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Andrew O’Hagan: I Think We’re Alone Now, 15 December 2022

... 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 ...

The First Person, Steroid-Enhanced

Hari Kunzru: Hunter S. Thompson, 15 October 1998

The Rum Diary 
by Hunter S. Thompson.
Bloomsbury, 204 pp., £16.99, October 1998, 9780747541684
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The Proud Highway: The Fear and Loathing Letters. Vol. I 
by Hunter S. Thompson, edited by Douglas Brinkley.
Bloomsbury, 720 pp., £9.99, July 1998, 0 7475 3619 8
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... 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 ...

At the Whitney

Hal Foster: Ed Ruscha’s Hollywood Sublime, 2 September 2004

... 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 ...

Deity with Fairy Wings

Emily Witt: Girlhood, 8 September 2016

The Girls 
by Emma Cline.
Chatto, 355 pp., £12.99, June 2016, 978 1 78474 044 3
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... 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 ...

On Mike Davis

T.J. Clark, 17 November 2022

... 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 ...

At the Pool

Inigo Thomas, 21 June 2018

... 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 ...

Diary

Mike Davis: California Burns, 15 November 2007

... 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 ...

Attending Poppy

Christopher Tayler: David Grand, 9 December 1999

Louse 
by David Grand.
Quartet, 255 pp., £10, April 1999, 9780704381155
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... 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 ...

The Reviewer’s Song

Andrew O’Hagan: Mailer’s Last Punch, 7 November 2013

Norman Mailer: A Double Life 
by J. Michael Lennon.
Simon and Schuster, 947 pp., £30, November 2013, 978 1 84737 672 5
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... 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 ...

J’Accuzi

Frank Kermode, 24 July 1986

The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America 
by Martin Amis.
Cape, 208 pp., £9.95, July 1986, 0 224 02385 3
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... 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 ...

‘Double y’im dees’

Christopher Tayler: Ben Fountain, 2 August 2012

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk 
by Ben Fountain.
Canongate, 307 pp., £16.99, July 2012, 978 0 85786 438 3
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... 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 ...

Roasted

Peter Robb, 6 March 1997

Oyster 
by Janette Turner Hospital.
Virago, 400 pp., £14.99, September 1996, 1 86049 123 5
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... 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 ...

Whatever

Andy Beckett: Dennis Cooper’s short novel, 21 May 1998

Guide 
by Dennis Cooper.
Serpent’s Tail, 176 pp., £8.99, March 1998, 1 85242 586 5
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... 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 ...

Diary

Inigo Thomas: Michael Wolff’s Book Party, 8 February 2018

... someone they could talk to.Journalistically, what more could you wish for? ‘It was gold,’ as Joan Didion would say. The historian Taylor Branch visited Bill Clinton secretly at the White House once a month in the 1990s. On his first visit, in the spring of 1993, maxims and epigrams were flying about the place. Bill was quoting Suetonius, Hillary ...

A Poke of Sweeties

Andrew O’Hagan: Neal Ascherson’s Magnificent Novel, 30 November 2017

The Death of the ‘Fronsac’ 
by Neal Ascherson.
Apollo, 393 pp., £18.99, August 2017, 978 1 78669 437 9
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... good novels unless they already have some bend in their imagination, as did Hemingway, Orwell and Joan Didion, towards self-excavation. The urge may hide itself, but you can see it in their language: the words don’t just arrive; they are bred in the bone and the actions they perform are specific to that writer. This is what we call style, and ...

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