The literary critic Frederick Karl was recently quoted as saying that Joan Didion "diminishes whatever she touches." It's a remark that becomes more interesting when you twist it into a compliment: Joan Didion writes from a vantage point so remote that all she describes seems tiny and trim and uncannily precise, like a scene viewed through the wrong end of a telescope. That cleared space where she stands, that chilly vacuum that could either be intellectual irony or profound depression, gives her a slant of vision that is arresting and unique.
Democracy, her fourth novel, is narrated by an "I" who is apparently Joan Didion herself, untransformed….
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