Didion’s notes, which surpass in elegance and clarity the finished prose of most other writers, are a fascinating record of this time. But they are also something more unsettling. Readers today will recognize, with some dismay and even horror, how much is familiar in these long-lost American portraits. Didion saw her era more clearly than anyone else, which is another way of saying that she was able to see the future ... South and West is, in one regard, the most revealing of Didion’s books...offers for the first time a glimpse inside the factory walls ... even in its most casual iteration, Didion’s voice, with its sensitivity to the grotesqueries and vanities that dance beneath the skim of daily experience, is unmistakable ... A writer from the Gulf South once wrote that the past is not even past. Didion goes further, suggesting that the past is also the future. Now that we live in that future, her observations read like a warning unheeded. They suggest that California’s dreamers of the golden dream were just that—dreamers—while the 'dense obsessiveness' of the South, and all the vindictiveness that comes with it, was the true American condition, the condition to which we will always inevitably return. Joan Didion went to the South to understand something about California and she ended up understanding something about America.
Both pieces are raw and clearly unfinished, but both are fascinating documents spiked with virtuosic turns ... Didion’s portrait of New Orleans is a vivid exercise in modern gothic ... Casting the South as a foil for the West, Didion is seeking out a counter-America unleveled by defense contractors, agribusiness, and corporate media ... It’s not uncommon for writers to publish work from the drawer when they reach Didion’s age — she’s now 82 — and these fragments would be of interest even if Didion’s sojourn in the South didn’t resonate with our moment of political reaction. They cast light backward and forward on her work, illuminating her reportorial process and the themes she would develop in later novels and nonfiction works ... South and West is a marvelous time capsule, and a reminder that sometimes even the great ones let themselves down. Didion wasn’t one to make a show of failure in her prime, but five decades on South and West is an act of generosity.
South and West is an odd and compelling book — rooted utterly in a past now all but lost to us, while also incredibly timely and relevant ... Even underwater, and in its unpolished state, South and West still bears the hallmarks of Didion’s sparkling prose: her use of detail, juxtaposition, and compression ... The diary format plays to Didion’s strength; like The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, as well as older pieces like The White Album, South and West works because it is fragmentary, a constellation of observations in lieu of an advanced thesis. But this style also cannot help but highlight some of Didion’s usual shortcomings. Her penchant for gnomic phrases means that some of them, lacking elaboration, simply fall flat ... It may be unfair to read too much of 2017 into South and West, but given its publication at this moment in time it’s also impossible not to read too much into it. What emerges here, between California and the Real America, are not just two different communities, or political affiliations, but two different articulations of time itself ... South and West is vital, ultimately, for how it demonstrates (even inadvertently) how such a tension plays out.
At a remove of more than four decades, she maps the divisions splintering America today, and uncannily anticipates some of the dynamics that led to the election of Donald J. Trump and caught so many political and media insiders unawares ... Her notes lack the depth and understanding of J. D. Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, which depicts the frustrations and anger of poor white communities from within. And while Didion’s estrangement sharpens her reportorial eye, it can curdle, at times, into condescension ... What Didion does capture, powerfully, in this book is the insularity of many places in the South, and, by implication, how insular the elites (like herself) are in places like California and New York and Washington ... The other reason that readers will find this volume so fascinating is that it shows Didion at work, as a writer and reporter, gathering details, jotting them down and running her observations through the typewriter of her mind. Even these hurriedly written notes shine with her trademark ability to capture mood and place.
There is almost nothing of haphazard daily life in Didion’s work, no sense of accident or chance. Everything in controlled, measured out and sharpened to a point. Even the meaningless is given meaning. That sort of paradox is central to Didion’s work: She takes a ruin and in prose makes it whole and beautiful. It is mysterious, in that context, to be presented with South and West: From a Notebook. It is not actually new work but a collection of notes from two failed works in progress. We are given no indication of why Didion has chosen to publish this book now ... So this is a book of notes, and the notes are explicitly not meant to amount to anything in particular. That does not mean that the observations Didion presents here are without elegance and insight ... There are also, perhaps inevitably, a few unforgettable shards of prose...But her hypnotist’s tricks keep getting broken up by the necessarily partial, impressionistic progress of a book like this. No anecdote gets longer than a page or two, and none ties smoothly to the rest. South and West is a book for the completists and hardcore fans, in other words.
