Memoir: Sacramento, California, is the place Joan Didion is from; she is also "from" a line of strong women, crossers of frontiers, pursuers of destiny, survivors against the odds.
They kept on and on, these pioneer wives, through flood and desert, snow and burning heat, jettisoning the past whenever necessary, stoically burying children who died along the westward trail, their emblems of intrepidity nothing weightier than the quilts and potato-mashers which descended through subsequent generations. These domestic heirlooms testified to a practicality which - perhaps - complemented the high-flown aspect of the wagon trail, the American "golden journey" motif. "One was going on a pilgrimage," wrote Josiah Royce, the inventor, Joan Didion says, of an idealised California, a place of wonder, virtue, and the most enticing possibilities.
What fascinates Didion, as a social commentator, is the gulf between the myths and ideals, and the inevitably corrupted outcomes of such exorbitant enterprises. Blisteringly alive to absurdities and contradictions, she is famous for her elegant dissections of American life, as a writer of both fiction and non-fiction. She is also famous for her oblique approach; and coming at things sideways, as it were, gives an edge to the autobiographical project. The pioneer mentality has its downside, a counterpart to all the reported feats of endurance, in "slight and major derangements . . . opaque bewilderment and moves to places not quite on the schedule".
This is not a new perception. Part Three of Where I Was From includes some paragraphs from Didion's novel of 1963, Run River, set in the Sacramento Valley, in which individuals are shaped in accordance with the specialised flaws and virtues of "a particular kind of people", those in whom ancestral impulses sanction continuous restlessness, a drive towards the bigger and better, the vast metaphorical significances and vaster designs for living. Indeed, "much of the California landscape has tended to present itself as metaphor", sometimes reducing those observing it to the status of a worm. But against its overwhelming immensity you can set the wagon-train code of conduct with its communal imperatives and its unique obligations, such as the obligation to kill a rattlesnake if you spot one, before it can slither off to harm someone else.
Running through Didion's narrative (or the more journalistic part of it), like the allegorical rattlesnake, is a delinquent high-school clique called the Spur Posse, whose members were accused, very publicly, of sexual assaults on younger children; and somehow this miserable affair is tied up not only with the vitiation of "old" California, but with the actual falling apart of a specimen community, as the industry which fuelled it has gone to pot. The Spur Posse was a product of Lakewood, a post-war boom town constructed to serve the aerospace industry, and at present a signifier of social breakdown, a slap in the face for people who placed their faith in fresh starts and auspicious undertakings.
Didion's reporter's nose takes her right to the heart of this and other contemporary enormities. But Where I Was From is essentially a memoir, if an idiosyncratic one; and we find something of the paradoxes underpinning Californian attitudes embodied at a personal level in Didion's mother.
Eduene Jerrett - as she was strikingly named - during the wartime childhood of the author and her brother, would (with an effort) present everyday difficulties and discomforts as an adventure, to keep the children's spirits up, something to be remembered and savoured. Yet in later life she was prey to a fatalism - "What difference does it make?" was her stock response to any request for advice, even about important matters - a fatalism that extended even to the making of beds, which would only get disordered again anyway.
"What difference does it make?" Well, it might have made some difference to the comfort of anyone obliged to sleep in a tangle of sheets.
With its (indirect) autobiographical disclosures, its vigilance and insight, Where I Was From enterprisingly gets to grips with all kinds of psychological inheritances, traits and tendencies both national and notional, and somehow attains an exceptional pungency and trenchancy, even while appearing to stay matter-of-fact.
This is an author who doesn't go in for charm, but she has a rarer quality: an inspired abrasiveness.
• Patricia Craig is an author and critic. Her biography of Brian Moore will be published in paperback later this year