November 7th, 2011 / 11:43 am
Snippets
Snippets
Kristen Iskandrian—
Well this last line from John Banville’s review of Joan Didion’s new memoir Blue Nights, I like it:
“However, it is most profound, and most provocative, at another level, the level at which the author comes fully to realize, and to face squarely, the dismaying fact that against life’s worst onslaughts nothing avails, not even art; especially not art.”
it’s like, ‘take that, art,’ y’know?
Whoa. Brutal.
When you are very sick and bedridden, the body cakes the muses in shit.
I believe this is correct. Art is no replacement for one’s lost child.
Nor consolation.
SO METAL
Does she name drop designer labels and brand names in every other sentence in this book? Rely on the same repetitive style–endless refrains, sentagraphs, lists? There’s just something about her that I can’t fully trust.
Correctomundo.
thank you for this post. so much.
Children are no replacement for lost cocaine and hookers.
Alas; and alack.
However, this comment is most profound at another level, the level where it is at its deepest, where it squares facefully at its farthest from the surface, where it is least superficial; especially where art is art.
There’s this great Mark Newgarden comic, where a man and woman are standing next to each other in an art gallery. The man is talking about art theory and criticism and all this business, and the woman admits that she doesn’t care because she’s single, has to take care of a kid, and her divorced husband keeps threatening her with violence. I wish I could link but it’s so tough to find Mark Newgarden stuff online.
Anyway, this quote reminded me of that comic, and that comic changed my whole perspective on writing and art, so, you know, feels good.
Nor consolation.
damn, that’s a really, really good review
using the word “avail” like this seems un rigorous in a critical piece and a poetic reflection after the tight writing that makes you understand how Didion signified life’s worst onslaughts with this book
Then what’s the point of reading her last two memoirs, because every sentence is basically infused with this admission. Why should I waste my time reading another book by a detached writer in a deadpan, detached style telling me for 200 pages that “art is no replacement for one’s lost child or husband”?
That “[quintana roos] are no replacement for lost cocaine and hookers”?
—–
I see not everyone is a fan of Joanie D.
Nope. Not a fan, though I respect her earlier work (e.g. Democracy, White Album) because her style (even if it’s not my cup of team) is on point. She’s clearly regressed as a stylist.
Here’s my last post on her, in anticipation of responses…
I agree that “art is no replacement for loved ones,” which is the point: it’s stating the obvious, yet her style is so detached, deadpan, and repetitive that it feels like a crutch to avoid genuine emotion. For instance, we get all these mundane details in “Magical Thinking,” like the lengthy lists of medicine bottles. We alsoGetOneSentence ParagraphsLikeThisThat are supposed to suggest a simple profundity that instead read (to this reader) like tics. While I haven’t read BN, people I trust say the style is very similar.JMO. Sorry:IMeant:JMOJust: My: Honest: Opinion[insert full dictionary definition of “opinion”: use:at:least:twenty:colons]
;-)
Wow, the formatting was totally destroyed in translation. Let’s try this again, minus the attempt to mock her famed sentagraphs and overuse of colons:
Nope. Not a fan, though I respect her earlier work (e.g. Democracy, White Album) because her style (even if it’s not my cup of tea) is on point. She’s clearly regressed as a stylist.
I agree w/ mimi that “art is no replacement for loved ones,” which is the point: it’s stating the obvious, yet her style is so detached, deadpan, and repetitive that it feels like a crutch to avoid genuine emotion. For instance, we get all these mundane details in “Magical Thinking,” like the lengthy lists of medicine bottles. We also get one sentence paragraphs that are supposed to suggest a simple profundity that instead read (to this reader) like tics. While I haven’t read BN, people I trust say the style is very similar.
This – along with list-making – is true of the White Album etc as well though, no? I haven’t read Magical Thinking nor the new one, so maybe for you – I’m guessing – she’s reached an end pt….?
Yes, she uses lists and deadpan wit/tone in White Album, but there’s more variety in that book (and in Democracy) and the style and voice feel honest and organic. I’m not anti-deadpan or list, but it’s more difficult for her to pull these things off now because other areas of her writing are lacking (her scenes, for instance).
–pretty much the opposite.
I saw J.D. interviewed on her book-promotion tour on The Chas. Rose Show and she said – for what it’s worth, again book-promoting – that her latest is a departure for her in terms of book-making – more mediative than her usual journalistc narrative style, etc., or something like that. Don’t know if true.
[comment got cut off because I inserted an html a href= link tag, I think…]
…the Charlie Rose show and she said her latest is a departure for her in terms of style – more mediative than her usual journalistic narrative. More inward-looking. Something like that.
Michael – My First comment in this thread was a personal response to Banville’s closing line (author’s realization of … dismay … art v. life’s worst onslaughts). Didion factored into my thoughts as a mother who had experienced the loss of a child. (And I speak as the mother of two young children, and one who has not experienced profound, close loss – of a child, of a parent, a sibling – I have only “imagined”.)
Should you “waste (your) time reading another book by…” ? Well, that’s up to you! I have read a “smattering” of Didion. I started “Year of Magical Thinking”, stalled, put it down and did not return to it.
And re: “lost cocaine and hookers”, well, deader’s comment provided an irreverent tangent to this thread.
What are you talking about: “tangent”.
OK, perhaps “tangent” is inaccurate (as is, perhaps, also, “irreverent”). Did JD & JGD adopt Q Roo as a replacement of, or consolation for “lost cocaine and hookers”? I honestly don’t know, having not read enough of JD or about her life.
I don’t know if they did that. Certainly, as we are talking of “replacement[s]” and “consolation”, children are no replacements nor consolation for one’s lost cocaine and hookers.
The forcefully pompous truism that you mock brackets Banville’s introduction to his review: a writer’s “ameliorat[ion]” (perhaps every artists) – namely, that “experience, no matter how dire, can be turned into material”. He’s being plainly shapely: ‘here’s where storytelling succors, and here’s where it can’t’.
(‘Pomp’? “[A] survivor — the relict, as the old word has it — “; “she forged — ambiguous word — “.)
Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album are great books. –Banville’s “measured yet distraught” is good. I thought his The Untouchable was excellent.
I hear you, mimi. Thanks for the clarification. I think the idea of Didion “pitting art against life’s worst onslaughts” struck a cord in me because I see a connection between her privilege–one she openly flaunts–and her detached/deadpan style. Her lack of imagination bothers me. Her dullness bothers me. Her mundane prose bothers me because I find in it the implicit idea that a fractured and broken world needs yet another meta-narrative reminder of art’s limits instead of something truly imaginative and lively. Personally speaking–and yes, this is a matter of taste–I look for literature to use a unique rhetoric to wake me up and shake me by the collar, and her dull style seems to do the opposite and rely on detached mimesis and narcissism.
Though she’s written novels and screenplays, Didion is a journalist foremost, or a news-writer essayist, or a magazine writer (as it was once called) in the New Journalism vein – still. Even the fiction of hers that I’ve read has a journalistic style or tone or approach – that she forged (hah-hah) into her own thing. Because of this, I hesitate to evaluate her work from an “artistic” POV. And that’s what also makes this new book somewhat interesting to me – in that it’s a departure from all that, supposedly. I think all your criticisms are valid btw: the repetition, the lists, the privilege, the contradictions, etc. If not for you, then that’s fair. Once upon a time though, writers like Didion did have the lofty ambitions you’re looking for.
Fair enough!
Banville is an excellent reviewer. I say reviewer because he gets prickly when you use the word critic: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5907/the-art-of-fiction-no-200-john-banville
thanks for that.