South African readers will be aware of Joan Didion - if remotely, like the late Susan Sontag - as an American intellectual, a wordsmith who has chronicled the past 40 years or so of what she terms the "cultural breakdown" of a society in which she has felt herself "a sleepwalker, moving through the world unconscious of the moment's high issues, oblivious to its data, alert only to the stuff of bad dreams . . ."
Born in 1934, she has written five novels and seven works of nonfiction. Her laconic, even cold, vision is captured in a piece from 1969 written on Midway Island, where with her husband John Gregory Dunne and daughter Quintana she contemplates her continual anxiety and the fact that "we are here . . . in lieu of filing a divorce".
Nobody really knows what goes on in anyone else's marriage, and perhaps we don't need to know: but Didion's "bad nerves" are part of her material, the detritus of Western society on an unspecified abyss.
But now she has written a bestseller, The Year of Magical Thinking, which received the National Book Award in November. It is a deeply moving account of a grief observed - what happened after late 2003 when Quintana had to be placed on life-support after pneumonia and septic shock, and as they sat down to eat supper and talk, her husband (the selfsame Dunne, perhaps best-known as a columnist and screenwriter) collapsed and died before her at the table.
After the book had been published, Quintana died too.
Her first written words after John's death were: "Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends." No solace is possible: instead each action is predetermined by the known metabolism of loss, and she sifts the literature (C S Lewis, for example, whose wife died of cancer) to find explanations that do not really come.
She records that she cannot give away John's shoes because "he would need shoes if he was to return. The recognition of this thought by no means eradicated the thought." Awareness that she is off-balance, "crazy", cannot resolve the classic mental and physical symptoms of bereavement.
She even finds corroboration in a book on etiquette by Emily Post: "Persons under the shock of genuine affliction are not only upset mentally but are all unbalanced physically. No matter how calm and controlled they may be, no-one can under such circumstances be normal. Their disturbed circulation makes them cold, their distress makes them unstrung, restless. Persons they normally like, they turn from. No-one should ever be forced upon those in grief . . ."
Social rituals are drained of meaning. Didion felt that she "seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers that divide the living from the dead, entered a place in which I could be seen only by those who were themselves recently bereaved".
Grief is at the heart of nature: "Geese had been observed reacting to such a death by flying and calling, searching until they themselves became disorientated and lost." So with humans.
Didion attempts a medical chronology; a scattering of personal memories; and possible forewarnings - but is being compulsively driven by the "magical thinking" that compels her to agonise over each detail, wondering if something she could have done would have changed matters. And, of course, the utter finality of the past, the remembrance, as T S Eliot wrote, of "things done ill", now never to be amended or retrieved: there is only the whirlpool of common woe, and "how open we are to the persistent message that we can avert death".
A year after John's collapse she realises she has been "keeping time by last year's calendar" and John would not have lived to see that day, which is its significance for her: "I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Let them become the photograph on the table."
There is no true consolation in this, and she doesn't want to complete the book; but does so with the image of them swimming together near a seaside home. The way the waves gained "swiftness and power" and how "The tide had to be just right. We had to be in the water at the very moment the tide was right. We could only have done this a dozen times during the two years we lived there but it is what I remember. Each time we did it I was afraid of missing the swell, hanging back, timing it wrong. John never did. You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that. No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that."
