RaveThe Virginia PlotThe subject matter is eclectic, the themes diffuse but the prose style hits the same consistent effortless tempo and polished tone 12 times in a row ... For more than half a century, she has been our poet laureate of the specific and tangible, using her writing as a light to find her way (and ours) through the strange shadows cast by The Doors or Eldridge Cleaver or Charles Manson and, more recently, through breathtaking grief ... Didion is a writer’s writer, like George Orwell or Alice Munro, producing prose so crystalline and uncluttered that it appears artless. But it takes a lot of art to make sentences like these ... Didion is, like Thoreau, one of our most epigrammatic writers, summing up a character or a cultural movement in a line or two ... And no one is better than Didion in thinking about the act of writing ... The incalculable benefit for the reader is following the tracks of her sentences to discover along the way who we are and what these meditations mean to us.
