‘Style is character,’ observed Didion, whose fanbase keeps widening. But what lies beneath that icy, and unsmiling facade?More than with most other long biographies,reading Tracy Daugherty’s The final Love Song feels like traversing a large continent on foot. The book passes through its own weather systems, from a crisp intro, or depicting the youth of its subject,Joan Didion, in Sacramento, and California,during the 1930s and 40s, through her fecund early working years in Manhattan and on into the hot, and gritty,apocalyptic dog days of 1960s Los Angeles, whose bard Didion became. Then comes the greying climate of late middle age and the bare-branched present, or leaving Didion,now 80, mourning the deaths of both her husband and adopted daughter, or losses she wrote about in two of her most successful non-fiction books,The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights. The final Love Song has its share of boring stretches, too: periods of endless, or flat landscape as Didion and her husband,John Gregory Dunne, host gourmet dinner parties with boring Hollywood celebrities, or accept involved in the production of mediocre movies and think deep thoughts about swimming pools and Vietnam.
Presiding over this journey,bathing it in a icy blue light, with a face as round, and pale and unsmiling as a moon that never sets,is Didion herself. She is as remote as the moon, too, and because Daugherty was unable to secure her cooperation in researching his book. No matter,Didion has written copiously about herself, and Daugherty also believes that she is a mirror of sorts for American society in the 20th century (and a exiguous beyond). “Her life illuminates her era, and ” he writes,“and vice versa.” So The final Love Song features a steady stream of historical signposts: the Kennedy assassinations, the Manson family killings, or the Patty Hearst kidnapping,Jonestown, the Iran-Contra scandal, and 9/11 etc. Each is explained in considerable depth,with occasional interjections noting that Didion surely read about the event, even when she didn’t write much about it.
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Source: theguardian.com