“... thinking here of the obfuscation of the Victorians, especially James; of the essays and novels of Joan Didion, which both forbid and implore the reader to bring his own version of the story to the events at hand; of the seemingly bland fare of Raymond Carver’s fiction, offered in full awareness that the reader will sit down at table with his own salt ...”

“... only the shadow of an old puzzle? This is the dilemma that confronts narrator and characters in Joan Didion’s Democracy, a novel whose title itself mimes the slippery problem. Democracy, in Didion’s work, is not a form of government but an item of rhetoric: what the world is to be made safe for; a conspiracy of ...”

“... it, I really knew I was in California, and I began to see among the commercial hieroglyphics what Joan Didion meant when she called these places ‘pyramids to the boom years’. On certain days, Didion is quite a nice accompaniment to one’s nervous system. When she was young and working for Vogue, she took a ...”

“... to write about his own terror and confusion as he drifted through the war zone, and it allowed Joan Didion, in The White Album, to weave details of her anxious upscale-Californian life into a startling account of the collapse of Sixties idealism. No one took the voice of the journalist further away from ‘neutral background’ (or seemed less able to ...”

“... there is a hint of catastrophe, a sick glow beyond the usual smog, a touch of Nathanael West or Joan Didion. Though he is a believer to the end, Ruscha suggests that Los Angeles might be a mirage and California a myth – a façade about to crumble into the desert, a set about to liquefy into the ...”

“... like, an endless, formless summer,’ Evie muses in the first chapter. Maybe I’ve just read Joan Didion too many times but this reads as a hair’s breadth away from parody, down to the subsequent mention of jasmine. Or maybe I just felt trapped in the echo chamber of the originary text of girlhood, The Bell Jar: ‘It was a queer sultry ...”

“... smog belt’, with eighty days a year of Stage One eye-stinging murk. In City of Quartz, he quoted Joan Didion, passing through on her way to a murder trial:The lemon groves are sunken, down a three or four-foot retaining wall, so that one looks directly into their dense foliage, too lush, unsettlingly glossy, the greenery of nightmare; the fallen ...”

“... is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the Western eye,’ Joan Didion said. She was writing about California, where pools, in her view, were less a symbol of affluence than of order – ‘control over the uncontrollable’. The history of California is to a considerable extent about the mastery of water in desert ...”

“... also offer lazy journalists the opportunity to recite those famous lines from Raymond Chandler and Joan Didion, in which the Santa Anas drive the natives to homicide and apocalyptic fever. But just as one shouldn’t read Daphne du Maurier to understand the workings of nature in Cornwall, one shouldn’t read Chandler to fathom the phenomenology of ...”

“... and emblematic Americana. In her 1967 essay about Hughes, ‘7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38’, Joan Didion attributed the fascination Hughes exerted to a return of the repressed: for ‘a nation which increasingly appears to prize social virtues’, Hughes is ‘the antithesis of all our official heroes’. David Grand’s first novel Louse sees ...”

“... like an oven and half the old-timers were falling asleep as I came in. I saw that Jean Stein and Joan Didion were deep in a conversation that could only be private, so I went over to the bar and had a whisky before approaching them. Joan Didion gave me her hand and she was so thin it felt like I was holding a ...”

“... Burroughs fares no better: most of what he writes is ‘trash, and lazily obsessive trash, too’. Joan Didion is suitably seared. Brian de Palma, the light-fingered flash trash movie brute who can’t even walk properly, is asked by the interviewer to explain ‘why his films make no sense’, not a sequitur in sight. Neither do Hitchcock’s, says the ...”

“... long apprenticeship is that his 1970s-vintage literary models – among them Robert Stone, Joan Didion and Norman Mailer in Vietnam-era reportage mode – turned out to be pretty useful for a writer hitting his stride at the start of the 21st century. His main adjustments concern mood. For the pill-popping nerviness of ...”

“... It reads like an awful lot of other novels, the award-winning kind, of the last decade or so. Joan Didion floats into view – her manner, if not her anorexic vigour. Roasted people are a substantial novelty in Turner Hospital’s writing. Ouster bears the marks of a radical discontent, a resolve to break out of the writers’ workshop ghetto, to cut ...”

“... these attributes. Luke’s reply to any request is always: ‘Whatever.’ Cooper has learnt from Joan Didion, the great flat-toned chronicler of California, that there is menace in repetition and restriction, in leaving out. By dispensing with the palm trees and the traffic snarl and all the state’s surface noise and danger, he depicts a ...”