Political Fictions - Softcover

Didion, Joan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375718907 ISBN 13: 9780375718908

Publisher: Vintage, 2002

Synopsis

National Bestseller

In these coolly observant essays, Joan Didion looks at the American political process and at "that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life." Through the deconstruction of the sound bites and photo ops of three presidential campaigns, one presidential impeachment, and an unforgettable sex scandal, Didion reveals the mechanics of American politics. She tells us the uncomfortable truth about the way we vote, the candidates we vote for, and the people who tell us to vote for them. These pieces build, one on the other, into a disturbing portrait of the American political landscape, providing essential reading on our democracy.

"One of our most cherished and insightful explicators of American culture...brings her perspective to the ultimate insider world." --San Francisco Chronicle

Winner of the George Polk Book Award

About this title

Review

Political Fictions--a collection of eight essays covering US politics between 1988 and 2000--takes a critical look at what author Joan Didion calls "the ways in which the political process did not reflect but increasingly proceeded from a series of fables about American experience". The New York Review of Books originally published these writings and they hit all the major events of the previous dozen years: the election of George Bush (Senior), the emergence of Bill Clinton, the Republican takeover of Congress, Clinton's impeachment and the 2000 race between George Bush (Junior) and Al Gore. During this period, Didion worked and reworked a theme of political disconnect. In examining who cast ballots in 2000 (for the first time, more than half of all voters had incomes about $50,000), she notes acidly in her foreword:

That this was not a demographic profile of the country at large, that half the nation's citizens had only a vassal relationship to the government under which they lived, that the democracy we spoke of spreading throughout the world was now in our own country only an ideality, had come to be seen, against the higher priority of keeping the process in the hands of those who already held it, as facts without application.

She puts it a bit more succinctly elsewhere by describing "the largest political party in America" as "those who did not vote".

Didion brings a novelist's eye to her project and she delights in exposing fakery. In describing one of Vice President Bush's visits to the Middle East in the 1980s, she notes that his advance team requested that camels be present at every stop--so that photographers could capture the supposed authenticity of the trip. Many of the essays in Political Fictions are, at a fundamental level, book reviews--and Didion's observations can be withering. She calls Newt Gingrich's novel 1945 "a fairly primitive example of the kind of speculative fiction known as 'alternate history'". The accomplishment of Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, she says, is to have produced "books in which measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent". Her targets are not always other writers: "No-one who ever passed through an American public high school could have watched William Jefferson Clinton running for office in 1992 and failed to recognise the familiar predatory sexuality of the provincial adolescent". Needless to say, Political Fictions is not a celebration of American democracy. It is more like an indictment. --John Miller

Review

"One of our most cherished and insightful explicators of American culture...brings her perspective to the ultimate insider world." -San Francisco Chronicle

"Splendid . . . Didion [is] on pure zen target . . . [with] her sonar ear, her radar eye, and her ice pick/laser beam/night--scope sniper prose." -The New York Times Book Review

"A steel spine of political argument . . . a mordant wit, refined critical powers, and a bone-deep knowledge of the ways in which Americans like to amuse and fool themselves." -The Washington Post Book World

"One of the most preeminent voices of journalism has stepped into the ring. . . . [A] gift." -Susan Faludi, The New York Observer

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0375718907
• ISBN 13: 9780375718908
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352