Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

Later, when I was living in New York, I would make the trip back to Sacramento four and five times a year (the more comfortable the flight, the more obscurely miserable I would be, for it weighs heavily upon my kind that we could perhaps not make it by wagon), trying to prove that I had not meant to leave at all, because in at least one respect California--the California we are talking about--resembles Eden: it is assumed that those who absent themselves from its blessings have been banished, exiled by some perversity of the heart. Did not the Donner-Reed Party, after all, eat its own dead to reach Sacramento?

The title essay in Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem precedes itself. About the hippie convergence on the Haight-Asbury neighborhood of San Francisco, it stands in for a popular recognition of the era's failures, and its curdling into something more dissolute and sinister. A step on the road from Woodstock to Altamont. And before reading it I had a general idea that it reflected in some way Didion's own brand of conservatism, which in turn reflected the nation's rightward turn as the ideals of the 60's petered out. But reading it, it must be said that what is most remarkable about it is the way that Didion absents herself from the narrative, declining to pass judgment or evaluation on the hippies with whom she's embedded, as if San Francisco were Fallujah. It is the hippies, instead, who implicate themselves, as with one couple whose faith in psychedelic drugs extends to doping up their toddler. Of course, this is all a kind of feint, a maneuver that reveals just how good a writer Didion really was--a way of hiding her hand. One must admit that, when some of the Haight-Asbury "Diggers" refuse to share information because they fear Didion to be a "media poisoner," that they have something of a point.

One point that Didion makes--or perhaps suggests by assemblage and arrangement, because she often demurs from making points as we typically think of them--is that the hippie movement was a children's movement. A considerable number of the people who converged on Haight-Asbury were literal runaways, and in Didion's telling, it seems to be this that gives the movement is sense of hope and energy, like a children's crusade. But Didion also depicts it as a children's world, bereft of adult pragmatism and sagacity. Even those adults who appear in "Slouching Toward Bethlehem," like the couple that give acid to their toddler, have a kind of childlike innocence, which is to say stupidity. "We were seeing the desperate attempt," Didion writes, "of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum ,no longer pretend that the society's atomization could be reversed." Which is to say, yes, these people are idiot kids, but who let them out of the house?

One way of reading "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" is one vignette in a series of essays about California, along with "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream," about a woman who may or may not have set her husband on fire in San Bernardino, and "Notes From a Native Daughter," an exploration of growing up and leaving Sacramento that is, I think, the collection's best piece. "John Wayne: A Love Song," another of the collection's highlights, is also a California story, though about the California that infiltrates our dreams through the engines of Hollywood. (Like the hippies, Didion gives Wayne and his hangers-on the rope to hang themselves; the image is of an aging star surrounded by sclerotic yes-men.) No doubt Didion writes best about California because it's what she knows best, but I think her best pieces are all about place, including "Letter From Paradise," which explores the way that the burgeoning tourist vision of Hawaii conceals a Hawaii that is deeply entangled with the military and the prospect of war. I also really enjoyed a typically acerbic essay called "Seacoast of Despair," about the grand mansions of Newport, Rhode Island. Didion's sense of place isn't unimpeachable--I thought her essays about the Southern U.S. in North and South were a strange misfire--but it must be said that she has a way of peeling back one understanding of a place to reveal something else underneath, whether it's California, Hawaii, Rhode Island, or Sonora, Mexico.

That said, I am developing an annoying and contrarian take on Didion that I think few will agree with: her fiction is better than her non-fiction.

Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers by Lois-Ann Yamanaka

And my grandma. Her whole house smells like mothballs, not just in the closets but in every drawer too. And her pots look a million years old with dents all over. Grandma msut know every recipe with mustard cabbage in it. She can quote from the Bible for everything you do in a day. Walks everywhere she goes downtown Kaunakakai, sucks fish eyes and eats the parsley from our plates at Midnight Inn.

And nobody looks or talks like a haole. Or eats like a haole. Nobody says nothing the way Mr. Harvey tells us to practice talking in class.

My favorite town when I went to Hawaii last summer was Hilo, on the rainy side of the "Big Island": far from the tourist mecca of Kailua-Kona, Hilo felt to me like a real place, where real people lived. That meant grit and it meant visible poverty, including visible homelessness--each storefront on Hilo's small main street seemed to have someone sleeping in it. Lovey Nariyoshi, the young protagonist of Lois-Ann Yamanaka's novel Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers, is a poor girl of Japanese descent living in the Hilo of the 1970s. Lovey wants more than anything to be like the rich girls who torment her at school, with their nice clothes and hair, and even more than that she wants to be a "haole," a white Hawaiian:

Sometimes I secretly wish to be haole. That my name could be Betty Smith or Annie Anderson or Debbie Cole, wife of Dennis Cole who lives at 2222 Maple Street with a white station wagon with wood panel on the side, a dog named Spot, a cat named Kitty, and I wear white gloves. Dennis wears a hat to work. There's a coatrack as soon as you open the front door and we all wear our shoes inside the house.

