Democracy (Joan Didion, 1984)

So far I've enjoyed plowing through the Novels for Students (NFS) series in a way that the authors completely never intended in that I'm not actually reading those books (which mainly help teachers to "teach the book"), but using it as a guideline for what to read that may be considered a "classic". The result is a random-yet-not-random assortment of books I normally never would read by my own free will. Democracy not only fits the description, but has also, over the years, become sort of an obscurity in itself. Bear in mind that the third volume of the NFS series was published in 1998, when Democracy was only 14 years old and, until only a couple years earlier, remained Didion's last novel. (NB: The Year of Magical Thinking, still six years into the future, is nonfiction.)

As was the case with Annie John and some others, the NFS series tries to incorporate a certain amount of more recent literature, probably for schools with the luxury of getting beyond the dusty basics of your plain American or World Literature courses. The 1980's is still a fairly gray area as far as what is destined for classic status and what is not, especially in non-genre literature. The Modern Library 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century stops chronologically with Ironweed from 1983 and don't think the 1980's got much more representation than that.

While I have the utmost respect for Didion, and I find her writing style intriguing, the sad truth is that Democracy hasn't aged all that well in the 21st century. This may explain why in all of the public libraries in San Mateo County, there was just one copy available for circulation. In fact, I had to check my spreadsheet to make sure it wasn't some other Democracy that made the list. I'm not exactly sure why the book sort of dropped off the radar in recent years, but perhaps more recent wars have clouded the American memory of the last days of Vietnam. On the other hand, we certainly haven't lost our national interest in the rich, famous, and powerful, especially when it all blows up in their faces. A lot of the reviews of this book I've seen express frustration at the "disassembled" narrative, which bounces about chronologically anywhere from 1945 to 1976 and frequently changes tenses, with the "I" being owned immediately as Joan Didion herself, not a surrogate "author". Yet I didn't find the book to be slow going at all. I think the secret may lie in just rolling with the changes, almost like a stream of consciousness rather than approaching it as "cinema in the mind's eye" which is so easy to do with straight narrative pieces.

So, is Democracy as classic? I think at one time it was, but it's importance ultimately turned out to be short-term. If you decide to read it, just keep this all in mind.