Didion, Joan. Democracy 1984. New York: Vintage, 1995.

"I am resisting narrative here" (113), Joan Didion—the conflated author-narrator-character—writes about halfway through this novel, and it's true that whatever story lies in Democracy isn't so much told to the reader as it is picked up, piece by piece, through a series of images and scenelets Didion seems compelled to return to again and again.

This is a story of war and the colonial urge at the tail end of Vietnam. Inez Victor née Christian is the wife of Harry Victor who at one point in the novel is making a serious go at the U.S. presidency. She has an illicit relationship with Jack Lovett, a C.I.A. man a good twenty-thirty years her senior—an illicit relationship everyone including her husband is aware of. Her father, Paul Christian, patriarch of their Hawaiian-aristocracy family, shoots and kills her sister, Janet, and another politician, and then turns himself in shortly afterward. Her daughter, Jessie, somehow flees the U.S. for Vietnam without ever having to show a passport.

The Book of Common Prayer is the novel that precedes this one and like it Didion is concerned here with the families who sit at the center of stories of political intrigue. More specifically the mothers and wives of these families, and yet it's not accurate to call these novels feminist novels because Didion doesn't seem interested in reconstructing readers' notions of the political hero/ine. What she seems interested in here is blending the line in narrative between fact and fiction, an understandable interest from a writer so practiced in both.

Democracy is constructed much the same way Miami (which follows this book chronologically) is: as a continued attempt to get at the story, given so much wayward evidence that hasn't yet been sorted through. The result is tough to get a hold of, as a reader. It's probably best put in Mary McCarthy's super-extensive NY Times review. She guesses at Didion's method as being analogous to a jigsaw puzzle, where

now and then, without hurry, a new piece [of the narrative] is carefully inserted, and the gentle click of cardboard locking into cardboard is felt—no forcing. Despite the fact that the pieces are known to us, face down and face up, almost from the start, there is an intense suspense, which seems to be causeless (no cliffhanger this, no heroine tied to the railroad tracks), suspense arising from the assembly of the pieces, that is, from the procedures of narrative themselves.

I'm not sure that I ever felt suspense while reading Democracy but it was always clear that Didion was trying quite urgently to do something new. Or, not perhaps intentionally setting out to be an innovator of novel form, but perhaps more accurately setting out with the bewildered gloominess of a writer for whom the forms she's known and practiced can no longer work.