Explanation:
For the past forty years Joan Didion has taken upon herself the task of explaining, or at least exposing, California to the New York literary world. She set her first novel, Run River (1963), written when she was twenty-eight, in her native Sacramento Valley, but her reputation as California diviner rests on her astonishing first two books of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979). At once romantic and jaundiced, elegiac and cold-eyed, her pieces largely defined the state—or, more accurately, the Central Valley and Los Angeles—for two generations of readers who came to see it through her eyes rather than their own. (The foreboding verging on existential angst with which Angeleno book-reading transplants from back east feel they must greet the coming of the Santa Ana winds in October is inexplicable absent the influence of Didion's essays "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream" and "Los Angeles Notebook.") This native daughter mingled icy, matter-of-fact observation of lust and murder in the San Bernardino Valley and the less than savory aspects of the Summer of Love with lyrical descriptions of swimming the American River, which ran "clean and fast with melted Sierra snow until July"; of the first fall rains; of the Pacific off Malibu on winter mornings. Writing of James Jones's Hawaii, Didion said, "A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively ... loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image." Plainly, Didion's ambition was to do that with California, and few critics and readers believed she would fail to become one of the most important writers in the state's history.
