Book Review: Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

by Joan Didion

      In the early 20^th century, the Irish modernist poet W.B. Yeats believed the end of the world had arrived. So he wrote his most famous poem called “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”. In it he described the coming of the Antichrist, a repulsive monster that would unleash chaos and mass confusion as society collapsed, leaving everything in ruins. You don’t have to be a mystical Christian like Yeats to feel the abject terror in the poem. You wouldn’t want to be anyways since Yeats’ answer to what he saw as a collapse of civilization was to support fascism. Yeats’s point of view isn’t a whole lot different from what we see in 21^st century America. If Yeats were here today he would be a white Christian nationalist and most likely a MAGA supporter. But that’s not the point here. What is important is that Joan Didion opens her essay collection, called Slouching Towards Bethlehem, with the W.B. Yeats poem. Like the Irish poet, she believed the chaos and confusion of her time would unleash a tidal wave of insanity into the world.

The essays in this book were originally written as magazine articles. Joan Didion in the 1960s was part of the New Journalism movement that included such now-famous upstarts as Norman Mailer and Hunter S. Thompson on the liberal left and Tom Wolfe and Didion on the conservative right. Before the 1960s, journalism was always presented as being objective without any trace of the writer’s attitude in the writing. This, of course, was a lie and an illusion as journalism had typically been written as propaganda. The New Journalists were more honest. They didn’t pretend to be objective. They made their own opinions and perceptions part of the writing and they didn’t hesitate to make that clear. The New Journalists were part of the story and they weren’t shy about saying so. Now in the 21^st century, journalism is almost nothing but opinion, but both mainstream media and podcasters on the left and right are now presenting opinion and ideology as fact and absolute truth. Fact-based journalism has receded into the distant past. But that’s another matter altogether. The matter here is that Didion’s first collection of magazine articles is a relic from the moment when New Journalism was a fresh and pioneering new style of media communication.

Yes, it’s a relic or an artifact, if you will. The collection opens with some underwhelming essays. The first is about murder and adultery in a quiet California suburb. This is followed by a time Didion hung out with John Wayne on a movie set in Mexico. She waxes poetic about how great he is while he babbles about nothing important or interesting. Then there is a piece about a conservative think tank that doesn’t do much thinking. These are all trivial works of journalism and I couldn’t care less about any of them.

It picks up a bit in an article about Carmel, California where the folk singer Joan Baez has opened a meditation center for hippies. The conservatives in the town want to kick them out but can’t scheme up a good enough reason to do it legally. There certainly can’t be any noise complaints since the hippies spend most of their time there meditating silently and peacefully. Their big crime is being different. Didion obviously isn’t one of the hippies, but she definitely takes their side when the cranky conservatives hold town meeting about the problem that really isn’t a problem. It’s a more exciting essay, but nothing so great.

This brings us to the titular essay. “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” is all about the counter culture of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury scene around the time of the Summer of Love. In her characteristic style, Didion writes about what the people do without so much concern for why they do it. Most of this involves her hanging out with young hippies while they do drugs and listen to music. The hippies inhabit communal living spaces in houses and a warehouse. If you’ve spent any time in the drug scene, you’ll know the kind of places she writes about. She is friendly with them, even non-judgmental and without an air of condescension. But some hippies around the Haight-Ashbury scene are suspicious of her and refuse to talk.

While all of this mostly looks harmless enough, the essay does show a growing awareness of darker elements creeping in. Hard drugs show up more and more often. Sleazy people are coming in and preying on runaway teenagers. The essay ends with performance artists walking around in blackface and drugs being given to little kids. Without directly referencing the Yeats poem, it is easy to see what Didion is implying about the future of America.

This is actually a very superficial portrayal of the hippy counter culture. It was a complex and multi-layered social movement that resulted from a wide range of issues and attracted people from a multitude of backgrounds. There was far more to it than a bunch of lazy kids who dropped out and sat around doing drugs because they couldn’t handle the responsibilities of life. Certainly some of them made bad decisions, but not all of them permanently ruined their lives. Most of them weren’t the types of people who would give LSD to a four year old child. The hippies didn’t usher in Armageddon. Instead they brought some much needed social and cultural changes to the American landscape and beyond, some of which are changes that the conservatives of today are directly benefiting from. The media would have you think that the Manson murders and the Altamont concert proved the hippy dream had failed. It’s more accurate to say that the vast majority of hippies simply grew older and moved on to other things, taking some of the new values along with them. That isn’t giving up or selling out. It’s maturing. It’s a process that is as much biological as it is cultural. But you can’t deduce any of this from Joan Didion’s writing because she takes a black box approach to journalism. Her concern is with what people do, not why they do it. That surface level approach leaves most of the story out.

