Democracy

By: Joan Didion

Narrated by: Denise Poirier

Inez Victor knows that the major casualty of the political life is memory. But the people around Inez have made careers out of losing track. Her senator husband wants to forget the failure of his last bid for the presidency. Her husband's handler would like the press to forget that Inez's father is a murderer. And, in 1975, the year in which much of this bitterly funny novel is set, America is doing its best to lose track of its one-time client, the lethally hemorrhaging republic of South Vietnam.

As conceived by Joan Didion, these personages and events constitute the terminal fallout of democracy, a fallout that also includes fact-finding junkets, senatorial groupies, the international arms market, and the Orwellian newspeak of the political class. Moving deftly from Honolulu to Jakarta, between romance, farce, and tragedy, Democracy is a tour de force from a writer who can dissect an entire society with a single phrase.

©1984 Joan Didion (P)2013 Audible, Inc.

Critic reviews

"A gem...a beautifully composed story that moves with effortless authority and becomes astonishingly moving...Stirring and memorable." ( Newsday)
"Striking, provocative, and brilliantly written." ( The Atlantic)

Perfect and odd

This is an odd book that is so exactly my thing! It is a story about a family and a murder but more importantly about a relationship between a politician’s wife and a government fixer. Or maybe it’s about Vietnam. It’s not a whodunnit or whydunnit but the questions are asked. It’s about Hawaii and more.

Exquisite

In a villanelle, lines are repeated later in the poem according to a strict structure. Sylvia Plath's "Mad Girl's Love Song" is such a poem. The repetition happens in such a way that the same phrase recurs in a new context, with a new meaning. They are difficult technical poems to write, but in Plath's poem, it becomes like the jumble of repeated off-kilter thoughts chasing each other.

Didion's novel is like that.

Didion's novel uses repetition like that.

The performance is also excellent.

There is a half-page, about two-thirds of the way through, that hit me with such clinical precision that I had to stop what I was doing and listen to it again, three times, then search the internet for the exact text so I could write it down.

Author interruptions are odd.

This is an odd book, with a unique narration. Parts of it involve moments when the author breaks the fourth wall and speaks directly to the reader, and the rest is mostly told in a peek-at-the-journal style. The writing was beautiful and the story intriguing, but the quirky story-telling style was a bit off-putting for me.

Mentally Taxing

I did not embrace Joan Dideon's writing style of repeating the beginnings and endings, usually the endings of sentences and usually the sentence's object. Joan Dideon's repeating of the beginnings and endings of sentences resulted in my inability to finish the Audible book I purchased. Joan Dideon's repeating of the beginnings and endings of sentences filled me with irritation. (See what I did there?) Good Lord, Joan. The entire novel? And no character development. I stuck with it up to Part 3, then gave up and removed it from my Audible library. Props to the narrator though. She did a bang-up job.