But Lovey is not a haole, she's Japanese and poor, and her visible poverty makes her deeply unpopular at school. Her only friend is Jerry, who is only slightly less popular than she is, and who is as interested in acquiring and amassing a collection of Barbie dolls as Lovey is--if you catch my drift. Jerry's brother, Larry, is one of the pair's chief tormenters--he steals and shaves the heads of all those Barbies, for one, but is capable of real physical violence as well--while his girlfriend Crystal is one of the few people who treat both Jerry and Lovey as human. One thing that sets Yamanaka's writing apart, both here and in Blu's Hanging, which I loved, is her attention to the material culture of time and place: Donny Osmond, Sonny Chiba, Charlie's Angels, a Hawaiian children's program called Checkers & Pogo. Yamanaka's cultural references come quickly, but they never feel irrelevant or overwhelming; instead, they seem to make up the cultural fabric that Lovey is always standing just on the outside of, dreaming of living the fantasies of popular music and television.

Wild Meat is a book about, among other things, how you speak: Lovey's teachers exhort her to adopt a kind of standard English that she's unable to master, illustrating that the difference between her and the world she wishes to occupy is one of being able to talk right. Lovey's parents aren't able to master it either, and the novel is buoyed by their colorful and evocative Hawaiian pidgin, a slightly modified version of which is also the language by which Lovey narrates the book. Of course, the strong and powerful voice that carries the book forward is ironically the very thing that Lovey tries and fails to eliminate in herself. Another recurrent motif is the importance of animals, both wild and domestic. In one story, we see Lovey's father drag her all around the island looking for feathers to use in the production of tourist leis. (The sellers who try to offer up native 'io, or Hawaiian hawk, feathers, are sinister people not to be trusted.) In the title story, Lovey describes being unable to eat a burger made from the family cow "Bully." There's a kind of overlap in these motifs, I think: the Hilo residents who speak perfect haole probably never stop to think where their meat comes from, or how a lei is made.

I didn't think that Wild Meat was as effective as Blu's Hanging. For one, Wild Meat is much more a novel of "linked stories," some of which are very brief and vignette-like. It lacks some of the physicality and viciousness that made Blu's Hanging such a shock, and until the very end it seemed much lighter in spirit and tone. I found myself longing for something like Blu's father's story about being isolated in a Moloka'i leper colony, and thinking it wouldn't come, until, in the novel's final chapters it did: First (spoiler alert) with the suicide of Crystal, unable to deal with the possibility of a second abortion. Then, with the possible blinding of Lovey's father in a convoluted story about trying to save some goats from a lava flow. Lovey, having listened to her father's stories about the highlight of his life--a boy's camp on Kaua'i--manages to hope a cross-island flight and bring her father back a bag full of earth. Blinded, he recognizes the earth by smell, and it smells, as he told her it would, like home. It's a wild swing by Yamanaka (she's like twelve??) but it works, and all the more because the novel refuses to tell us whether Lovey's father's blindness will be a lifelong condition.

So, by the end, I found myself persuaded and touched by Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers. Not to pick on it too much, but I found myself thinking of Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing, a novel where all "local flavor" to me felt cheap and forced. By contrast, Yamanaka's books pulse with Hawaiian life (as far as this haole can tell, at least), because she knows that such a local existence is also made up of the tawdry, cheap, and chintzy, and the stuff of mass culture.

Blu's Hanging by Lois-Ann Yamanaka

You know what I would wish if I could have one wish in the whole wide world? I wish my house was underneath Kaunakakai Groceteria.

In my bedroom there's a secret door up to the groceteria, which I could sneak into at night, after everyone went home. Then I can choose anything I want to eat when I get hungry, when all you, Maisie, Poppy, and I have to eat in the house is mayonnaise bread, peanut butter and jelly, or dry saimin.

And I would take Maisie and you with me too, so we can get all the ingredients to we need to make the biggest laulau dinner, the whole works--day-old poi, lomi salmon, haupia, pipi kaula, and squid luau, just for the three of us, and Poppy.

That's my wish. My one and only wish.

