The good thing about authors being mortal is that their deaths provide such people as me with an opportunity to read about them in leading journalistic outlets aimed at the general reader. Suddenly, in other words, you don't have to seek information out. This lasts for a few days, maybe a week.
When I clicked recently on "Joan Didion didn't play golf, but her writing had qualities for which all golfers should strive," I wasn't expecting anything like this, in GOLF Magazine. I think he's trying to imitate her style? He hasn't altogether succeeded, but he does get at a frequent effect, which is that of a directness that is simultaneously sort of disorienting. She's nervous, a little jumpy, even if the individual sentences are poised. At the comedy club, if you think you know where the joke is going to land, and then it lands somewhere else, that is a sign of a good joke. Didion's sentences are like that. Some of her obituarists, trying to describe her style, give the impression of having entered "mordant" or "incisive" in a thesaurus, in order not to repeat another obituarist, but the golf journalist—he did something different.
Inevitably individual works are mentioned and described, and it may be that my taste is lacking, for it seems that my favorite, "Sentimental Journeys," about the Central Park Jogger case from 1989, is never mentioned. A 29-year-old Ivy-educated woman with a Wall Street job and an apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side was assaulted and raped in Central Park while jogging after dark. Didion observes, in what resembles a thesis statement near the beginning of an essay that runs to more than 40 pages in her collected nonfiction:
Later it would be recalled that 3,254 other rapes were reported that year, including one the following week involving the near decapitation of a black woman in Fort Tryon Park and one two weeks later involving a black woman in Brooklyn who was robbed, raped, sodomized, and thrown down an air shaft of a four-story building, but the point was rhetorical, since crimes are universally understood to be news to the extent that they offer, however erroneously, a story, a lesson, a high concept.
In the essay, Didion describes the erroneous "story," "lesson," or "high concept" that made the case a sensation. Here is a sample of her exposition. The first sentence refers to the fact that the victim's name was not published in media reports, though it was known on Centre Street (a metonym for the administration of justice in NYC, as it's home to the Municipal Building and more than one courthouse) and north of 96th Street (the southern boundary of Spanish Harlem, where most of the suspects lived).
That the victim in this case was identified on Centre Street and north of 96th Street but not in between made for a certain cognitive dissonance, especially since the names of even the juvenile suspects had been released by the police and the press before any suspect had been arraigned, let alone indicted. "The police normally withhold the names of minors who are accused of crimes," the Times explained (actually the police normally withhold the names of accused "juveniles," or minors under age sixteen, but not of minors sixteen or seventeen), "but officials said they made public the names of the youths charged in the attack on the woman because of the seriousness of the incident." There seemed a debatable point here, the question of whether "the seriousness of the incident" might not have in fact seemed a compelling reason to avoid any appearance of a rush to judgment by preserving the anonymity of a juvenile suspect. . . .
This emphasis on perceived refinements of character and of manner and of taste tended to distort and flatten, and ultimately to suggest not the actual victim of an actual crime but a fictional character of a slightly earlier period, the well-brought-up virgin who briefly graces the city with her presence and receives in turn a taste of "real life." The defendants, by contrast, were seen as incapable of appreciating these marginal distinctions, ignorant of both the norms and the accoutrements of middle-class life. "Did you have jogging clothes on?" [prosecutor] Elizabeth Lederer asked [defendant] Yusef Salaam, by way of trying to discredit his statement that he had gone into the park that night only to "walk around." Did he have "jogging clothes," did he have "sports equipment," did he have "a bicycle." A pernicious nostalgia had come to permeate the case, a longing for the New York that had seemed for a while to be about "sports equipment," about getting and spending rather than having and not having: the reason that this victim must not be named was so that she could go unrecognized, it was astonishingly said, by Jerry Nachman, the editor of the New York Post, and then by others who seemed to find in this a particular resonance, to Bloomingdale's.
Plainly my strategy is just to give an example of her distinctive voice rather than trying, and like most everyone else failing, to describe it, but I would point out how effective that last sentence is—the way its cadence is slowed by all the subordination, a build-up to the withheld kicker, "Bloomingdale's." Didion's skepticism about the propriety of naming the juvenile suspects was warranted. They were convicted at trial in 1990, the same year Didion's essay was first published in The New York Review of Books, but the convictions were vacated in 2002 after a man whose DNA was a match for semen collected at the scene confessed and provided authorities with details of the crime. The original defendants sued the city, which eventually settled for more than forty million dollars.
“There were, early on," Didion had written, "certain aspects of this case that seemed not well handled by the police and prosecutors, and others that seemed not well handled by the press."
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