Many Mansions Summary and Analysis

The third essay of Part Two 'California Republic' is an essay by the reporter Joan Didion on the new Governor's Mansion built by Nancy and Ronald Reagan for their governorship of California, before he was elected President. In this short essay, Joan Didion again uses the subject matter of the article to examine the American Dream, and that of the idea of California in particular, finding clues as to the national psychology in the eventual fate of this building and its history.

The Governor's mansion cost millions and sits on a bluff overlooking a river (but not, in actual fact with a view of the river, merely of its hidden contours, a fact that Didion finds symbolic as we shall see later). It is a ground floor mansion, with large rooms, tennis courts, bedrooms that open out into an...