Ivah Ogata is a young girl living on the Hawaiian island of Moloka'i. After her mother's death, she has had to take up the role of a mother, looking after her imaginative little brother Blu (whose name comes from "Blue Hawaii," a pet name from their mother inspired by his real, Presley) and her youngest sister Maisie, who has become non-verbal. Their father, Poppy, is still around, but he works nights as a janitor at the Bank of Hawaii, and his despair at the death of his wife has made him increasingly bitter and resentful, especially toward Blu. Ivah does her best, but poverty makes their situation a difficult one, her two charges are especially challenging. The "hanging" of the title comes from a moment when Blu, inspired by the westerns he sees on TV, imagines himself to be an outlaw and comes close to accidentally hanging himself. He makes ropes out of the good sheets, like characters in cartoons. He has an adventurous spirit, but without the discernment of age to temper it: Ivah finds him exposing himself to a local creep in exchange for candy. And yet, Blu is generous and kind, too--he'd made sure to get three candies, one for himself, one for Ivah, and one for Maisie.

The central conflict in Blu's Hanging is within Ivah, who feels torn between looking after Blu and Maisie and her own dreams of a different life. This plays out in some predictable ways, as when the one kind schoolteacher suggests that Ivah apply to a prestigious school in Honolulu. But the novel itself is far from predictable, and enlivens a familiar scenario with the richness of its imagery and the sharpness of its characters. Yamanaka evokes a Hawaii of the 1960's where a child's life is perilously close to sex, danger, and spoil, to dying dogs and cats in heat, to blood and urine, dirt and rust. It situates Ivah's conflict in a particularly Hawaiian setting, noting that she's the only one among the Japanese students who receives a token for free lunch at the school, an indignity usually reserved for the Portuguese laborer families and native Hawaiians. She butts head with her haole teachers, white women who have arrived in Hawaii on work programs and not discovered the tropical paradise they were expecting. Once, when she discovers that a teacher has been shaming Maisie for soiling her underpants (another psychological effect, we understand, of the mother's death), Ivah ransacks the teacher's dormitory and spreads her ripped panties all over the street. In one climactic and chilling moment, Ivah learns that her parents met at Moloka'i's leper colony, a place they once thought they'd spend the rest of their lives. Her mother's death, as it turns out, resulted from kidney failure from overuse of the sulfones used to treat leprosy--terrified that she would be sent back to the colony and separated from her children, their mother medicated herself to death.

"But tonight," Ivah writes, "I loosen the knots in the rope that tie him to me, and let the rope fall away. Fall from my brother, who has learned how to fly." In the end, Ivah is unable to protect Blu in the way she wants. And it's important, perhaps, that she understand this, which her mother could not. She saves him from further disgrace at the hands of the creepy old man, but she cannot keep him from having much-too-early sex with the girl next door, a sinister Portuguese that Ivah labels a "Human Rat." The one thing that didn't quite work for me was the end of the novel, when Ivah discovers that Blu in the midst of--spoiler alert--being tied up and sodomized by Uncle Paco, another local pederast who might more properly be categorized a sleazebag than creep. Is it too extreme or too melodramatic? Or is it a moment that doesn't shy away from exactly the kind of dangers that Ivah must let Blu confront himself if she is to follow her dreams in Honolulu? My feeling is that it goes a little too far, but I found the book mostly so convincing that I'm not bothered by it. 

In the Time Before Light by Ian MacMillan

I described for him first the size of the world, and the size of the islands in the world, the distances. He listened to this intently, and then asked me what the haoles were like, how their world was different from ours. "It is very different," I said, "and in ways very similar. The world of the haoles is made up like our own in this way: there are two kinds of people--ali'i and common people, and the common people do the bidding of the haole ali'i. Those haoles I knew were all, at one time or another, victims of these ali'i, and in various ways escaped them as I escaped Kahimoku. I went on to try to make clear to him why so many heads were chopped off in China, and why two boys were burned to death in King Philip's Land. As I descriebd these things, I thoguht of Muapo's story, and understood how this pattern seemed to repeat itself, both in the things I had seen and in the stories I had heard. The world, it seemed, was made tis way.

One of the more interesting things I saw on my trip to Hawaii was the Pu'ukohola Heiau, a great temple built by Kamehameha I, the warrior-king who was the first to unite all the islands. Kamehameha was told by a kahuna, a priest, that he would be victorious against his enemies if he built a temple at what was known as Whale Hill; he did, and he was. What remains today is the great base of the temple, an enormous edifice of lava rocks that is all the more impressive for being made with no mortar: the rocks are simply chosen and positioned so that they bear each others' weight, and so clever were the Hawaiians at this that the temple remains intact today. Pono, the protagonist of Ian MacMillan's novel In the Time Before Light, is conscripted along with his family by a great ali'i, a chief, to build just such a temple. Pono, who belongs to the lowest, outcast class of Hawaiian society, having been ousted from his home by a neighboring band, works under the eye of the sadistic kahuna Kahimoku, who likes to select the weakest among his workers and kill them as a show of strength. When Pono finally is chosen for death, he is saved at the last moment by Roger Beckwith, an English pirate whose crew is made up of those whom, like Pono, he's saved from execution at the hands of authority.

