knows about the Western genre in film and literature. Westward expansion in the 19^th century is a reality that is baked into the collective American psyche, for better or worse. The Western genre in entertainment and art uses that as a template for the exploration of themes dealing with the American identity including enterprise, personal responsibility, individuality, freedom, and justice. And guns. Somewhere in the space between the historical westward expansion and the storytelling fantasies that originated in journalistic sensationalism, penny dreadful newspapers, and pulp novels, to films as far back as the silent movie era there is a gap that has been overlooked by purveyors of high and low art. That gap is the less romanticized portrayal of what happened after the westward moving pilgrims settled, particularly those that settled in California. One author that did explore that gap is John Steinbeck. Another is Joan Didion and her first novel, Run River, picks up exactly where John Steinbeck left off.

The connection between Didion and Steinbeck isn’t tenuous; Didion makes sure you get it with direct references thrown right in your face. She mentions the novel In Dubious Battle by name and the land owner Everett McClellan speaks with contempt to his wife Lily about the Okie migrant workers camped out on the edge of their farm. It’s a direct reference to The Grapes of Wrath in which we see the downtrodden fruit pickers from an outsider’s point of view. Lily, whose maiden name is Knight, comes from a lineage of settlers in the Sacramento Valley just like her husband McClellan. The reference to Steinbeck’s East of Eden is just a little too obvious as if Didion is begging you to compare her to that legendary American author. Didion, in a further possible reference to East of Eden, even has an Asian caretaker raising her children who are otherwise almost absent from her life. It’s the kind of stunt a young author pulls in their first novel. These ancestral lines of the Knights and McClellans are important because when Lily’s father, an ex-congressman, dies and the married couple’s connection to their families’ past begins to fade, we see how uprooted they actually are in their time and place.

Lily and Everett live empty lives. Lily is a slut. And she’s shallow. There is no point to saying this in a delicate way. It’s just how she is. She’s easy to get into bed. It’s not that she’s excessively horny or indulgent in her sexuality. It’s just that she has nothing better to do with her life. She has enough money to live comfortably and doesn’t have a strong enough mind to occupy herself with the kinds of intellectual pursuits that would build character. She’s just an emoty dress that gets passed around like a jug of ripple wine at a campfire. There is a profound irony here. Lily isn’t shallow because she isn’t a well-drawn character. Didion is a much better writer than that. Lily is shallow because Didion is a good writer. She creates a shallow protagonist through complexity in her prose. The writing is anything but shallow. In fact, you could say the prose is a little too complex for what Didion is trying to achieve. But it does work well enough to get you inside the empty mind of Lily.

Everett himself isn’t much better. He is a dull person, devoid of intellect or emotion. As a father, he manages the family the way a foreman might run a factory that makes products like toothbrushes or shoelaces, things that he has no emotional investment in. He is a family provider but one that is so emotionally distant from his wife and children that he is little more than an anchor or a hitching post for them. We do learn through the course of the novel that he does feel things like jealousy, shame, guilt, and anger, but he is so cut off from his own emotions that we don’t realize this until he expresses them with his gun.

The novel starts with a gunshot as heard by Lilly as she sits fretting in her bedroom. We don’t learn who got shot until the end of the story. The man who does get shot near the beginning is Ryder Channing. I’d expect anybody with a name like Ryder Channing to be from California, or at least to be a character in a soap opera set in California. I’m just sayin’. Everett murders Channing after catching him having a romp in the bushes by the river with Lilly. Throughout most of the story, even though Everett is emotionally dead, he doesn’t show any signs of being homicidal. So here the plot is set in place to be about how Everett came to the point of murdering this man. It almost starts with the feeling of a murder mystery albeit one in which the mystery is not who committed the murder but why did so.

Ryder Channing sees himself as a visionary entrepreneur. He schemes up big plans for business ventures that are guaranteed for success. Of course, all he needs to get started is money...other peoples’ money to be exact. His sales pitches are successful and he attracts a lot of investors and women too. But his businesses never succeed in getting off the ground and he maintains his luxurious lifestyle by skimming off the investments. Ryder isn’t exactly a grifter; it’s just that he is immature and not very responsible.

Ryder Channing has designs on Martha McClellan, Everett’s sister. The McClellan siblings have a curious relationship. There are heavy suggestions of an incestuous attachment. If the two haven’t actually slept with each other, there certainly is a desire between them that hangs heavy over the narrative. Martha is insanely jealous of Lily which is complicated by the detail that the two women both live in the McClellan mansion near the bank of the Sacramento River. They manage to get along though, especially because the children have a good relationship with Martha in the absence of Lily’s emotional support. As the story progresses though, Martha’s behavior becomes erratic and unpredictable. When she drowns in the river, we can’t be certain if it is a suicide or not. Martha is in the middle of all this because she had been planning to marry Ryder Channing, but the arrangements were called off partly because Everett didn’t approve of the marriage. Considering that Ryder and Lily were growing closer to having an affair before Martha’s death, it is easy to see how the history between the two men climaxes with Everett shooting Ryder after he discovers him post-coitus with Lily on the river bank.

After the suspicious death of Martha, Everett is driven further into despair because a powerful development corporation is planning to buy the Knight and McClellan properties. The intention is to turn the inherited agricultural land into suburban housing tracts. The businessmen are like turkey vultures circling the shack of a nearly dead man. This element of capitalist predation even further represents separation from the weakening ancestral roots put down by Lily and Everett’s families. Even worse, Ryder and others who live nearby are in on this real estate scheme because the pursuit of money means more to them than quality of life. This all builds up to the ending gunshot Lily hears in the first sentence of the novel.

All the pieces fit together making a clear and coherent picture. Unfortunately, the prose doesn’t do it justice. Didion’s writing is choppy and stilted a lot of the time. It doesn’t flow as it should. Some of the run-on sentences go on so long that it becomes difficult to follow what she is saying. At other times, the prose is difficult to pay attention to. It is the kind of writing that makes more sense after you finish reading it than during the reading process.

Another shortcoming is her use of the river as a metaphor. The river is a source of life for the farming community that lives on its banks. They obviously settled there because they needed water for irrigation. It is also a place of death since so many people die in or near the river during the course of the narrative. Also it represents a line of demarcation that cuts the communities off from the world outside the valley. This is especially important as a line that separates the people migrating from the east from those that stopped migrating and settled on the western bank. But a river is supposed to flow and the stream of ancestry that leads up to the marriage of Lily and Everett comes to a dead halt as their lives and relationship reaches the end. But Didion doesn’t emphasize the metaphor of the river with the strength she could have. Its meaning is obscure and should have been developed further to completion.

Like Finnegans Wake, Run River begins where it ends and ends where it begins, occupying a limbo between fantasies of the Old West and more contemporary fantasies of California as the land where dreams come true. Joan Didion t makes the farm lands in the Sacramento Valley arid and inhospitable. She writes about the people that way too. While the meaning of Run River is legitimate, the story is average and the writing unpolished. It does set the tone for her later and better works though. If those other novels had never been written, this one would have faded into obscurity. It’s not a great book, but if you’re inclined to see where the author of Play It As It Lays started off, it is worth reading once.