The remaining two sections have personal statements about Joan Didion herself. One of the more memorable ones, “On Morality”, relates back to “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” without mentioning it. She addresses the issue of morality being a practice of community values, a kind of roadmap for conduct within that society. But then what happens when individuals are outside the boundaries of that society? They have to adapt and possibly reinvent rules or morality in order to survive. Didion brings the Donner Party into the discussion. Those were the 19^th century pioneers who got trapped in the Sierra Nevada mountains during a snowstorm and resorted to cannibalism for survival. The point of this is that their ordinary moral codes had to be suspended when they were forced into a situation outside the boundaries of ordinary living. Survival would have been impossible if the Donner Party had strictly adhered to a moral doctrine that didn’t apply in their unusual situation. This brief essay, which I think is the best one in this anthology, can retroactively be applied to her essay about the hippy counter culture. Like it or not, young people embrace new ideas and those who are too inflexible to adapt to an ever changing world are the ones who suffer for it the most. Joan Didion is explaining moral relativity and how it functions. This is quite interesting considering her conservative political views. I tend to think of her as a moderate Republican, if not an actual Democrat, who supported a party that didn’t align with her values.

The Donner Party comes up in other essays. Didion identifies with them because she descends from an ancestral line of pioneers who settled in the Sacramento Valley of California. Those settlers, once they stopped on the West Coast, were faced with a new situation requiring a new set of standards and lifestyle. While they didn’t have to resort to cannibalism like the Donner Party, they were faced with a similar void of morality making it necessary to adapt and build up society from scratch. Applying this principle to her other essays and novels, it can be deduced that California is still in a state of formation. This might account for the shallowness and lack of soul that characterize the Californians in her writing. Didion extends this idea in her essay about white Americans who settle in Hawaii, specifically mentioning the real families she portrays in her novel Democracy.

I have to admit, after finishing Slouching Towards Bethlehem I couldn’t remember most of what I had read. Joan Didion’s writing just didn’t stick in my mind. Possibly that’s because this is a collection of magazine articles. Magazines are full pf ephemera and tend to be little more than literary fluff. They are written for people riding the subway or waiting in a dentist’s office waiting room. New Journalism or not, these articles are surface level reportage, mostly of things that aren’t that interesting to begin with. Joan Didion never does a deep dive into anything here. I get a lot more out of her novels. This book is a museum piece. I think it has value as an artifact exemplifying the style known as New Journalism from the 1960s, but on its own it doesn’t carry much weight.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Jamaica White by Harold Underhill

Jamaica White

by Harold Underhill

      According to Jamaican folklore, the plantation mansion of Rose Hall in Montego Bay is haunted by the ghost of Annie Palmer, also known as the White Witch of Rose Hall. As the story goes, Annie Palmer murdered three of her husbands, practiced occult rituals in secret chambers under the mansion, and was finally executed during a slave rebellion in the 19^th century. Now her ghost, hungry for revenge, is said to wander around the plantation grounds.

Rose Hall, in more recent times, was bought by an American businessman who renovated the mansion and turned it into a museum. Night time tours, for those willing to fork over enough cash, are given. These excursion come complete with Scooby Doo style explorations of secret passageways splashed with blood, underground tunnels, and seances. These tours would not be complete without scary stories about Annie Palmer. So some people in the Jamaican tourist industry have a vested interest in keeping the legend of the White Witch of Rose Hall alive.

I’ll admit that I’m a sucker for gothic horror. I don’t literally believe in ghosts or haunted houses, but when gothic horror is at its best, such things function as metaphors anyhow. So when I found Harold Underhill’s historic novel Jamaica White, purported to be the story of Annie Palmer and her life at Rose Hall, I thought I was in for an interesting creepshow. This novel did turn out to be creepy, but not for the reasons I expected.

James Arthur is the novel’s protagonist. He arrives on the docks of Montego Bay after a voyage from Manchester, England where he grew up in poverty. In a desire for power, wealth, and a ticket out of the working class slums, Arthur takes on a job as a “buckra”, an overseer, on a Jamaican sugarcane plantation named Rose Hall.

Arthur meets up with Broderick at the wharf. Broderick was once an Irish murderer, living on death row in an English prison. The jailers struck a deal with him. If he agreed to work as a colonial plantation boss, they would spare his life on the condition that he never return to England. After arriving at Rose Hall, Broderick’s self-discipline, sadism, and sociopathy made him rise in the ranks to become the head buckra of Rose Hall.

