Joan Didion

The obsession with details and the cool recording of facts that distinguish Ms. Didion's writing and that I revere, freaked me out in her transcript of the death in 2003 of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne.

Has anyone read her White Album? Apparently it records from the edge of a breakdown. In the context of her intense sorrow, her compulsive compiling of minutiae--what Mr. Dunne had in his pockets, the medical literature on grief, the log book of their Park Avenue apartment--transcended technique and became coping mechanism. This reader gained a breathtaking look into a brilliant mind; astonishingly, even in suffering, Ms. Didion instructs: carry a notebook, always write it down.

Creepy Book Recommendations

Julie Saltman asks for books to read when you're suffering in a downtown St. Louis Starbucks from a tornado-induced blackout. How about Ian McEwan's Saturday to get the blood pumping? Read Edward Champion's discussion of it, or Zadie Smith's interview with McEwan. It's just so cozy, two Booker-Prize long-listed writers mooning at each other. What I like about Smith's writing is that she's right:

Picking up a book by McEwan is to know, at the very least, that what you read therein will be beautifully written, well-crafted, and not an embarrassment, either for you or for him. This is a really big deal.

What I don't like is how falsely modest and pandering she can sound:

Because of the posh university I attended, I first met McEwan many years ago, before I was published myself. I was nineteen, down from Cambridge for the holidays, and a girl I knew from college was going to Ian McEwan’s wedding party. This was a fairly normal occurrence for her, coming from the family she did, but I had never clapped eyes on a writer in my life.

She's such an ingenue.

Self-hating?

Last May, I attended a riveting discussion among Daniel Mendelsohn, Andre Aciman, and Louis Begley on literature and exile and Jewish identity at downtown's new Museum of Jewish Heritage. Perhaps the high point of the talk was when Mendelsohn, a skilled moderator, asked Begley if he felt any responsibility in his writing to depict the Polish world he'd left behind, just after WWII, and which had been lost.

Begley replied, in some apparent confusion, "But that world is exactly as I left it. I can go back and visit, so why would I need to restore it?"

Remember we're at the Museum of Jewish Heritage and we're talking about Nazi-occupied Poland. Grumbling from the audience, loud shifting in seats.

Ever the able host, Mendelsohn responds, "But Louis, we're talking 3 million Jews. Obviously there has been loss."

I suppose Begley agreed, but what he seemed to be saying was, "I'm Polish before I'm Jewish, and Poland remains." I scorned his apparent self-hatred, but I could also relate. I have sort of adopted German culture as my own, and at times I've wanted to think being an intellectual comes before being Jewish. But I've found that studying German art and literature without the atrocities represents a painful masking of my religious identity.

How much can art really do? And in the face of actual historical events, how solid are one's cultural and intellectual affiliations?

In Begley's first book, Wartime Lies, which I finally read this week, the narrator comes across as an aesthete, a lover of literature who seems to have faith, which the author himself might share, that  the SS couldn't destroy the Polish high culture he loved. 

I respect his conviction but I wonder if Begley's extreme reserve didn't suppress a deeper reservoir of emotion and conflict.