Salon.com > Joan Didion

Bret Easton Ellis interviews Matthew Specktor: People in L.A. aren’t afraid to read

Sun, 02 Jun 2013 15:00:00 +0000

Matthew Specktor and Bret Easton Ellis have known one another for 20 years. Neither of them can remember how they met. “I think it was at the Bowery Bar in New York,” Specktor says. “But that could just be a mathematical probability.”

Approximate generational peers, Ellis grew up in Sherman Oaks, Specktor in Santa Monica. These were two different versions of the same city. On a recent Friday night they sat down at the Polo Lounge, a Beverly Hills landmark that seemed as good a place as any for the two writers to drink martinis (Hendricks gin, with cucumbers) and talk about Los Angeles, writing, Twitter and Specktor’s new book, "American Dream Machine."

The Polo Lounge was full, as it always is, but a tape recorder was on the table between them, and over the murmurings of the cocktail hour crowd, this is what they said.

Bret Easton Ellis: You grew up in a relative showbiz environment and I didn't. Let's start there.

Matthew Specktor: Right. But when I read "Less Than Zero," I thought, Jesus, I’ve never seen my world described this way. Or any way, for that matter. People think of “Hollywood” as a metonym, as if it and “Los Angeles” are the same thing. They aren’t.

Rediscovering Renata Adler

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 21:00:00 +0000

In the past few weeks, there have been quite a number of pieces published on the two novels of Renata Adler, which were reissued this week by The New York Review of Books. Nearly all of them contain a reference to the infamously negative review Adler wrote of her former New Yorker colleague Pauline Kael’s book of collected film criticism. Usually the reviewer quotes one particularly damning line from Adler’s 8,000-word excoriation of Kael’s book, but really, the whole thing is a masterwork of literary analysis. In the beginning of the piece, Adler demonstrates her great talent for deflating an idea by giving us a nutshell description of the critic’s job:

What [the critics] provide is a necessary consumer service, which consists
essentially of three parts: a notice that the work exists, and where it can be
bought, found, or attended; a set of adjectives appearing to set forth an
opinion of some sort, but amounting really to a yes vote or a no vote; and a
somewhat nonjudgmental, factual description or account, which is usually
inferior by any journalistic standard to reporting in all other sections of the
paper.

Joan Didion’s “Salvador” delves into the heart of darkness

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 19:00:00 +0000

Over the last few years, I’ve been sent 400 to 500 review copies of books and audiobooks. I haven’t read them all, although I have tried to read at least a handful of pages of all of them, or listen to at least the first couple of minutes. Most of them have offered at least some pleasures to reward the time, and I’m happy in general that we live in a world where there is a place even for books and audiobooks that appeal to the narrowest of audiences.

The most striking thing about all this reading and listening is how few of these books and audiobooks have taken up any kind of long-term residence in my mind and in my life – how few have troubled me so that I think about them months and years after I thought I had finished my time with them, and how few have brought pleasure or solace of the sort that cause me to want to reread them.

If I tried to categorize what it is that gives these books their special staying power, the first thing I might do is make a list of the qualities that — surprisingly — aren’t sources of this power. It’s not the subject or the content, although subject and content that is inherently interesting or dramatic can go a long way toward helping a book be interesting or dramatic. It’s not timeliness, although I’m always happy to spend time with a book that has something to say to the present moment. And it’s not the events the book offers, although I’m drawn to a book that offers a series of interesting events.

Mr. Joan Didion

Tue, 25 Dec 2012 16:00:00 +0000

Joan Didion. The name alone conjures up an ocean of descriptive phrases in which one could drown. Here is but a small helping: In Salon, Kyle Minor called her “the most consistently interesting and quotable essayist in the English language.” InIntelligent Life magazine, Robert Butler echoes that sentiment, labeling her first-person voice “cool” and “incisive.” “The writer who expressed most eloquently the eternal-girl impulse,” Caitlin Flanagan recently dubbed Didion in The Atlantic. A visit to the Amazon page of but one of her fourteen books yields “taut, clear-eyed,” “extraordinarily poignant,” “achingly beautiful,” and, about the book peddled at this particular URL, “a remarkably lucid and ennobling anatomy of grief.”

But goodbye to all that, for now.

Worry makes the best literature

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 12:45:00 +0000

Why pick worry as a topic?

Indeed. One of the few benefits of anxiety is the creation of fictional worlds or alarming perspectives wherein writers can indulge and play out their fears. This may heal, it may exacerbate, I’m not sure. Nevertheless, a writer’s worries, which come in many flavours, are a boon to readers with similar tastes.

Your first choice is Wolf Solent by John Cowper Powys. What’s the flavour of worry here?

Powys was one of 11, several of whom also published, and was an extremely sensitive soul. He was born in the 1870s, which meant he suffered the shocks of a new noisy century when he was old enough to worry properly. His medium was more existential angst and self-doubt, offering an antithesis to Whitman’s universe-embracing enthusiasm. Powys started out teaching at girls’ schools in England, which he somehow parlayed into an ongoing gig on the American lecture circuit, where he spent his middle years. He had a wife and child in England and a common-law wife in the US. His autobiography doesn’t mention either of these women, and just barely, his mother. He was an anti-vivisectionist and a vegetarian. He enjoyed long walks and mistrusted airplanes. Depending on whom you ask, he was a notable footnote to 20th-century literature or an overlooked genius.

Joan Didion, Diane Keaton bring ’60s alive

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 19:53:00 +0000

Forty-four years ago, in the preface to her first book, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Joan Didion wrote: “My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.”

It was an appropriate opening salvo for a writer who would become — and who remains — the most consistently interesting and quotable essayist in the English language. At the beginning of her career, Didion announced herself as the owner of two voices: the voice of the throat and the body, which stumbles in service of the other voice, the writer’s voice, the register of the interior life, which has asserted itself ever since with a great and intelligent ferocity.

The writer’s voice, which has been heard for so many years only in the intimate space created by the reader’s imaginative engagement with the words on the page, has now found a richly appropriate vessel in the narration of Diane Keaton. Keaton's delivery is fluid enough to accommodate not only the stately elegance of the sentences belonging to Didion, but also the many emotional colors of the other voices Didion embeds throughout her stories.