Arthur is taken to his bungalow where he meets two other characters of lesser importance in the plot. One is Mary Lou, a slave woman who cooks, cleans, and does sexual favors for him. The other is Wilson, a rum-drinking alcoholic who used to be a school teacher. He got fired for protesting the use of corporal punishment in the classroom and so got sent to work in Jamaica to get rid of him. Wilson acts as a voice of conscience in the story. He doesn’t like slavery, but he depends on it for work. Convinced that it will eventually end, he holds educational classes for slaves who want to learn how to read.

So far so good. The characters are distinctly drawn and effectively introduced. The world building is of high quality with vivid descriptions of the plantation and surrounding jungle. The narration goes step by step to draw the reader into this world and the story with all the elements building on each other to create a fantastical literary space. Despite being a place of slavery, the plantation and its surroundings are described as enticing, sensual, and elysian. Underhill has a definite talent for using language to create mood, atmosphere, character development, and plot. But at a certain point in the novel, I begin to feel his talent is wasted.

When Broderick first shows Arthur around the plantation, the new buckra gets a first taste of what is to come. One of the slaves gets a severe whipping for stepping out of line. Arthur is initially shocked by this, but gets over it quickly. After dark, Broderick brings Arthur to a dungeon where the house servant named Venus is chained to the wall. Broderick gives Arthur a whip and commands him to flog her as part of the training. Arthur obeys and again feels disgusted before silencing his conscience and continues learning how to be cruel.

There are multiple scenes of tirture throughout the story. They are vivid in their detail and go on for longer than they need to in order to get the point across. Broderick is also sexually promiscuous with the slave women and even indulges in pedophilia. On one hand you can say that this descriptive writing needs to be so detailed to show how inhumane slavery truly is. It also serves the purpose of building Broderick’s character as a psychopathic sadist. One the other hand, the descriptions of torture are so indulgent that they read like passages from the Marquis de Sade. What I mean to say is that Underhill writes about slavery as though it is a fetish. He writes as though he takes delight in all the fine details of the torture. I’ll come back to this later.

All of this builds up to Arthur’s meeting with Annie Palmer, the owner of the Rose Hall sugarcane estate. Up until that point, Arthur only hears about her through other characters. Her reputation precedes her as stories circulate about her frequently having sex with Broderick and the strongest of the male slaves. It is also said that she murdered her husband to inherit control over the plantation. But before they meet, Broderick commands Arthur to kill a slave who tries to sabotage the machinery in the sugar mill. After the killing, Arthur goes through the same cycle of disgust and suppression of his conscience. Then he gets incapacitated by an illness.

Annie Palmer demands that he be brought up to her mansion so she can nurse him back to health. In the process of Arthur’s recovery, they get emotionally close and begin a sexual relationship. Arthur falls madly in love with her, but of course she is only playing with him. He is too naive to see that. After he becomes healthy again, Annie takes him to a waterfall in the jungle where they have sex. The eroticism in this novel is just as graphic and indulgent as the passages where slaves are tortured. At this point the writing becomes outright fantasy and it is easy to forget the story has anything to do with slavery. In fact it reads like a description of paradise. As the narrative goes on, it becomes more apparent that the practice of slavery is a deliberate part of that paradise.

At this point, I can reiterate that the writing in this novel is great. The sequential progression leading up to the meeting between James Arthur and Annie Palmer is effectively handled even if it isn’t entirely original. The description and character building are consistently strong. Annie Palmer is an especially well-drawn character combining elements of sensual beauty, intelligence, and social charm all wrapped up in a woman with a strong and commanding personality. If you ignore her darker side, her role as slave owner and her ability to be cruel without mercy, you could be forgiven for finding her attractive. In fact, if you like strong, commanding women it would be surprising if you didn’t.

In the course of Arthur getting to know Annie Palmer, he appears to be building up to a moral awakening. He feels disgusted by the violence used to control the slaves. He agrees with the alcoholic Wilson, the man who tries teaching the slaves to read, that slavery is morally wrong and must end sometime in the future. But as he continues working as buckra on the plantation, he gets closer to Annie as their sexual trysts become more common. Annie Palmer, as it turns out, thinks of herself as a visionary. She acknowledges that slavery is terrible, but she justifies the practice by saying that great empires can only be built through cruelty. Her long range dream is to turn Jamaica into another Roman Empire. This could well be a delusion of grandeur, but Arthur swallows it whole. This is the point where the novel loses my sympathy. Any moral awakening that Arthur may have been on the verge of having is crushed as he becomes more fanatical about his love for Annie Palmer.

