Run River (Vintage International)

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Summary: Joan Didion doesn't want you to know this...
Review: ...but Run River is her finest novel. "Democracy" is excellent, but it is more a tour de force than a novel. Didion was only in her twenties when she wrote Run River, and it is a winner--stylish but never mannered (something you can't say about her subsequent novels), subdued, witty, assured, and filled with Valley (as in the Sacramento Valley) characters with whom Didion was rather obsessively in love. It is a pity that she seems more interested these days in writing about Washington insiders for N.Y.C./L.A. insiders. Everett McClellan, my favorite character in the book, would not have been able to sustain an interest in such figures as Henry Hyde and Kenneth Starr. That Didion can--even if only for the purpose of eviscerating them--is an indication of how far she has strayed from her literary roots. Ah, but what roots they were. Run River is an extraordinary achievement.

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Summary: Early Efforts an Excuse?
Review: As a longtime Didion fan I was mildly disappointed with this text. It's cumbersome, swishy, and sloppy. It hints at phrases, and the sort of language she eventually uses later in her writing, but this early novel is exactly that...early. It shows promise, and is not entirely without wit, but it's weak and cumbersome plot, it's overwrought prose, and it's harlequin voice were a disappointment given her profound later works.

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Summary: A Californian Elegy
Review: This novel is early Didion, wonderfully lyrical and dark, passionate without sentimentality, and beyond conclusions. It is homage to James Jones, to William Faulkner, perhaps a little to John Steinbeck, but mostly to a California now almost vanished. That California is mostly the settlers' California, but it is also a California felt and known aboriginally. She writes, as always, poignantly about things dying away: but the heirs live on and the Californian sun and hills, rivers and floods, carry on- the part of eternity we can know a little of. I liked this book very much, but the reader should be warned it is not a light read and not written as completely in Joan Didion's famously sharp style as her later works.