The Year of Magical Thinking

Reading, like everything else, takes place in context. A great book will probably be great and a bad book bad whenever you read them, but the experience of reading a book is inevitably shaped by the circumstances in which you read: by the last book you read, by recent events, by whether your back hurts, by whether you devour the book flat out in one sitting late into the night or nibble it in bits and pieces at the bus stop and in ten free minutes before picking the kids up from school.

A friend lent me The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion's memoir of the year after the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, maybe six months ago. Had I read it immediately, I wouldn't be comparing it to Sandra Gilbert's Death's Door: Modern Dying and the Way We Grieve, another literary widow's recent book about death, which I read this summer. Nor would Jenny's recent Didion post have left me slightly embarrassed at my apparently jejune affection for Didion's prose.

I might not have noticed that there appears to be a canon of death--Geoffrey Gorer, C. S. Lewis, Phillipe Aries, Sherwin B. Nuland--to which both Didion and Gilbert turn in the face of loss. I might not have wondered whether their books will enter this canon. I might not have been so aware that it seems impossible to speak of death today without referencing 9/11.

If I hadn't just read Gilbert's argument for the permeability of the barrier between dead and living, I might not have noted how acutely absolute that barrier is for Didion. On the other hand, if I'd read Didion's brief reflection first, Gilbert's lengthy exposition might have seemed not only unnecessarily long, but perhaps even unnecessary.

Six months ago, I might not have focused so intently on Didion's prose, probing, like a tongue in a dubious tooth, whether or not I do in fact like it. I might not have noticed that her sentences in this book seem different: simpler and less show-offy, more drastically to the point, and thus not a useful gauge.

Then again, I might have noticed, for if I'd read the book six months ago, I would still have been me. I would still have had my fascinations with death and disaster, with prose style, with glamour (for even, or perhaps especially, in the devastating wake of its loss, Didion and Dunne's life still comes across as enormously glamourous, and I must pinch myself in punishment for my envy of something whose loss has left someone else bereft) (I have a host of other fascinations, but those were the ones that primarily shaped this reading experience).

I think The Year of Magical Thinking is a very good book, and I think I would have thought so six months ago. The name dropping gets to be a bit much, though you could argue that it was simply her life (Jenny's comments about Didion's sense of her own preciousness poke at me), and at the end the circling back and repetition, which I liked for most of it (structure is always Didion's strength), starts to lose its power. But unlike the excerpt that appeared in the NY Times Magazine, the whole book does not seem arrogant and solipsistic, or even cold (I don't remember, now, why I thought the excerpt was so cold, except it had something to do with the absence of her daughter, who is a central presence in the book, and with the sense that she knew everything there was to know about how everyone grieves, which isn't so much the case in the book). I like, too, how she describes her fights with Dunne, refusing to fall into the everything-was-beautiful-all-the-time trap with which the dead are so often recalled. It comforts me, somehow, to know that other couples, famous writer couples, hardly speak for days after stupid fights.

As I was finishing the book (more context) I read Ron Rosenbaum's review of Daniel Mendelsohn's new book about the Holocaust. I'm not sure I can read the book. For all my obsession with death, the Holocaust is not one of my readerly preoccupations. It's too much for me. In fact, I'd been thinking, with reference to Didion, about how difficult it is to imagine the unimaginable--one's husband dropping dead across the dinner table--and how perhaps I read these books about death to try to get there, where I can't imagine, even though I don't want to go. Perhaps it's a kind of inoculatory effect: if I can know, from someone else, what it will be like, perhaps it won't be so bad, or perhaps I can at least anticipate the badness. And I was thinking, as I do, in my liberal guilt kind of way, how much easier it is to access the pain of a famous writer losing her husband, than a Lebanese grandfather losing his whole family in a bombing, or a Mexican mother losing her children in a mudslide. And I was thinking about boxcars, really, I was, and then I read this passage in Rosenbaum's review:

And if one thinks one has lost one’s capacity for horror at the depths of human nature, consider this, from an eyewitness deposition he finds about the second roundup of Bolechow Jews: “A terrible episode happened with Mrs. Grynberg. The Ukrainians and the Germans who had broken into her house found her giving birth. ... When the birth pangs started she was dragged onto a dumpster in the yard of the town hall with a crowd ... who cracked jokes and jeered and watched the pain of childbirth. ... The child was immediately torn from her arms along with its umbilical cord and thrown — It was trampled by the crowd and she was stood on her feet as blood poured out of her with her bleeding bits hanging.”

It’s an episode that raises questions about the limits of representation. After giving us an excerpt from another eyewitness account — of Jews packed in cattle cars on the way to the death camps — Mendelsohn writes: “Whatever we see in museums, the artifacts and the evidence, can give us only the dimmest comprehension of what the event itself was like. ... We must be careful when we try to envision ‘what it was like.’ It is possible today, for instance, to walk inside a vintage cattle car in a museum, but ... simply being in that enclosed, boxlike space ... is not the same as being in that space after you’ve had to smother your toddler to death and to drink your own urine in desperation, experiences that visitors to such exhibits are unlikely to have recently undergone.” Well intentioned as such exhibits are, the power of eyewitness testimony suggests that sometimes words are worth a thousand pictures.

If one reason we read is to get into another context, to understand another circumstance and another life, if we feel that we must go there, even if we don't want to, then Didion's book works, regardless of her preciousness or her prose.

[I am wildly dissatisfied with this post. It's been bobbing around in my head since I started the book on Friday night. There are too many bits and pieces here, and I didn't even include them all. But maybe that's why I can't just delete it. Sorry.]