Pain Without Gain
The Year of Magical Thinking
by Joan Didion
Knopf, 2005
(240 pages, $23.95, hardcover)
reviewed by Harold K. Bush
Mark Twain once said: “Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society.” But some of our most influential people have allowed themselves to become the most naked of people. The prophets all stood naked before God; Augustine was most poetic as he unclothed himself; and Emily Dickinson, hidden most of the time behind her bedroom door, revealed her deepest secrets in her majestic verse. The glory of transparency is why so much of Walt Whitman’s revolutionary poetry of the 1850s involved, scandalously enough, naked human bodies, and why many of Flannery O’Connor’s characters learn the truth at the moment of exposure.
Physiological Errors
Joan Didion has recognized the power of nakedness since her career began. A striking aspect of her stylistic gift has always been her willingness to reveal secrets. In an essay in The White Album called “In Bed,” she describes the severe migraine headaches that have plagued her for much of her adult life. There she writes, “The physiological error called migraine is . . . central to the given of my life.” One reads these lines and wonders how, given the regularity of such brutal pain, she can write such elegant prose.
The essay supplies an answer: “The migraine has acted as a circuit breaker, and the fuses have emerged intact. There is a pleasant convalescent euphoria. I open the windows and feel the air, eat gratefully, sleep well. I notice the particular nature of a flower in a glass on the stair landing. I count my blessings.”
When I first met Didion in 2002, she was struggling with various kinds of physical pain, much of it chronic. She told me that she still suffered regularly from those same migraine headaches. In her art as well, pain has always remained a crucial concern, and she has been exceptionally sensitive to the “physiological errors” of the American body politic, the migraines of our culture. Perhaps the personal pain somehow allowed her to respond even more richly to public pain.
Nakedness, pain, vulnerability: These aspects of Didion’s work have never been more prominent than in The Year of Magical Thinking, winner of the National Book Award in 2005 and huge best-seller ever since its release. The book chronicles the sudden illness of her daughter Quintana, who fell into a coma on Christmas morning of 2003, and the sudden death of her husband John Gregory Dunne from cardiac arrest at the dinner table a few days later.
The book’s major achievement is the articulation of the mood or tone of grief.
People who have recently lost someone have a certain look. . . . The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness. It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist’s office into the bright sunlight with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off. These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible.
It is a sustained and often riveting account of one person’s close encounter with the powers of horror and grief, written on a sophisticated yet intimate level, and as such it ranks with other bereavement narratives of high literary achievement, such as C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed, which Didion invokes.
Harold K. Bush teaches English at Saint Louis University. His newest book, Mark Twain and the Spiritual Crisis of His Age, will appear in the fall of 2006.
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