Run River

This first novel by one of modern America's prose-writing treasures is set in a part of California no one associates with the Golden State: the Sacramento Delta. The emotional and physical geography of the book blend seamlessly. Didion has since critiqued this book herself, in her much later prose reflection on California, "Where I Was From." She's a bit hard on her former self. This is a lucid, hard etched short novel on... Read Full Review

This novel is early Didion, wonderfully lyrical and dark, passionate without sentimentality, and beyond conclusions. It is homage to James Jones, to William Faulkner, perhaps a little to John Steinbeck, but mostly to a California now almost vanished. That California is mostly the settlers' California, but it is also a California felt and known aboriginally. She writes, as always, poignantly about things dying away: ... Read Full Review

...but Run River is her finest novel. "Democracy" is excellent, but it is more a tour de force than a novel. Didion was only in her twenties when she wrote Run River, and it is a winner--stylish but never mannered (something you can't say about her subsequent novels), subdued, witty, assured, and filled with Valley (as in the Sacramento Valley) characters with whom Didion was rather obsessively in love. It is a pity ... Read Full Review