Aboard Beckwith's ship, Pono proves to be a quick learner. He picks up English immediately (though MacMillan never addresses how easy it would be for a Hawaiian, whose language contains neither an F nor a T, to utter the first word "foot") and voraciously devours Beckwith's encyclopedia. Pono becomes a valued crewmate, and alongside his new mates he travels as far as the Philippines, China, New Zealand, and even the western American coast. Though he longs to return and search for the wife and children from whom he's been separated, Pono is one of the first Hawaiians after contact with Europeans to be ushered into the now much wider world, and what he finds is that that world is not so different from his own. As the excerpt above describes, his principal discovery is that everywhere, the big people exploit the little people. This is an interesting viewpoint, I think, for a white writer to take when writing about Indigenous people; similar arguments have been made to dismiss the depredations of colonialism: Well, they weren't so peaceful before we got there, you know. And yet it's hard to deny the truth of the matter; when I looked at Kamehameha's temple on Whale Hill, I thought of MacMillan's novel and the nameless, unremembered labor that must have occurred at the king's request.

What makes the book work, I think, is the frame story, in which an aged Pono tells his story to a British sailor in Honolulu with an interest in publishing his account. The Hawaii the sailor sees, as Pono illustrates, is a different one from the one he left behind when he was rescued by the pirates. For one, the warfare that turned Pono into an outcast is no longer, thanks to Kamehameha (who I think remains unnamed, a silent force), and white traders have descended en masse, bringing with them new ways of life--and new, devastating diseases. Perhaps it's true that everywhere the ali'i exploit the common people, but it's true also that Pono's new world is one that comes with new and frightening kinds of exploitation. As Pono tells his story, a rumor arrives that a Hawaiian Christian convert is due to arrive at Honolulu, one with the same name that Pono gave his long-lost son. The reunion is a failure; the son rejects the father because he has found another father. It seems like the final nail in the coffin for the Hawaii that Pono once knew, replaced by something that is perhaps no worse but certainly no better. And yet, this scene gives some hope, too: Pono's wife is still living somewhere near Hilo. When he sets off at the end of the novel to find her, MacMillan suggests that restitution and repair are possible even in a world that has slipped out from under one's feet.

Shoal of Time by Gavin Daws

History came to Hawaii by way of the sea, and traces of the past are still visible in the water as well as on the land. At Lahaina, close to the harbor, skin divers prospecting on the sandy sea bed occasionally turn up anchor chains and oil lamps and square-face gin bottles from whaling ships, coffee cups from Navy submarines and Matson cruise liners, and splintered calabashes and stone adze heads tossed overboard from Hawaiian canoes. The sand shifts with the currents; one day the past is exposed, the next it is all but obscured, and it takes a sharp eye to bring it to light again. Farther out to sea the past repeats itself endlessly. The tides run, the sun sets, the night passes, and in the morning, just at dawn, the islands come into view again as they did for Cook so long ago, a fresher green breast of the new world than ever the old Atlantic sailors saw, and still a place of gentle, beckoning beauty.

I'm going to Hawaii next week. It'll by my fiftieth state state. And with good reason: it's possibly the single most remote major population center on earth, much farther away from mainland U.S. than even Alaska. I have many expectations, but one is that it will be strange how not strange it will feel to be dropped off in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, nearly as close to Japan as California, and to be in the same old McDonald's-and-Chipotle America. How did we come to possess such a place? And how did it become a state like all the others, when it seems so different?

A little less than 200 years passed from the time that Captain Cook first spotted the "Sandwich Islands" to the moment that Hawaii became the fiftieth star on the U.S. flag. Some might object that Gavan Daws takes these two moments as the endpoints for Shoal of Time, his history of the Hawaiian Islands. After all, Hawaii's history as a Polynesian settlement extends back much, much farther than the 18th century. (It seems perhaps more excusable to end with the 1959 statehood when writing in 1968, as Daws did.) But it's hard to argue, when Daws reveals how much of a watershed moment the arrival of Cook was not just for the Europeans, who found a new cache of resources to plunder in the Pacific, but for the Islands themselves. Without Cook, Daws makes clear, there would be no Kamehameha, the Hawaiian juggernaut who united the islands for the first time under a single ruler. Though there's no selling Kamehameha short--you only need to compare him, it seems, to the lineage of feckless drunks that came after him--it was European guns and iron that allowed him to make the conquest, along with the assistance of a pair of whites, one kidnapped and one shipwrecked. The arrival of Europeans, it seems, had a funny way of making a people out of fractious and divided tribes; Kamehameha's conquest is almost a literalization of this principle.

