Few contemporary American writers are "American" in all the ways that Joan Didion is. Although she has visited Europe often, she has never written an essay on Europe, nor do we find a single European character in her fiction. Not only are all of her major fictional characters born and raised in the United States; they also bear no marks of European nationality, carry no memory traces of European traditions. (p. 140)
In both her fiction and her essays, Didion sees the American character as often arrogant, often nostalgic, but invariably and quintessentially romantic, and thus deluded. Her more nostalgic characters are ever looking backward to the simplicity of childhood, finding there the source of the myth they are currently living: Maria Wyeth learned from her father that material success is life's easy and natural goal; Lily McClellan learned from her parents that no harm could come to her or her family in the Sacramento Valley. Her other characters have woven different myths: Charlotte Douglas, that all change is progress, that history moves people inevitably toward the greater good; Grace Strasser-Mendana, that every problem is susceptible of scientific solution. These illusions are characteristically (although not exclusively) American, and Didion also sees as characteristically American the tenacity with which they are held and the naiveté with which they are expressed.
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