Review: Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a collection of essays by Joan Didion, and I have never felt so much for a non-fiction collection. Slouching is basically perfect; it's the kind of book that stays with you even long after you read it.

Ms. Didion's prose is razor-sharp and quite simple, but at the same time complicated. Her prose is sardonic, but not cruel. She does not judge her own subjects but she does not sugarcoat it either. Writing about the instant marriage business of Las Vegas, she could make fun of the people in and using these businesses like many writers did (and still do) but instead she writes about a rather humanizing account of it. She could condemn the parents who gave their elementary school-aged child LSD, but she didn't. When talking to teenage runaways, she didn't ridicule or scoff at them but she also didn't exactly side with them. Ms. Didion is ironic, yes, but she's also honest and kind. She lets her readers form their own conclusion instead of pronouncing her own judgement.

The topics of these essays are at the same time specific and universal. They are topical: the Haight-Ashbury District during the 60s counterculture movement, Ms. Didion's own thoughts and self-reflections, the closing of Alcatraz, a history of Sacramento. But there's a universal pattern to these kind of topical subjects; when Ms. Didion writes about what she sees as the decline of her hometown Sacramento, she might as well write about the decline of any other town in anywhere in the world. Even though my town does not have dusty palm trees or baked-clay houses like they do in California, I know and understand what Ms. Didion's feeling when she saw that her hometown is slowly changing right before her very eyes. I sympathize and felt her slow alienation to her beloved Sacramento and what she calls "California", just like I felt my own alienation to my hometown here in Indonesia, several hundred thousand miles away from the sun-kissed shores of the Gulf of California. And I think the specificity is what makes it so general. Sometimes writers, in an attempt to embrace the most and widest audience as possible, tends to write in a broad, generalized manner, which in turn alienates their audience. Despite the fact that Ms. Didion wrote about crystal-snorting teenagers in the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco during the Vietnam War, she could write about the restless youths of present-day America. By writing her own thoughts and feelings, she elevates a mundane and topical subject into something timeless.