Volume 26, Number 13 · August 16, 1979
Pictures from an Expedition
By Martha Duffy
The White Album
by Joan Didion
Simon and Schuster, 223 pp., $9.95
Some of Joan Didion's nonfiction would scarcely fill up the back columns of an airlines magazine. Altogether it does not have much bulk. She has many followers, though, for these occasional pieces. She has mastered the art of direct address without being trivial or colloquial. One wants to know what she has to say, even if it means tracking down a copy of New West or Travel & Leisure. One wants to read her spare, elegant prose and her flinty humor or just check in, get the annual Christmas letter. Whatever the topic of Didion's comment or reportage, she works in bulletins on other things as well, a houseful of emotional furniture, recognizable from the past she has told her readers about. There are the sheets and towels, the freeways, the rattlesnakes, the swimming pools, the old bikinis, the toasters, Waikiki Beach, the desert, the Donner Pass. There is Joan herself: the shy but dogged party-goer, the profuse weeper, the gambling lady, or the mistress of the meticulous kitchen who sometimes seems to be in a literary bake-off with Mary McCarthy.
Review, 2460 words
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