Joan Didion Was Our Bard of Disenchantment

 

"In 1988, Joan Didion joined a scrum of reporters on the tarmac of the San Diego airport to witness the writing of the first draft of history. The assembled journalists were trailing the Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis. She was trailing the journalists. Didion watched as a baseball was procured, a staffer tossed the ball to the candidate, he tossed it back—and as the cameras dutifully captured the exchange. She watched as presidential fitness was redefined as athletic prowess with the consent of the national media—as the myths that shape, and limit, Americans’ sense of political possibility were manufactured in real time. She documented the moment in an essay for The New York Review of Books. It was titled “Insider Baseball,” and it has since been, like so many of Didion’s essays, so widely imitated that its innovations can be easy to overlook. But the piece was singular, and scathing: a collective profile of, as she wrote, “that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life.”

Didion died today at 87, still one of this moment’s most debated and admired and consequential writers. Thinking about her wide body of work—essays, novels, memoirs, pieces of criticism, each with their own tendrils and limbs—I keep coming back to “Insider Baseball,” because it captures something so essential about her approach. She was a storyteller who rejected mythology. She had no patience for the pablum sold in the hectic American marketplace: bootstraps, merits, salvations. Her most common subject, instead, was entropy. And her second-most-common subject was grief. She observed the world that was, even as she mourned the world that might have been."}

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