A few of the more polished passages bring to mind what Didion could do at her height — the literary journalism from El Salvador, the defining pieces about California’s culture of ennui ... At times, the notes are merely disconnected impressions. In one regrettable case, a harangue by a good ol’ boy is presented verbatim for pages. Still, salvation keeps arriving: Sentences — with their detached, reportorial tone, their economy of words, and piercing observations — that are vintage Didion ... These excerpts, of course, cannot approach Didion’s two great nonfiction collections, The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem, or her screenplay for The Panic in Needle Park, or her 2005 memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking ... But these excerpts have value. They give us a renewed sense of the writer, now 82, in her creative prime. And, often enough, they remind us of her brilliance as a stylist, social commentator and observer...there is every reason to be grateful that Didion heeded her own advice, and wrote it all down.
Some readers will doubt these materials add up to a book. But one line of Didion is worth 10 from almost any other writer. Now that Didion is in her 80s, admirers will appreciate the chance to fall, once more, under the spell of her prose. The voice here is classic Didion: intimate, yet preternaturally detached, as though her matchless ear bears witness from the beyond ... California animates her like nothing else, refracting her consciousness wherever she touches down. In 'California Notes,' part II of South and West, she writes: the West 'is simply what looks right . . . I am easy here in a way that I am not easy in other places.'”
There is no plot in South and West, or conflict, or ending. The pleasures of this short book, rather, are found in observing the South through Didion’s eyes. She is particularly sensitive to Southerners’ relationship to history, a relationship that stands in sharp contrast to the prevailing attitude in California.
South and West’s evocative, elliptical narrative of rejected details and paths not taken shed light on the often impossible-to-articulate act of writing, and show us Didion the writer in pursuit of her story. It also contains sentences as precise and brilliantly rendered as those in her finished books ... It’s a rare and valuable gift to witness a writer of Didion’s talents at the height of her powers allowing herself to drift, however briefly—to acknowledge that she’s 'underwater,' overwhelmed by possibilities, not yet lodged in the clear comfort of having discovered the shape of a story, or having found her own place in it.
In a single, terse paragraph, the author introduces the journal yet offers no explanation as to the purpose of its publication ... You’d expect a measure of literary voyeurism from a book that bills itself as being 'from a notebook,' and South and West delivers some of that ... The most common criticism of Didion’s writing has been that it is too cold; the second-most-common has been that it is too self-centered. (Didion herself has allowed some of that: 'I’m not very interested in people,' she once acknowledged.) Here, though, with South and West, are those critiques answered—with the warm transparency of an open notebook, with the humble acknowledgement that even someone of Didion’s caliber is so deeply capable of failure. How fitting that her latest book be a non-story that dares us to consider what it means to be a story in the first place. How fitting, too, that the writer who once called writing 'an aggressive, even a hostile act' has given the world a work that acknowledges an even more basic truth: that not all stories are hers to tell.
It might sound like a volume best left to scholars and completists, except that Didion’s notes are not like most writers’ notes. The form suits her particular brilliance: the ability to sequence arresting sentences, crammed with observation and insight, and let them generate their own momentum. Her best work is often elliptical and free-floating. South and West gets us, if anything, even more swiftly to one point after another. And from one improbable image to the next: Didion falling in the mud; Didion keeping a Confederate flag in her linen closet ... If this is how Didion’s notebooks read, let’s have them all.
Fans of The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, memoirs about the death of Dunne and of their daughter, respectively, might expect more personal revelation, but Didion has always held herself at a distance, describing people and events with icy precision from a safe space in the corner. ... a short trip, full of piercing little moments that influenced several of Didion’s later books, and worth taking.
[Nathaniel] Rich attempts to explicitly link Didion’s sociological observations with the recent presidential contest...Yet Rich’s sensibility is miles apart from Didion’s. In her notes, Didion often seems annoyed and distressed by the South, but she cannot conceal her fascination, either; even when her tone is dry, her accounts have the liveliness of a cultural anthropologist ... In the divisive years to come, readers would do well to follow the route mapped out in South and West: to be inquisitive about those with whom they seem to have nothing in common, including electoral preferences.
