Friday, May 17, 2019

RUN, RIVER by Joan Didion

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” 

Joan Didion, "The White Album" from The White Album

Run, River (1963) is a novel by one of my favorite essayists, the writer's writer Joan Didion. I never met a Didion essay I didn't like, a lot. She writes about suburban shopping malls, the opulent mansions in Newport, lots about California including the Manson family, and all sorts of social commentary. She wrote a couple of memoirs after losing her daughter and her husband within a couple years of each other. I'd never read one of her novels until this month, when I downloaded Run, River and listened to it in the car. I didn't know if my fascination with her writing would carry over to her novels.  It took me some time to get into it, but by the halfway point I was engrossed. The character development and nuances of storytelling are masterful. I don't know how Didion did it, but I started thinking I was (protagonist) Lily, while alone with her in the car. We have little in common, so it wasn't that I related to her thoughts, feelings, and bad decisions. I just understood her thanks to Didion's fantastic writing.

Lily, Everett, Martha, Joe, Ryder, and a few parents and offspring populate the novel. I'm not going to give awayany secrets, because the way Didion reveals those secrets is part of the beauty of the novel. At least one of those characters end up dead, and please don't expect this author to tell you straight out how this happens. Nope, she casually mentions that person's funeral merely as a point on a timeline when she's describing another event. Wait, what? Did I miss something? If I had been reading a print book, I could have paged back a bit to see what I accidentally skimmed over. With an audio book, there's not a possibility to go back especially when driving. It would have been a waste of time anyway, because this was simply a cavalier mention of a death that hasn't happened yet. Eventually, Didion gets around to telling us what happened to this character in the most deliciously suspenseful way. There are plenty more storytelling treasures here.

That quote at the top of this post is a favorite of many Joan Didion fans. It comes at the beginning of her autobiographical essay, "The White Album" from a collection by the same name. The essays were written between 1968 and 1978. "The White Album" is the essay in which she writes about Charles Manson, meeting Jim Morrison and the Doors, and other tales of 1960s California. She demonstrates her unique gift for people-watching in these essays, and guess what: she "watches" her fictional characters as astutely. Through her descriptions of Lily, Everett, and Martha, along with insight into what they are thinking and how they are reacting, the story crescendos to that death I told you about (vaguely). "We tell ourselves stories in order to live..." and to understand how others live. The people of Run, River make mistakes and bad decisions and live their lives, and Joan Didion helps us understand them. Sometimes we read stories in order to understand life, don't you think?