Rating: A+ | ★★★★★ Synopsis (from Goodreads): The first nonfiction work by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era, Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem remains, decades after its first publication, the essential portrait of America—particularly California—in the sixties. It focuses on such subjects as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up a girl in California, ruminating on the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture. Review: I always find it difficult to review collections of stories; I am troubled by the process of reviewing Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a deceptively slim collection of essays about life in California in the 1960s and all of its sunny and conflicting moods. The collection has its ups and downs; the first essay, "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream," is a rather slow and meticulously detailed introduction to many of its dreamier and emotional compatriots. The eponymous essay, deftly placed in the midst of the rest, is also rather sluggish, challenging the reader to remember the names of myriad characters, locations, and events. Still, that is part of Didion's style; the names themselves are not important but rather the landscape they create—the arid, hardy-yet-ethereal vista of California. Didion's writing shines most brightly in the essays that are hers alone to tell, such as her musings on keeping a notebook and on self-respect. She addresses these topics with a kind of sensitivity that provides the reader with the almost tangible feeling that they are watching her physically turn inward to address her own fears and thoughts, an intimate portrait unlike any other. Even Didion's rare platitudes or overly purple phrases carry with them the weight of not just someone who has lived but also someone who is burdened to convey the zeitgeist of an entire generation and geographical location. I would like to promise her that she will grow up with a sense her cousins and of rivers and of her great-grandmother's teacups, would like to pledge her a picnic on a river with fried chicken and hair uncombed, would like to give her home for her birthday, but we live very differently now and I can promise her nothing like that. Loss is the most prevalent theme in Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Didion contends with a culture that has started losing pieces of itself from its very founding, people who lose themselves without realizing. The collection is deeply tragic, but it is a bitter tragedy—not like the tear-inducing ending of a sad movie where the love interest dies at the end but rather the kind of tragedy that forces the reader to carry with them a lump in their throat for the rest of the day. It is the feeling of an acute tragedy that speaks of life rather than of death and is all the worse for it. And when Didion leaves and returns to California at the end of the collection the loss is transformed and dealt with rather than vanquished.
This is an essay collection for readers of all ages, not simply as a rich historical portrait of an era that has been long-mythologized since its passing but also as a timeless meditation on life and how deeply humans might infuse their surroundings with their hopes, dreams, and despairs.
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