Books, Arts & Manners: The Hawaiian Connection

Democracy, by Joan Didion (Simon & Schuster, 234 pp., $13.95)

Joan Didion’s new novel shares its title with a novel by Henry Adams, published in 1880. and shares also with that book the attitude that democracy is not an especially good thing. Neither Adams nor Miss Didion means by questioning the value of democracy to suggest changes in the Constitution; they mean instead to lament certain aspects of the condition of the American people: chiefly, in Miss Didion’s view, a certain lack of connection. Her Democracy shows us a nation that maintains only fragile ties with its history and institutions and with the rest of the world, and which is governed by persons hypersensitive to the media and oblivious of everyday reality. Present-day American society, as Miss Didion sees it, does not distinguish very well, even on a working basis, between such basic categories as friend and foe, right and wrong, and Americans are disoriented by this incoherence.

FM

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Francis Marnell

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Democracy, by Joan Didion (Simon & Schuster, 234 pp., $13.95)

Joan Didion’s new novel shares its title with a novel by Henry Adams, published in 1880. and shares also with that book the attitude that democracy is not an especially good thing. Neither Adams nor Miss Didion means by questioning the value of democracy to suggest changes in the Constitution; they mean instead to lament certain aspects of the condition of the American people: chiefly, in Miss Didion’s view, a certain lack of connection. Her Democracy shows us a nation that maintains only fragile ties with its history and institutions and with the rest of the world, and which is governed by persons hypersensitive to the media and oblivious of everyday reality. Present-day American society, as Miss Didion sees it, does not distinguish very well, even on a working basis, between such basic categories as friend and foe, right and wrong, and Americans are disoriented by this incoherence.