When I am asked why I do not find Joan Didion appealing, I am tempted to answer—not entirely facetiously—that my charity does not naturally extend itself to someone whose lavender love seats match exactly the potted orchids on her mantle, someone who has porcelain elephant end tables, someone who has chosen to burden her adopted daughter with the name Quintana Roo; I am disinclined to find endearing a chronicler of the 1960s who is beset by migraines that can be triggered by her decorator's having pleated instead of gathered her new dining-room curtains. These, and other assorted facts…. put me more in mind of a neurasthenic Cher than of a writer who has been called America's finest woman prose stylist….

[In "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream" from Slouching Towards Bethlehem] Didion reports, or purports to report, on the murder case of one Lucille Maxwell Miller...