The Imagination of Disaster

By R.Z. Sheppard

A BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER

by JOAN DIDION 272 pages. Simon & Schuster. $8.95.

Novelists who have trained as journalists can usually be identified by their lack of plumage. There is something about trying to interpret the world in narrow columns that keeps the feathers compact and flat. Sentences tend to dart rather than gyrate. Effects are sought with tone and timing; ironies are implied, not spelled out. Anyone who has followed Joan Didion's career as a magazine writer can easily discern the newsprint between her fine lines. Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a collection of her best magazine work, brought wide praise in 1968. With the publication of her novel Play It As It Lays in the summer of 1970, Didion established herself as a distinctive voice in American writing. Hers was a lean, laconic voice that delineated the parched hide and blistering tarmac of Southern California. The book desiccated human experience. As Didion now sees it, her novel was "a way to work out my own feelings of aridity." Yet as a work of fiction, Play It As It Lays enabled the reader to taste--in Poet Wallace Stevens' phrase--"the unreal of what is real."

This capacity is the secret of Didion's power. It works again in A Book of Common Prayer, a novel whose unreal made real includes a Central American country called Boca Grande. Once more the author writes about a distressed California woman. Charlotte Douglas is the victim of a romantic idealism so hermetic that self-knowledge is impossible. The currents of revolution and privilege scarcely ruffle her hair. Incapable of reflection, Charlotte moves, therefore she is. This unexamined life is filtered through the tough mind of Grace Strasser-Mendana, Colorado-born widow of a Boca Grande plutocrat.

Torpid Tropics. That Grace is an anthropologist and trained observer is of great importance. Any other method of narration might have turned the novel into a pastiche of psychological and social pathology. To begin with, there is Charlotte's education as a norteamericana: "She was immaculate of history, innocent of politics. There were startling vacuums in her store of common knowledge. During the two years she spent at Berkeley before she ran away to New York with an untenured instructor named Warren Bogart, she had read mainly the Brontes and Vogue, bought a loom, gone home to Hollister on weekends and slept a great deal during the week."

No Didion book is free of subliminal aggression: among Charlotte's accomplishments is the ability to perform emergency tracheotomies. She can also catch chickens and snap their necks with one smooth motion. Warren is a monstrous lout and a failure whose "face had been coarsened by contempt," whose "mind had been coarsened by self-pity." Their daughter Marin ("good strong hair and an I.Q. of about 103") grows up to be a skyjacker and a fugitive Marxist. Her resemblance to Patty Hearst can hardly be coincidental. Charlotte's second husband is also a familiar type out of the recent past--a successful San Francisco lawyer who travels a lot, defending Black Panthers and arranging arms deals for urban guerrillas. When someone at a party asks Charlotte what he does, she replies characteristically, "He runs guns, I wish they had caviar."

Charlotte travels to escape unpleasantnesses like Warren--and the FBI, which keeps pestering her about Marin's whereabouts. In Boca Grande she spends a good deal of time at the airport and the hotel pool. She involves herself in some social work, has an affair and attempts to introduce lively cocktail society into the torpid tropics. In the end. Charlotte fails to heed the unmistakable signs and explicit warnings that precede one of Boca Grande's periodic coups, and is shot by one side or the other.

The evidence uncovered by Grace Strasser-Mendana does not clarify the murder. What is clear, however, is that Joan Didion has produced a remarkable modern variation on Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady. Her technique may seem feverish but it is calculated to give the novel its unique quality--a blend of literary invention and the sort of lurid stories found on the "freak-death" pages of big-city newspapers. Her ear for contemporary speech rhythms, her eye for the incriminating details rank with those of William Gaddis in J.R. But it is Didion's romantic imagination of disaster that puts innocence and corruption on their inevitable collision course. There is, after all, some Charlotte Douglas lurking in most of us. How often have we felt vaguely paralyzed by the high beams of an onrushing history that does not brake for small game? When she began her column for LIFE in 1969, Didion announced: "You are getting a woman who for some time now has felt radically separated from ... the ideas that seem to interest other people ... I have felt myself a sleepwalker, alert only to the stuff of bad dreams."

But the nation was having collective nightmares in the late '60s, and Didion connected by writing honestly and well about Viet Nam, runaway children and marital stress. In 1970 she and her husband, Writer John Gregory Dunne, paid $140,000 for a house at Malibu, Calif, where the sun always shines and the cost of real estate is limited only by what the next multimillionaire rock star is willing to pay. There Didion can have her bad dreams in style and gather strength for the promotional tour that is likely to make A Book of Common Prayer a bestseller this spring.

The Dunnes' up-and-down marriage --chronicled by both writers in magazine pieces--has not interfered with a creative collaboration. Their most recent effort, the script for A Star Is Born, earned them $150,000 plus a percentage of the gross profits. "It should make us a lot of money," predicts Dunne. "In fact," says Didion, "we saw it basically as a picture about money."

The Dunne household includes their eleven-year-old adopted daughter Quintana. Joan is barely 5 ft. 2 in., 91 Ibs., pale and sun-shy. "Q" is nearly as big, a budding Southern California beauty--blonde, blue-eyed and fawn-skinned. Didion is no California carpetbagger; her great-great-great-grandfather settled in the state in 1848. She is proud of her heritage of rugged independence. At Sacramento High, the seedling novelist read Eugene O'Neill's plays even though they were not accepted for book reports. "One year I was a pom-pom girl," she recalls, "but I was always out of step." She insisted on taking shop because of "a high-minded idea of not doing what people wanted." And she wrote stories, "mostly about people jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge."

Didion moved to New York in 1956 after winning a Vogue editorial contest. She worked on the magazine while writing her first novel, Run River, the story of a California farmer's wife whose husband kills her lover and then commits suicide. It was an early working out of Didion's concern for a personal code of honor. She later sharpened that code in an essay on self-respect. "People who respect themselves," she wrote, "are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all but when they do play they know the odds." Didion has chosen to play in a big way--both the ruthless Hollywood game of deals, points and broken promises, and the personally ruthless game of betting one's intelligence and emotions on serious prose fiction. In novels, so far, the score is Didion 2, Opposition 0.

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