Dinner in the Rain Forest

A Book of Common Prayer By Joan Didion Simon & Schuster, 272 pp., $8.95 There is a certain segment of the American population for whom each day is an exercise in futility bound together only by certain rituals—shopping at exclusive stores, recalling elegant childhoods, peering into the pointless, limpid pools of water that gather outside $120-a-day hotel rooms. No one has ever succeeded in portraying these people as well as Joan Didion.

In her first novel, Run River, Miss Didion illustrated at great length the life of a rancher’s daughter from California who, under pressure that would be small by most standards, goes insane. In Play It as It Lays, the heroine is a former model who, also for no clear reason, simply loses the ability to function and, after throwing aside family, career, and conventional behavior, narrates her story from a mental hospital. Now comes A Book of Common Prayer, a lineal descendant of those two stories about life at the breaking-point. This too is a story of a despoiled, broken human being playing out a life which signifies not quite nothing, but close enough.

BS

About the Author

Benjamin Stein

Featured Tags

Manage following

Literature

Fiction

A Book of Common Prayer By Joan Didion Simon & Schuster, 272 pp., $8.95 There is a certain segment of the American population for whom each day is an exercise in futility bound together only by certain rituals—shopping at exclusive stores, recalling elegant childhoods, peering into the pointless, limpid pools of water that gather outside $120-a-day hotel rooms. No one has ever succeeded in portraying these people as well as Joan Didion.

In her first novel, Run River, Miss Didion illustrated at great length the life of a rancher’s daughter from California who, under pressure that would be small by most standards, goes insane. In Play It as It Lays, the heroine is a former model who, also for no clear reason, simply loses the ability to function and, after throwing aside family, career, and conventional behavior, narrates her story from a mental hospital. Now comes A Book of Common Prayer, a lineal descendant of those two stories about life at the breaking-point. This too is a story of a despoiled, broken human being playing out a life which signifies not quite nothing, but close enough.