As Arthur becomes increasingly more devoted and less concerned with the welfare of the slaves, she loses interest in him, begins to humiliate him, and eventually shuns him. Meanwhile, a slave rebellion is brewing up with Venus, the house servant, playing a major role in it. The entire plantation, including the mansion, is set on fire and all the white people are killed except for James Arthur who is saved by his sexual servant Mary Lou. The rebellion is arbitrary. It functions more as a means of climaxing a plot rather than delivering poetic justice. It is an explosion to distract the reader from the mundane plot in which the relationship between Arthur and Annie Palmer fizzles out. The key to understanding this is in the final passage when James Arthur is returning to England on a ship. As he lies face down on his bunk, he is crying because he lost Annie Palmer, the woman he was madly in love with and the one he pinned his fantasies of future wealth and power on. He has no gratitude, or even any thoughts for Mary Lou, the slave woman who saved his life. James Arthur’s story ends without any moral redemption.

That’s the whole problem with this novel: it just doesn’t say anything. It doesn’t make a statement. It doesn’t take any definite moral stance. The message is vague and weak. Sure there is something to the slave rebellion, but the slaves aren’t fully humanized in any way. They are mostly in the background or else used as objects for labor, torture, or sex. Venus does have her own monologue at the end, but it does little more than explain the plans for the rebellion. Her subjectivity is only suggested. Mary Lou is entirely objectified too. She appears to like Arthur but it’s never made clear why. And the only white people who have any pity for the slaves are pathetic losers who don’t have enough will to do anything aside from continuing to work as buckras, sustaining the practice they claim to hate.

It’s possible the author is attempting to examine the nature of power and domination in the character of Annie Palmer. If so, it’s not clear what he is trying to say. Her flippant attitude that slavery is a necessary evil when doing great things is sickening, but she isn’t written as a villain. In fact she’s written as desirable and seductive. In fact, she bears some resemblance to Wanda von Dunajew, the dominatrix in Sacher- Masoch’s Venus in Furs. And James Arthur isn’t far from Severin in the way he worships her. Actually Annie Palmer reminds me a bit of Elon Musk and his belief that empathy is a weakness that prevents great men from doing great things. Arthur is like the kind of shlubs that admire Musk for his ruthlessness and power even though Musk has made it clear that he despises the entire human race. That is an all inclusive hatred and the shlub fans are a portion of the humanity he despises. But if this is the point of the book, it is weakly stated and too vague to be of any value. In any case, if empathy is nothing more than an obstacle to great achievements, I’d say that great achievements are not important. I’d choose empathy over greatness any day.

Again, I will restate my opinion that this novel is excellently written on a technical level. But the content is such crap that the form gets overshadowed. The over-indulgence in sex and violence is a big part of that. It’s not that I’m, squeamish. I’ve read and sometimes enjoyed my share of transgressive writing. I’d even say there is a time and place for detailed descriptions of the cruelties of slavery. You could argue that such excessive description is necessary to show how cruel it actually is. When written into the proper context that is true. But there is a problem of proportion in this story. The passages about torture and sex are longer and given far more attention than any other elements in the narrative. The author seems to take great delight in his scenes of sadism and then takes just as much delight in pairing them with long and detailed passages of erticism. After seeing what Annie Palmer is responsible for on the Rose Hall plantation, you’d have to be a really sick person to want to fuck her over and over again, let alone fall madly in love with her and worship the ground she walks on. I think Harold Underhill’s intentions are to indulge in a sick, racist fantasy while throwing in some insincere details about moral conflicts so that readers don’t outright dismiss him as a complete piece of human shit. If he has some other intention, I’ve missed it because he didn’t articulate it clearly enough.

If you want a Caribbean twist on the gothic horror genre, Jamaica White isn’t a good choice. It does have a castle, but there isn’t any witchcraft and there aren’t any ghosts. The only thing scary about it is the passe attitude the author has towards the brutality of slavery. It’s nothing but an eroticized fantasy of white supremacy, power, domination, and violence. It might appeal to people who are indifferent to racism. It might appeal even more to Nazi pigs who sexually fetishize racism.

Jamaica White doesn’t even incorporate any of the Jamaican folklore surrounding the White Witch of Rose Hall. Academic folklorists have traced the legend’s origin back to an early 19^th century novel about a slave rebellion set in Cuba. Over the years, details about a female plantation owner were added; they derived from a real woman, who didn’t live at Rose Hall, but had three successive husbands. They all died of natural causes and she never killed any of them. It is true that Rose Hall once had a slave rebellion, but Annie Palmer never existed except as a fictional character in ghost stories told around campfires by Jamaican storytellers late at in the night. The current owners of Rose Hall have a vested interest in keeping the legend alive since their profit margins depend on it. I didn’t like this novel, but if I ever get to listen to the the legend of the White Witch of Rose Hall being told by a Jamaican person in the flickering lights of a campfire, I’d be fascinated.

 

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.