The book takes place in a fictional Latin American country, and is narrated by the matriarch of a family who controls much of the business and politics in the country. The narrator was born in the United States, but moves to this country as a young adult. She claims early on in the book that the story is not about her, it's about a woman named Charlotte who flees to this country as an adult when her life in the U.S. starts to fall apart. However, it is clear to the reader (well, at least to this reader) that her telling of the story is as much about her as about Charlotte.
Early in the book she characterizes Charlotte as a norteamericano, a classification in her world that determines how Charlotte is treated and how she integrates with the local community. The following passage well illustrates the mirror the narrator looks into in her telling of the story:
"As the child of comfortable family in the temperate zone she had been as a matter of course provided with clean sheets, orthodontia, lamb chops, living grandparents, attentive godparents, one brother named Dickie, ballet lessons, and casual timely information about menstruation and the care of flat silver, as well as with a small wooden angel, carved in Austria, to sit on her bed table and listen to her prayers. In these prayers, the child Charlotte routinely asked that "it" turn out all right, "it" being unspecified and all-inclusive, that she had been an adult for some years before the possibility occurred to her that "it" might not. She had put this doubt from her mind. As a child of the western United States, she had been provided as well with faith in the value of certain frontiers on which her family had lived, in the virtues of cleared and irrigated land, of high-yield crops, of thrift, industry and the judicial system, of progress and education, and the general upward spiral of history. She was a norteamericano."
Didion has a very rhythmic writing style, which I enjoyed. That passage above is of a style common in this book: sentences that would be considered "run-on" anywhere else, coupled with a strong ability to capture a particular theme quickly. In some cases, Didion was more likely to break her rhythm onto separate lines, connecting them by using the same words in a different way. This style definitely brought me into the book and into the narrator's head:
"Anyway." Charlotte folded the pages of her unfinished Letter with a neat vertical crease as children fold their weekly themes. "It's not just a new sentence. It's a new paragraph."
It occurred to me that I had never before had so graphic an illustration of how the consciousness of the human organism is carried in its grammar.
Or the unconsciousness of the human organism.
If the organism under scrutiny is Charlotte.
Thematically, the book was largely about Charlotte's relationship with her daughter, who disappeared as part of a radical political organization. I think there were ways in which I would have connected with the book even more if I had children. That said, I may have appreciated themes in the book I would have otherwise missed had I been more focused on the mother-daughter narrative.
For example, avoidance. Charlotte's move to Latin America is the most extreme example of her propensity to avoid the things in her life she doesn't like. She refuses to acknowledge her daughter's defection initially:
"Marin...was at that moment, even as the two FBI men occupied Leonard's Barcelona chairs, even as te fat FBI man toyed with one of Leonard's porcelain roses and even as the thin FBI man gazed over Charlotte's head at the 10' by 16' silk screen of Mao Tse-tung given to Leonard by one of the Alameda Three, skiing at Squaw Valley. Or so Charlotte tried to tell the FBI man."
Finally, ideas around separation were common in this book. Charlotte is norteamericano, thus treated differently. She also expects to live by different rules as her counterparts. The dialectic of how she acts and how she is treated through her life reinforces this. The narrator's comment on this is extreme:
"Charlotte had no idea that anyone else had ever been afflicted by what she called the "separateness."
And because she did not she fought it, she denied it, she tried to forget it, and, during those first several weeks after Marin disappeared and obliterated all the numbers, spent many days without getting out of bed. I think I have never known anyone who led quite so unexamined a life."
This book takes more patience than most books. It nudged me through the story rather than ushering me. I enjoyed that about it, but not everyone will.
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