The Year of Magical Thinking: The Play

In The Year of Magical Thinking, both the book and her stage adaptation, Joan Didion purports to share with us the circumstances and aftermath of the death of her husband and, following close, of her daughter. The idea is that these bereavements were emblematic case and life histories from which we could all profit in due time.

Good enough in theory, but the writing is mawkish, mannered and self-serving. My concern is with the freshly published play version, only a fraction of the memoir's length but, surprisingly, much the worse for it.

Imagine a raisin bun from which the bun is omitted, and you are left with only the cloying raisins. For me, Didion's tone has generally been that of a singer who sings flat or sharp. In her case, cutesy, poseurish, self-regarding. The very idea of a year of magical thinking strikes me as precious, posturing, forced.

Husband John Gregory Dunne dies suddenly at the dinner table after a visit to the couple's hospitalized and comatose daughter, Quintana. He is unmistakably dead, but Didion relates in suffocating detail all the procedures, from the paramedics' long attempt at revival, through the hospital's rules and rigmaroles, to her phoning in the death to the newspapers and family and friends. She decides on a year of magical thinking that John isn't really dead:

"'Magical thinking' is a phrase I learned when I was reading anthropology.
Primitive cultures operate on magical thinking.
If we sacrifice the virgin—the rain will come back.
If we keep his shoes—…"

It all began when "I could not give away his shoes./ I stood there for a moment, then realized why: he would need his shoes if he was to return."

And, in a later passage:

"You think I'm crazy.
You think I'm crazy because otherwise I'm dangerous.
Radioactive.
If I'm sane, what happened to me could happen to you.
You don't want to hear what I have to tell you.
You want me to give you a good prognosis.
I can't. So it's safer to think I'm crazy.
Fine. It doesn't matter to me."

[IMG:R]It would seem that Didion's delusion is that she is writing free verse. Paragraphs tend to be one or a couple of short sentences long—sometimes only a few words or even a single one. There are recurrent refrains, usually italicized. Entire longer paragraphs are repeated at supposedly strategic moments. There are frequent flashbacks and flashforwards, making it hard to unscramble the sequence of events. Some of this may derive from John and Joan's screenwriting techniques, but this is not a movie. More than once, for example, we get John's bon mot that writing for Life is "like being nibbled to death by ducks."

On the night when John is declared dead at the hospital, the social worker, who labels Joan "a pretty cool customer," asks her whether she has "money for the fare home." There follows a brief, seemingly irrelevant meditation on why he didn't say the "less troubling" taxi home. What sensitivity to fine points, to verbal punctilio! But there is method in it. Ten pages later we read:

"To myself I am invisible, incorporeal. I have crossed one of those rivers that divide the living from the dead. I feel for the first time the power in the image of the rivers, the Styx, the Lethe, the cloaked ferryman with his pole.
I saw the ferryman.
I heard the ferryman speak.
It was the ferryman who asked if I had the fare."

The social worker as Charon: We have here not only magical thinking but, indeed, elevation to mythical thinking. I am leery of such fare.