Democracy by Joan Didion

She did it with no passport (her passport was in her otherwise empty stash box in the apartment on Central Park west) and a joke press card that somebody from Life had made up for her during the 1972 campaign. The pre card had failed to get Jessie Victor at age fifteen into the backstage area at Nassau Coliseum during a Pink Floyd concert but it got her at age eighteen onto the C-5A to Saigon. This seems astonishing now, but we forget how confused and febrile those few weeks in 1975 actually were, the "reassessments" and the "calculated gamble" and the infusions of supplemental aid giving way even as they were reported to the lurid phantasmagoria of air lifts and marines on the roof and stranded personnel and tarmacs littered with shoes and broken toys. In the immediate glamour of the revealed crisis many things happened that could not have happened a few months earlier or a few weeks later, and what happened to Jessie Victor was one of them. Clearly an American girl who landed at Tan Son Nhut should have been detained there, but Jessie Victor was not. Clearly an American girl who landed at Tan Son Nhut with no passport should not have been stamped through immigration on the basis of a New York driver's license, but Jessie Victor was. Clearly an American girl with no passport, a New York driver's license and a straw tennis visor should not have been able to walk out of the littered makeshift terminal at Tan Son Nhut and, observed by several people who did nothing to stop her, get on a bus to Cholon, but Jessie Victor had done just that. Or so it appeared.

Inez Victor is the wife of a Hawaiian senator and former presidential candidate, Harry Victor. She has developed a mien of utter detachment, having lived so long in the public eye, which is attracted to her for her elegance and stature. (Funnily, Inez is the second character, after the powerful First Lady Nicole Thibodeaux in Philip K. Dick's The Simulacra, to be clearly modeled on Jackie Kennedy.) But Inez has her secrets, too, and among them is a lifelong dalliance with a CIA "spook" named Jack Lovett who has had his hand in every bit of American mischief in a tropical country over the past several decades. The long-time affair comes to fruition as the third act in a brisk tragedy for the Victor family: first, Inez's demented father shoots and kills her sister Janet along with a well-known congressman. Then, Inez's daughter Jessie somehow gets on a plane and insinuates herself into Vietnam just as Saigon as falling. When Inez and Jack board a plane together to locate Jessie, the final dissolution of Inez's life as a political spouse is complete.

I brought this book to Florida because I got it in my head somehow that it's a Florida book. But it's a Hawaii book. Though his political ambitions are thwarted, something in Harry Victor's Hawaiian origin does anticipate Barack Obama. For Didion, Hawaii is important as the new margin of America proper. When Harry runs for president, it's been a state for less than twenty years, and it shares many qualities with those tropical places that Jack Lovett does his clandestine work. It's just a skip and a jump from Hawaii to the Marshall Islands where--as described in the book's opening--American atomic bombs were tested: "The light at dawn during those Pacific tests was something to see. Something to behold." It's a skip and a jump, even, to Vietnam, or Malaysia, where Inez Victor spends the remainder of her life after leaving Harry. These pacific islands, absorbed into the gestalt of America, only seem to exhibits the porousness of its borders, and of the idea of America itself. Hawaii is a place where the bleed between America and the world becomes apparent.

What's meant by the title, Democracy? I have a few thoughts about that. Obviously, there's Harry's political career, although you can't exactly say that his presidential campaign is a central part of the book; it's hardly mentioned except as a failure. But win or lose, the act of voting is only one element in democracy's vast operations. Another is the PR spin, the creation and maintenance of Harry and Inez's Camelot marriage. That marriage is threatened on all sides, by unsavory family elements like Jessie and Inez's father Paul, and by Jack Lovett's machinations, which are themselves a part of American democracy, too, like it or not. In a way, Democracy is a book about one part of democracy eating another.

But one of the most glaring and interesting aspects of Democracy is the way that Didion writes herself into it. She presents the (obviously fictional) story as a work of journalism, the kind of long-form essay for which she was well-known. That's Didion, flying to Kuala Lumpur to meet with aging émigré Inez. The novel presents several false starts, histories of Inez's family in the Hawaiian islands, before shuffling them away self-consciously. This kind of pretense is not so unusual, I think, but it's unique coming from Didion, who you really can imagine writing a book like this; the blurring between Didion's fiction and non-fiction is one of the most fascinating qualities of Democracy. And it suggests, perhaps, that what Didion does is part of Democracy as well: the maintenance of official memory, the interpolation of political events whose truth remains outside the public eye by nature. It's no wonder, then, that Inez, having washed her hands of it, treats "Didion" with such aloofness and hesitation in Kuala Lumpur.

Democracy never quite reaches the heights of A Book of Common Prayer, Didion's masterpiece of political fiction, although it's easy to see some overlap between Inez and the character of Charlotte Douglass, a non-political actor who refuses to recognize her own place in politics, or in history. Perhaps they are opposites, actually--Inez sees this maybe too well, which is why she runs from it. Democracy never reaches those heights because it's a little too shaggy; I think plot was not Didion's strong suit. (In the end, what the hell does Janet's murder have to do with anything? It hangs very strangely and limply from an otherwise very streamlined novel.) But she could write; more than anything, that was her superpower, and in that regard Democracy is pure Didion.