The 1980s & 90s: Salvador / Democracy / Miami / After Henry / The Last Thing He Wanted

by Joan Didion, David L. Ulin (Editor)

In the 1980s and 1990s, even as successive administrations hailed “morning in America” and “a thousand points of light,” Joan Didion brought her brilliant and impeccably stylish prose to bear on the darker truths of American empire. Gathered here for the first time in this second volume of Library of America’s definitive edition are her masterful novels and nonfiction from this period, five complete book-length works.

“Terror,” Didion writes in Salvador (1983) at the height of that country’s civil war, “is the given of the place. . . . Bodies turn up in the brush of vacant lots, in the garbage thrown down ravines in the richest districts, in public rest rooms, in bus stations.” Her powerful and incisive reporting measures the perverse distance between such abstractions as Communism, human rights, and democracy in Central America and the senseless violence she is witness to.

Often considered Didion’s finest novel, Democracy (1984) tells a story of Inez Victor, daughter of an old money Honolulu dynasty, glamorous wife of a prominent politician, and sometime lover of a hardboiled intelligence officer, who is roused from a listless life of drinking and photo opportunities by her father’s murderous insanity and her daughter’s heroin addiction. Into this mix steps a narrator, “Joan Didion,” who pieces Inez’s story together with a sharp and often comic eye.

More than an urban portrait, Miami (1987) is a deep dive into the violent heart of the Magic City’s unwritten history. The “underwater narratives” Didion pursues take her not only through diverse and vibrant neighborhoods but into the clandestine operations and internecine rivalries of organized crime bosses, cocaine traffickers, CIA operatives, exiled Cuban counterrevolutionaries, and White House insiders.

The essays in After Henry (1992) capture the zeitgeist of the 1980s and early ’90s as surely as Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album did for the 1960s and ’70s. Alongside signature reflections on life in California, including a trenchant account of the scourge of wildfires, are provocative examinations of the 1988 presidential campaign and an in-depth look at New York City and the notorious case of the Central Park Five.

The Last Thing He Wanted (1996) turns Didion’s fascination with the Iran–Contra affair into a tense, intricately plotted, inimitably atmospheric thriller. In the middle of the 1984 presidential campaign, Elena McMahon leaves her job as a reporter for The Washington Post to care for her ailing but secretive father––only to find herself on a late-night flight to Costa Rica, bound for a morally compromised world “on the far frontiers of the Monroe Doctrine,” full of spies, ideologues, mercenaries, and assassins.

Genres: Fiction, 20th Century, American, Literature

851 pages, Hardcover

Published April 20, 2021

About the author

Joan Didion was an American writer and journalist. She is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism along with Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe.
Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Over the course of her career, Didion wrote essays for many magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Esquire, The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Hollywood lifestyle, and the history and culture of California. Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s often concentrated on the subtext of political rhetoric and the United States's foreign policy in Latin America. In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted. In 2005, Didion won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir of the year following the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. She later adapted the book into a play that premiered on Broadway in 2007. In 2013, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by president Barack Obama. Didion was profiled in the Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, in 2017.

Reviews

[William Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Have read all but Salvador. Didion is the best. What else can one say?

[Grace Dixon]

I want so badly to enjoy Joan Didion, and I am slowly coming to terms with the idea that she may not be for me. I find her writing technically impressive, formidable even. She writes with teeth, I would hate to be on the other side of her gaze. But I deeply struggled to finish this own, I could not for the life of me stay focused. Genuinely took over a year, because I had to put down and revisit so many times. Maybe that’s on me! I’ll come back in a decade and see if that’s changed.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Being such a large collection I'm going to break it down to a few quick thoughts about each piece.
•
🌿
SALVADOR: Analyzes the Civil War and Cold War politics in early 80's El Salvador. Didion's reporting is tight as always. I felt the terror of which she writes so vividly.
4/5🌟

MIAMI: A deep study of the city. Castro, drug wars with the cartels, Cuban migration, Government conspiracies, paranoia. Didion writes of politics so well. She captures a portrait of this city in its full murkiness. Obviously Joan is not an own voices reporter for this piece but I think she did a great job with it. 4/5🌟

AFTER HENRY: Essays on American politics and social analysis. Some of these pieces felt dated. Like reading about US presidential politics in the 80's, Washington and Nancy Reagan. But Didion's journalistic views are always so elegantly put so I can't say I disliked these pieces either. The look into Patti Hurst's life was a great piece! She also writes of LA's natural disasters and other pieces that felt relevant to today like the Central Park jogger case as it deals with ideas of race. 4/5🌟

DEMOCRACY: A multilayered novel about circumstances surrounding the US's preparations to evacuate from Vietnam. Didion flawlessly intertwines the character personal lives with these events. She took what she does best in nonfiction to another level here.
5/5🌟

THE LAST THING HE WANTED:
A political thriller about a Washington reporter who ends up inheriting her father's position as a US Government arms dealer in Central America but quickly ends up in government conspiracy. This novel was a bit confusing at first and it ended up just being an ok read for me.
3/5🌟

I read this over the Summer and its such a beautiful volume of Didion's work. I enjoyed having it all collected like this and experiencing the full sprectrum of her work throughout these decades. Definitely recommend this one!

Thank You to @libraryofamerica for generously sending me this book opinions are my own.

For more of my book content check out instagram.com/bookalong

[Paul Jellinek · Rating 5 out of 5]

For me, just about all of Didion's prose, whether it's fiction or non-fiction, has a strong undercurrent of icy rage--rage, it seems, at the betrayal of both her own dreams and the American dream writ large (to the extent that there's a difference). Yet her writing has the same kind of fierce, bleak beauty that I found when I visited Death Valley some years ago, even when the subject of her writing is as far removed from the California deserts as the jungles of Salvador or the political swamps of South Florida. Didion's unique voice is the voice of a prophet and, as dark and painful as its message often is, it will not be denied.

[Corinne · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5
I liked Democracy and Miami best.