Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays

Didion's collection of essays was recommended to me by writing instructors as an example of excellent essay writing. I found it to be just that. In the first third, she writes a series of remarkable essays about California in the late 1960s. The middle third contains personal essays. And the book finishes with a collection of essays about different places she's been - New York, Hartford, Hawaii, Sacramento. What makes her writing most impressive is her masterful presentation of portraits, inserting herself just occasionally to remind the reader of who the photographer was, to inject humanity. She does an excellent job combining place and character and shows that long sentences can work. This book is useful both an as example to those who aspire to writing better essays and as a memorable voice from the 1960s.

I have owned several copies of this book, and have given away more copies than I can count. It's a book I come back to, at least once a year since 1980, when I first read it. It seems to me to be better and better each time. The times it's about may be long gone, but the issues at the heart of these essays haven't changed much at all.Much has been made of Didion's take on California, and this book is laden with essays about the place, and the people, and a particular time that - as other reviewers here have noted - has a different resonance in popular culture than the one she presents here. Didion herself recently professed some alarm at the idea that she is an expert on the place (in 'Where I Was From'), but there's no doubt that she's provided more food for thought about contemporary culture than almost anyone else. But the real strength of her writing is in her prose style, in which not a single sentence is sloppy, or ill-considered. Her style is distinctive, but it's not just for show. There are other fine essayists working today, but few are as disciplined and considered as Didion in the way they write.It's probably a toss-up as to whether this book or 'The White Album' is a better place to start with Didion's work. I think 'The White Album' is a more cohesive collection, but there are better individual essays in 'Slouching', including the sublime essays in the 'Personals' section. And chances are that once you've read one, you'll read the other, and in that case it makes sense to start with the earlier collection, which is this one.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem is the best book of essays I have ever, by the grace of God, been fortunate enough to own and read. In essay after essay, I found myself saying,"Go on, Joan. You said it, Joan. We are the same, you and I, Joan, etc." That is the type of book Slouching Towards Bethlehem is. Reading it, slowly, meticulously, I felt such a close kinship, a bond, not with the writer but with her words -- so carefully chosen and wonderfully articulated. These essays are not meant, honestly, for teenagers, although, if given a chance, the totality of the book would be most beneficial for their pliable and socially indoctrinated minds. The purport of this book is something that I can so easily identify with: the disappearance of the past for the establishment of a fragmented, roughly organized new society with newfangled, unaccustomed societal perceptions as well as an aggressive casting off of the traditional value system of those who were born and raised a long time before the emergence of the radical, cataclysmic sixties. These essays explore, through author Joan Didion's own feelings and experiences and the feelings and experiences of those she encountered, the disharmononized emotions of the hippy generation vs the elders of the more reactionary periods, periods where: Free Love, Acid Trips, Groovy, Crystal Snorting Gurus and Muumuu Dressed Followers seemed a complex and social oddity in the hierarchy of those who were deemed, "Not with it, man." What is so nice about these essays is that they are not condescending; there were and are thousands upon thousands of citizens and non-citizens alike who had and have no clue whatsoever as to what the counter-culture represented (me, honestly, being one in that vast catagory). Joan Didion thrust herself into its epicenter, and with a keen eye took it all in, trying to understand. The darkness of the counter-culture I think is best represented in the title essay "Slouching Towards Bethlehen" on page 101: "Pretty little 16-year-old chick comes to the Haight to see what it's all about & gets picked up by a 17-year-old street dealer who spends all day shooting her full of speed again & again, then feeds her 3,000 mikes & raffles off her temporarily unemployed body for the biggest Hight Street gangbang since the night before last. The politics and ethics of ecstasy..." That was the darkness of the counter-culture, but that is not representative of the entirety of it. Didion's family can be traced back all the way to the Donner-Reed tragedy in which cannibalism was the well known result. Thus, California is liked to that sole dark act; it is forever historically and symbolically linked, California becoming tarnished and not the land of "Golden opportunity." That is one way of looking at the counter-culture. Or it can be viewed in this fashion, in the essay: "Rock of Ages" about Alcatraz Island on page 208: "I saw the shower room (in Alcatraz) with the soap still in the dishes. I picked