Book Review: South and West: From a Notebook

(Taken out of Jackson Heights Library) "In New Orleans in June the air is heavy with sex and death, not violent death  but death by decay, overripeness, rotting, death by drowning, suffocation, fever of unknown etiology." What an opening sentence. Joan Didion's rough drafts are more intoxicating than the finished versions of most writers. This brief treat is taken from Didion's notes for two articles never finished. In the first longer segment, she and her husband travel from New Orleans and head into the South with no particular agenda. In the second, much shorter vignette, she has gone to San Francisco to cover the Patty Hearst trial for Rolling Stone, but winds up writing about herself and her relationship to California the state where she grew up. What emerges is a sharp portrait of a particular place and time. The South cannot forget the past and is trapped by it--to a certain extent, they still are 50 years later. The West has no past and only looks forward. It's very short, you can read it in less than two hours, but Didion will haunt you with her indelible images.