South and West: From a Notebook

Reading this slim volume is like opening a time capsule…and then having the alarming realization that almost nothing has changed. Here, National Book Award winner Didion (The Year of Magical Thinking) gathers together and juxtaposes her notes from a visit to the American South during the 1970s with those she wrote a few years later in San Francisco while covering the 1974 Patty Hearst kidnapping. As she draws parallels between the two places, she reveals the false promise of commercial industry and development, "the kernel of cyanide" hidden within the American dream, which has brought about its current state of decadence and decay. Though her notes are notes—in no way do they resemble the perfunctory outlines or drafts one usually associates with the term. Her narrative arrangement closely mirrors her itinerary, resulting in a multitextured patchwork of voices from New Orleans; Mississippi's Biloxi and Meridian, and Tuscaloosa, AL. The reader gets the sense she is eavesdropping on the past, and these conversations, haunting in their prescience, are difficult to forget.