Memoir: Joan Didion's engaged detachment makes for a remarkable study of grief.
'I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense," wrote CS Lewis shortly after his wife died. But grief is also a deeply unique journey - and one in which the very foundations of the self are rendered unstable and, perhaps, unsound. More tellingly, in the wake of grief, we don't know how to play the normal day-to-day game, let alone work out what modus vivendi will somehow power us through this tenebrous swamp.
"A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty", writes Phillipe Aries in Western Attitudes to Death. "But no one has the right to say it aloud." Or as Joan Didion notes in her new book, The Year of Magical Thinking: "People in grief think a great deal about self-pity. We worry it, dread it, scourge our thinking for signs of it. We fear that our actions will reveal the condition tellingly described as 'dwelling on it'. We understand the aversion most of us have to 'dwelling on it'. Visible mourning reminds us of death, which is construed as unnatural, a failure to manage the situation".
As anyone who has read Joan Didion knows, she has always presented herself as someone who has been well able to "manage the situation". Her fictional and journalistic persona has always been one of engaged detachment - an oxymoron, no doubt, yet one which seems to aptly describe her finely wrought ability to cast a cold eye on the complex absurdities of life, yet still do so with a sense of passion that, though muted, nonetheless underscores all her work.
Indeed, she has often been described as something of a "cool customer" - something she acknowledges in The Year of Magical Thinking when, in the wake of her husband's fatal heart attack, she heard the social worker assigned to her at New York Hospital tell the attending doctor: "She's a pretty cool customer".
Didion's husband, John Gregory Dunne, was a novelist (True Confessions), a screenwriter, and a truly wonderful exponent of so-called New Journalism (He wrote probably the best book on Vegas in its gimcrack heyday, and Monster, his account of writing, with Didion, the screenplay for a Robert Redford vehicle, Up Close and Personal, remains one of the best contemporary accounts of playing the Hollywood screenwriting game). More tellingly, Didion's marriage to Dunne had lasted 40 years. And like most liaisons between two highly charged and bright individuals, this one was marked by the usual sturm-and-drang, the usual ongoing tensions, and a profound attachment.
The Dunnes had a daughter named Quintana, whom they'd adopted at birth. In 2003, she married at the age of 37. Some months later, just before Christmas, she was hit with what seemed to be a severe dose of the flu.
Within days this flu had metamorphosed into pneumonia. And suddenly the nightmarish trajectory of this illness took an even more horrifying turn as she suddenly was hit with complete septic shock and ended up in a New York ICU ward.
On the night of December 30th, 2003, Didion and Dunne returned home from the ICU and - to use Manhattan-speak - decided to eat-in. He sat down. She fixed him a Scotch and started preparing dinner. He asked for another drink. She gave it to him. She started mixing the salad she had just made. "John was talking, then he wasn't".
He had suffered a massive coronary - and though the paramedics were on the scene within minutes, he was pronounced dead at New York Hospital shortly after being rushed there by ambulance.
"Life changes fast.
Life changes in an instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
The question of self-pity."
As Didion notes, the above were the first words she wrote after "it happened". But her husband's death wasn't the only horror story of her "year of magical thinking". Though her daughter Quintana did come out of her medically induced coma - and the scene where Didion details having to break the news that her father had died is harrowing - her recovery ended three months later. Shortly after landing at Los Angeles Airport with her husband, she pitched forward, landing flat on the asphalt. She was rushed to UCLA Medical Centre. One of her pupils was fixed - always a telltale sign of neurological trauma. She was wheeled into an operating theatre. She had a hematoma on the brain.
The Year of Magical Thinking is Didion's attempt to sort through the psychic debris of these personal disasters; to try to understand the terrible happenstantial nature of things. And one of the many remarkable aspects about this truly remarkable book is the way in which Didion imposes a clinical discipline upon herself when describing the vortex into which her family fell. She insists on detailing, with immense technical detail, the varying procedures used on her husband by the paramedics in order to revive him, and even demands an autopsy report to see what exactly killed him (despite the fact that she well knew that Dunne had a congenital heart condition).
Her descriptions of her daughter's neurological traumas are equally unsparing - but you quickly begin to understand that this obsessional need to describe medical hardware and chemical substances isn't merely a displacement activity, but also an active facet of her grieving process. Just as she begins to recognise that her inability to throw away her husband's shoes stems out of her need to believe that this death thing is really nothing more than a hiatus . . . that he will be coming back from the hospital, and the life they had together will recommence.
It is precisely because Didion maintains her engaged detachment throughout that The Year of Magical Thinking has such an emotional wallop. As a study of grief as a terra incognito without cartological logic, and of the complexities of a long marriage, and of the need we all have to try to find purchase in this highly fragile enterprise called life, it is exceptionally impressive. One comes away from Didion's devastating book - finished before her daughter died in August of this year - alive to the brutal randomness of quotidian existence, and to the fact that, like ir or not, we are all hostages to chance.
Douglas Kennedy's latest novel is State of the Union, published by Hutchinson
The Year of Magical Thinking By Joan Didion Fourth Estate, 227pp. £12.99