After Henry by Joan Didion

Didion's fifth book of nonfiction was another collection of magazine pieces, like Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, after the focused examinations of Salvador and Miami.

Most of the essays in After Henry are dated from 1988-90, implying this was a somewhat focused collection of work, at least focused in time.

I've been reading Didion's non-fiction, in the gigantic 2006 omnibus We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, over the past couple of years. And so now I've finally hit the point where her writing career started to overlap with my publishing career - this is a book I could have conceivably seen and reviewed for my employer at the time.

I didn't, of course. I was very junior in 1992 and Didion was very important. Even more so, she was tightly associated with The Competition, so I doubt "we" even made a play for the book. But it's a might-have-been, and Didion's essays are so full of contingencies and suppositions and radically different opinions that alternative history becomes almost real when reading her.

After Henry breaks down into four sections. In a very Didion way, three of the sections have only a single essay; the bulk of the book is in the remaining section, and that is titled, as it must be, "California." Despite the fact that nearly all of the essays in this book were written after she had moved to New York.

The title essay is about her longtime editor, Henry Robbins, who died suddenly in 1979. This is the only undated piece in the book, so I'm led to assume it was original in 1992. Why write about him a dozen years later? Well, everything with Didion is about the past and stories and what people talk about and don't talk about - I can't say what sparked her to write that essay at that moment (though I'm pretty sure someone asked her that question, on the publicity tour, so there's probably at least one answer, out there in the world), but doing so is very in character.

Saying what the other essays are "about" is trickier; Didion tended to start in one place and wander around the nearby territory when writing non-fiction. Essays start out "about" something specific - the Central Park Jogger, Peggy Noonan, Patty Hearst - but turn out to be more expansive, really "about" things like racial tensions and views of truth in New York, how Ronald Reagan was managed and how California molded him, and a sideways review of Hearst's book as well as related musings about the California-ness of her story.

I may be snarkily saying that Didion made everything about California. She did: that was her lens for viewing the entire world; she's the kind of writer that contextualized death squads and political turmoil in El Salvador by noting that several California counties were larger than that entire country.

Didion's essays, as always, examine a situation or time without exhausting it, without claiming to nail it all down for the reader. The longer pieces here, in particular, fall into sections that can feel like separate essays, as if the larger assemblage is really several beads on a string, organized and related but not one thing in any central way. She has a point of view, and a catastrophizing mindset at all times, but that mostly bubbles along below the surface here - she was older, and more settled, and not thinking the chaos would rise up and envelop her the way she had twenty years before.

This is, I think, considered one of her minor works: it has insights, and good writing, and some gems of essays, but it doesn't add up to anything. It's not a cultural signpost like Slouching or an in-depth view into a particular world like Miami. It's, instead, some things that the middle-aged Didion thought worth investigating in the years around 1990.