Writers tell us about their literary loves as part of a forum which appears in PEN America 13: Lovers.

Jessica Hagedorn | John Barth | Yusef Komunyakaa | Stewart O’Nan | Anne Landsman |
Saïd Sayrafiezadeh | Lily Tuck | Jesse Ball | Elissa Schappell

In Thrall

Audrey Hepburn, at the end of Roman Holiday, is asked which city is her favorite, and answers, “Rome. By all means Rome.” Asked such a question about writers, my answer is: Joan Didion. By all means, Joan Didion.

I just now reread A Book of Common Prayer and once again—the book was published in 1977—was dazzled by the power of understatement and indirection which is so much a trademark of Didion’s art.

Withholding, I suppose one calls it.

Who is Charlotte Douglas, the enigmatic woman at the center of the novel? Why did she come to this out-of-the-way Central American country? One never really finds out exactly, and yet, because Didion gives one just enough tantalizing details to guess, to imagine, to make assumptions, the reader is totally in Charlotte’s thrall. As are most of the men in the novel.

Here is how Didion describes her:

As a child of comfortable family in the temperate zone, she had been as a matter of course provided with clean sheets, orthodontia, lamb chops, living grandparents, attentive godparents, one brother named Dickie, ballet lessons, and casual timely information about menstruation and the care of flat silver …

No mention is given of her parents, as that would give too much away; parenting, or the lack of it, is, in large part, what the novel is “about,” the failure of parents to understand their children. In particular, Charlotte Douglas’s failure as a mother is what propels the novel to its tragic end.

I love the quirky, oblique dialogue with the slightly surreal repetitions:

We should be doing this all our lives, Warren had said.

We should have done this all our lives, we should do this all our lives.

“I don’t want to leave you ever,” Charlotte said.

“No,” Warren said. “But you will.”

After a while there were no more frosts at night and the wild carrot came out along all the roads and every night ended badly.

In her essay “Why I Write,” Didion admits that her attention is always on the periphery, on the specific, the tangible—on what she can see, taste, touch. She writes in order to know what she thinks, she says. I do too.

Joan Didion’s writing continues to dazzle and continues to inspire and remind me to look for what is there—then try to leave it out.
 

Copyright © 2010 by Lily Tuck. All rights reserved.