Kamehameha's story would make one hell of an HBO streaming series. I know what a lame thing that is to say, and I'm the first to say we're all a little too TV-pilled these days. But it really does have all the Game of Thrones elements: a powerful leader, unconventional allies, scheming vassals, and the pressures of choosing between a bunch of morons to carry on your legacy--plus the beautiful natural setting. Hawaiian history, and thus Daws' book, is never quite as interesting after the Kamehameha period, with its wars and diplomacies and poisonings. But Shoal of Time offers a reminder, too, that this Golden Age of Hawaii was a relatively brief period; after Kamehameha's death in 1819, no subsequent king or queen has the same kind of control over the Islands, and all seem caught perilously between protecting Native Hawaiian interests and the European planters who become quickly and uneasily absorbed into the kingdom's politics.

But in my imagined HBO series, I hope there is a season set aside for the aftermath of Kamehameha's death, which is one of the most interesting stories in all of Hawaiian history. At the time of Cook's arrival, Hawaiian religion was circumscribed by the concept of "kapu," that is, taboo, the interdiction of certain places and things as off limits to some or all members of society. It was kapu, for example, for women to eat with women, but a chief could also declare and lift kapu as he saw fit. Kamehameha consolidated his power, for example, by declaring the harbors where European ships had landed as kapu until his particular demands for trade had been met. Yet, when Kamehameha dies, his young son and successor Liholiho (or Kamehameha II) is convinced by the dead king's widow to overthrow the kapu system entirely. (Although powerful, she seems to have felt keenly the way that the kapu system was used to keep women in their place.) The result is total cultural destabilization, which paves the way for the Christian missionaries who arrive just months later, just in time to offer an alternative to the Hawaiian religion that lies in shambles.

One idea I see on Twitter a lot is that Hawaii isn't "really" part of the United States; or it shouldn't be. That's certainly true; the state of Hawaii is the direct successor of a military coup by American whites against the kingdom's last monarch, Liliuokalani. (As far as that goes, none of it should be the United States.) But one thing I didn't really understand until reading Daws' book is that the kingdom was already filled with, and staffed by, whites. Kamehameha relied on Isaac Davis and John Young; Kamehameha III relied on a rotating staff of whites from missionary families to perform the business of the kingdom. Though it was clearly far from racial harmony, there's something to marvel at in this era of the kingdom, in which whites served in the king's cabinet as Hawaiian nationalists. Later on, things devolved, as one supposes they must, with the white elements in the kingdom trying hard to minimize the power of the Hawaiian king. The pretext for Liliuokalani's overthrow, in fact, was her attempt to abrogate a constitution her brother and predecessor had been forced to sign at the point of a gun. This solved one of the two questions that seems to have dominated the white elements of the kingdom in the 19th century. The other question was, which imperial nation should we be allied to, and under what context? This question was settled with the 1898 annexation, fought for by the same actors who overthrew Liliuokalani and created a republic, but one look at the Hawaiian flag with its hopeful Union Jack shows that an American Hawaii was not a historical inevitability.

Daws describes the process of obtaining statehood as one that was both fraught and sort of inevitable. (One thing that made it inevitable, which I never really considered, was the admission of Alaska, which obliterated most of the already weak complaints by stateside politicians.) The Hawaii that becomes a state in 1959 is a far cry from the Hawaii of 1778, or even the Republic of 1898. Both Hawaiians and whites are far outnumbered by Asians (whom, in a regrettable relic of the 60's, Daws calls "Orientals"). Hawaii's position in the Pacific has made it a place where many cultures converge, and not always easily or well, as Daws shows in one particularly lurid story of racism and murder in the 1930s. But Daws finds a lot of hope in the symbolic nature of its statehood; perhaps its diversity--it's the first state to send a Japanese and Chinese legislator to Congress--tokens a changing America. I don't know how well we've lived up to that hope, but it's a nice thought, and it makes me wonder what Daws would have made of the political ascension of Barack Obama, whose Hawaii background is often forgotten in consideration of his breaking down of racial barriers.  

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.