The Washington Post, May 10th, 1992
AFTER HENRY By Joan Didion Simon & Schuster. 319 pp. $22 IT WILL come as no surprise to anyone who has read her novels, but Joan Didion distrusts and dislikes narrative, or at least "narrative" as she chooses to interpret the term. She equates it not with story or chronicle but with fiction - worse, fantasy - and she finds it "sentimental," a way of mythologizing and falsifying the world that gives comfort to our illusions and shields us from reality. How we employ it is the dominant theme of this, the latest collection of her occasional journalism. After Henry takes its title from an essay in...
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