After Henry (Audible Audio Edition) Joan Didion, Elizabeth Hess, Audible Studios Books
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In her latest forays into the American scene, Joan Didion covers ground from Washington to Los Angeles, from a TV producer's gargantuan "manor" to the racial battlefields of New York's criminal courts. At each stop she uncovers the mythic narratives that elude other observers Didion tells us about the fantasies the media construct around crime victims and presidential candidates; she gives us new interpretations of the stories of Nancy Reagan and Patty Hearst; she charts America's rollercoaster ride through evanescent booms and hard times that won't go away. A bracing amalgam of skepticism and sympathy, After Henry is further proof of Joan Didion's infallible radar for the true spirit of our age.
After Henry (Audible Audio Edition) Joan Didion, Elizabeth Hess, Audible Studios Books
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After Henry (Audible Audio Edition) Joan Didion, Elizabeth Hess, Audible Studios Books Reviews
It's interesting to read Joan Didion in some sort of rough chronological sequence, because I'm watching her mind and her writing develop as I go. Her earlier books, Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, are intensely personal affairs that use her own experiences to illustrate general features of 1960's America. They are brilliant pieces of work that have encouraged me to read everything else she's written, but they are also profoundly self-absorbed. Reading her earliest works, I feel like a therapist talking to someone who is stuck inside her own head; every time she tries to solve a problem, she finds some reason why she can't, and the chain of reasons ultimately leads in a circle back to her initial desperation. It's a good thing Prozac didn't exist then (only gin and hot water, and Dexedrine), or else we'd never have gotten works of such political and literary brilliance.
What's fascinating about those earlier books, and about After Henry (the most recent book of hers that I've read), is that there's at least one strong narrative line through all of them they are books about the stories in which Americans enshroud the news. The White Album's title essay is famous for its opening line "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." That's what appears in Bartlett's from The White Album, but it's basically vacuous without the rest of the paragraph -- a paragraph that summarizes, at an abstract level, every essay that she's written since (at least among the ones I've read)
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be "interesting" to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest's clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. 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.
"Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling. ..."
The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem continue on this theme, at very concrete levels. Didion is our Virgil, giving us the slideshow tour of Hell and only rarely drawing out a lesson. The world doesn't make sense anymore; the center isn't holding, and the best she can do is to paint small pictures for us of what she sees. She'll let us make up our own stories.
After Henry comes 20 years later, and you can tell what the time has done. The essays are tighter, more didactic, less personal, less self-absorbed her examples come from the newspaper, and are quite explicitly about the lessons we can draw. Only now she's drawing lessons about the media itself here is the Central Park Jogger case, which the media rapidly distort from one woman's sufferings into some allegory about the city itself. The allegories try to paint New York as itself raped, itself violated, itself likely to rise from the ashes. The story is no longer about this woman. It is about a city, but a city that has never existed; the story ignores pervasive racial and class differences in New York, all in a very predictable (and probably unconscious) defense of the ruling power structure. The story can never make New York corrupt and frightening; it is only allowed to make the city courageous and "bustling."
When Didion wrote that essay ("Sentimental Journeys"), New York was on the decline and crime was rampant. Yet the stories the media produced bore no relation to the frightening empirical reality that New Yorkers (apparently) saw. Nor did the stories around the 1988 presidential campaign bear any relation to what Americans knew about their country, or how the political process actually worked.
A map of how stories form, fold in on themselves, and ultimately serve the needs of the ruling class, is what Didion brings to the table. Reading her is like taking a deep, relaxing breath after reading the minutiae of, say, the Plamegate scandal; her stories about media distortion have been true as long as she's been writing, and remain true up to today.
First published in 1993, this collection of essays by a master of the form display her incisive, yet cool gaze, as always. I was expecting more personal pieces – but these range across place, from fire storms in California to New York, and politics, and issues rather than touching more on the personal.
The After Henry of the title refers to a tribute to Henry Robbins, Didion’s friend and editor, which is one of the few personal pieces. A highlight was definitely a look at the Reagans in the White House in In the Realm of the Fisher King, which throws a very glaring, and coruscating spotlight on Nancy and Ronald. Also fascinating was Sentimental Journeys, an exploration of the way the rape of a white woman was reported by that city’s media.
A very good read. I had to get this book for a college English class, but it's got great stories.
This collection of essays covers the waterfront by time and topic, but Didion brings to each her characteristic innocence and cynicism combined with personal knowledge of the events and acquaintance with the persons that inform her analyses.
I adore Joan Didion - will read anything written by her!
After Henry is a gem. I depend on Didion to look under and around the public images she writes about. Her sentences on any subject give me clues as to how to look at all things.
I usually love Joan but this is the worst of her usually wonderful output. Buy white album or Bethlehem instead.
Joan Didion's AFTER HENRY is a collection of essays from mostly the late 1980s, most published in THE NEW YORKER and THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS. SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM is one of my favorite essays and I so enjoy Didion's prose, subject matter and unvarnished take on a variety of topics. The most in-depth of the essays (sections divided into three sections Washington, California and New York) concern the 1989 rape of the Central Park Jogger and subsequent trial, both media-driven and actual, as well as the 1988 presidential race, insomuch as it was presented by the media. She writes about the 1988 writer's strike as well as Patty Hearst, California Brush Fires, and political conventions. The subject matter is obviously less personal then her tremendous memoirs THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING and BLUE NIGHTS, but the taut, observational writing is intact, as well as the knowledge that she brings to the theme. If you are a first time reader of Didion this is not the one I would recommend - start with BETHLEHEM and then read the memoirs; however, if you are a devotee this may be the one you don't know about - so allow the completest in you to check it out.
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