The first selection for book club (so other members of said club should probably avoid reading this entry until they've read the book, on pain of spoilers...).
Didn't know anything about Didion before coming to this book, so was more open to whatever it might prove to be than usual (ie, had fewer preconceptions or expectations). So in essence - well, in one of its essences - Democracy is an account of the 25-year relationship between Inez Christian and Jack Lovett, also taking in Inez's husband Harry Victor and her well-to-do family in Honolulu (and a murder which takes place within that family). But it's also an attempt at an elliptical portrait of the US of A (it was published in '84). And on top of this, it stages a fairly sustained interrogation of narrative, fictionality, representation, memory and historical truth. I think that its treatment of these different themes is successful to varying extents, but they really need to be considered all together.
The aphorism that Didion has Dwight Christian spout early on is, I think a telling one; it's from Kierkegaard, and goes 'Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards', which provides an interesting gloss on one of the most striking formal elements of the novel - its non-linearity and use of repetition and metafictional intrusion throughout. Didion's concerned with the question of what it is to tell a story, and with the possibility of accuracy in writerly re-presentation, and she addresses this by figuring herself qua Joan Didion, reporter as a character in the novel, muddying the waters by presenting the other characters as real people and Democracy as ostensibly a novel about real people (a neat double-coding gesture which sets her technique somewhat apart from the bog standard postmodern metafictionality that seems to have crept into every second literary novel of the last 30 years or so), and then engaging in extended 'digressions' about the writing of the novel itself and 'Joan Didion's' attempts to ascertain what actually happened and so arrive at a true account of events.
For the most part, I think that all of that works well (and I'm a pretty stern critic when it comes to this kind of pomo-narrative stuff!), but where the novel falls down a bit is in its putative plot. It would be unfair and beside the point to judge Democracy on its success in developing believable characters, generating conflict and then resolution, and so on - although, incidentally, she does a good job of these despite, and to some extent because of, her wilful fragmentation of the narrative means by which they're presented - but I think that the novel can and should be criticised for failing to pull all of its threads together. In particular, there's no especially compelling reason that I could see for including a lot of the subplots and detail, except inasmuch as this is intended to create the sense that Democracy is concerned with sketching out a portrait of (certain aspects of) America as a whole (in which respect note particularly the contrasting figures of Harry and Jack, the examination of politics, the deep shadow cast by Vietnam, the way in which the media and the capitalist market are shown to be operating, etc) - and I wasn't convinced that Didion succeeded in making the connections between the micro and the macro levels particularly elegantly, although she did it well enough that I could see the shape of what she was trying for. (I also thought the prose not particularly elegant, to the extent that it got in the way and irritated me at times.)
So overall, I think that Democracy is quite good, but that it falls short of what it's striving for. The reader has to do a lot of work to put the pieces together and (re)construct what it's all 'about', and I don't reckon that the payoff is sufficient to make the effort worthwhile. Looking forward to hearing what everyone else has to say.