This will disappoint those who anticipated a work on the level of The White Album or even Salvador, but if intended as a scholarly artifact, it is fair enough, as far as it goes. Didion is sufficiently remarkable that even her unpolished work makes for fascinating reading; even if it not always pleasurable, a half-finished draft and the insight it offers into a writer’s process can be immensely valuable to dedicated fans and imitators ... I do not raise all of this in order to call Didion’s fortune-telling project a failure. In order to fail at that, she would have shown an ambition to prophesy in the first place, and nothing in this book indicates that she actually did .. Knopf, evidently, does not really believe that South and West is valuable enough to move units solely as a literary curio. Yet that is precisely and exclusively where the value of this notebook lies. Didion’s greatest accomplishment, perhaps, is her capacity to appear entirely unvarnished in her published works, despite her obvious and often-celebrated stylistic mastery ... We’ve read nearly one hundred pages of interviews and observations and reporting tricks. We’ve seen, in short, Didion the actual writer.
...in many ways, these sketches are vintage Didion, idiosyncratic and tantalizingly self-revealing. As a journalist, she coolly lets readers draw their own conclusions from her stark observations. These pages seem haunted ... South and West is a slim, slight book: unfinished, equivocal, yet filled with piercing, startling sentences ... If Didion’s attempt as a Californian to 'understand' the South here is (at best) sketchy, her glimpses into her own psyche are fascinating.
...exemplify Didion’s signature brand of reportorial haiku — her pitiless camera eye, razor-sharp wit and telling techniques of self-deprecation that only bring the reader — at least this reader — further along for the ride ... She has an unerring ear, for the cliched, the false, the overstated ... 'There is no real way to deal with everything we lose,' Didion has written. But it may be that what we make of that loss is what makes everything else matter.
Describing anything about prose by Joan Didion – even a book as slender and unfinished as this one – as 'raw' is more than a little comic. Nothing about Joan Didion’s prose, not even in notes, is 'raw.' It is the product of a stunning sensibility that drives headlong into specificity ... She has never known deprivation, she writes, unlike the South she saw so full of the past. 'I have been looking all my life for history and I have yet to find it.' There was a book in that – years later but a book nevertheless.
Her observations, then ? being those of an outsider ? are poetic and critical, but not thorough or truly meaning-making. Still, the comparisons to modern-day middle America and its desire to protect hierarchical and oppressive values can easily be drawn ... With an anthropologist’s detachment and precision, Didion took notes on the South that, while lyrical and often funny, do little to empathize with the region. Still, the writer reinforces the paradoxes of Southern warmth, and exposes contradictory beliefs about race and religion.
...the accretion of pungent details ensures that this tiny volume will persist in the memory. Putatively provisional and raw, many of these notes and immediate impressions, technically not even a first pass, have the crystalline lucidity of Didion's best prose, sentences that, as the critic John Leonard once put it, 'come at you, if not from ambush, then in gnomic haikus, icepick laser beams, or waves.'
In lush and captivating prose, Didion describes a Southern landscape permeated with decay and burdened by the oppressive weight of history. Even in these preliminary sketches, her rhetorical framing is expert, her eye for the telling detail unerring ... The less said about the 'California Notes' chapter, the better. Perhaps the publisher needed to add to the word count to justify the $21 list price, and thought Didion’s stream-of-consciousness meditation on growing up in the Golden State was a natural sequitur to amplify the statement quoted earlier about the South being the true future of America. While Nathaniel Rich asserts in his breathless introduction that the reader is getting 'a glimpse inside the factory walls,' the demystification of the writing process makes for cringeworthy reading ... a naked money-grab by an insatiable corporation, shilling an overpriced product to a public addicted to name brands.
Didion’s notes describe the standard stuff of southern road trips: dusty towns, gas stations, motel pools, Confederate flags, bourbon, kudzu, swamps and snakes. In fact, lots of snakes … Of course, the Civil Rights Movement gnaws along the edges of Didion’s notes. It’s the real reason behind her trip, the prompt for her questions, and the implicit context for much of what she sees. Sheriff Bull Connor and Governor George Wallace are on her mind … Didion’s storied writer’s life also gives these notes a special interest. Think of them as something like an artist’s sketchbook—a chance to watch Didion at work.
