BOOKS IN BRIEF

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (Knopf, 227 pp., $23.95). I know, it seems downright cruel to fault a book written by a woman who lost a husband after more than forty years of marriage while their daughter, in and out of hospitals, died almost 20 months to the day after her father. Obviously this is a time to try any soul most bitterly.

Joan Didion has some twelve works--fiction and nonfiction--to her credit. Perhaps it was all too understandable for her as a writer to want to try to make some--any--sense at all out of the "weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself."

But actually how much do we learn of life, illness, death, marriage, or memory from this book that one sincerely hopes brought at least some measure of therapeutic ease to its author? I read it with considerable interest, having not that long ago entered the unhappy state of widowhood myself after more than fifty-three years of marriage. Yes, as Didion notes, you are constantly replaying bits, pieces, scenes from memories you had thought long forgotten. Your mind is never still.

My husband Richard and I had met Didion and her husband John Gregory Dunne way back in the early eighties. Richard wound up talking with Didion through the meal as she told him in great detail of her great-grandparents, who had made the arduous trip across the desert to settle in California. Off and on over the years he would recall that conversation, always admiring her for her pride in the grit it had taken her family to make that perilous journey.

Didion continually recollects bits, pieces, snatches, scenes of a past formed by joined lives as the days go by. But her telling perhaps is still too raw to bring any real meaning or insight to such an experience. One of the things I found disturbing, or at the very least curious, in her book was how in attempting to come to terms with her grief she glides over the whole question of, well, the afterlife.

She talks of having a priest come to the hospital after Dunne had died, and having both a Catholic and an Episcopal priest officiate at Dunne's funeral services at St. John the Divine in New York, but that's about it as far as any role religion seems to have played in their lives. She devotes rather more space to what Emily Post had to say back in a 1922 edition of her book on etiquette about comforting the grieving individual, offering "a little hot tea or broth."

She does talk of not wanting to give away Dunne's shoes, since "he would need shoes if he was to return." She says at a later point, "I did not believe in the resurrection of the body but I still believed that given the right circumstances he would come back." This is part, I suppose, of the eponymous magical thinking that went on in her year of grief.

In talking over Didion's book in recent days with two fellow widows, long married to brilliant and talented men, none of us felt she had come anywhere near expressing our own thoughts on the experience. And one woman, who had lost one of the finest minds of his generation, said what she missed every day, every night, was "the conversation." The other two of us exclaimed, virtually wailed, "Yes, that's exactly it. The conversation." Our men had been great talkers. The intertwining of ideas, judgments, memories--the very texture of our lives for decades--were now irretrievably cut off from us. We keep on inevitably, but we know we're so much the poorer for the time that remains.

Didion closes her book leaving us with the thought, "if we are to live our lives there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead." I don't agree. The dead--our special dead--keep living as long as we do. Yes, conversation is no longer present, a sad factor, but the spirit lives as long as we do.

Now, for Didion, she has the sad mission of writing another book mourning the death of her daughter. You can only pity the small, pitiful waif of a persona she presents to us, doggedly going on about her book tour.

--Cynthia Grenier