Product Description

In these coolly observant essays, Joan Didion looks at the American political process and at "that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life." Through the deconstruction of the sound bites and photo ops of three presidential campaigns, one presidential impeachment, and an unforgettable sex scandal, Didion reveals the mechanics of American politics. She tells us the uncomfortable truth about the way we vote, the candidates we vote for, and the people who tell us to vote for them. These pieces build, one on the other, into a disturbing portrait of the American political landscape, providing essential reading on our democracy.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #553406 in Books
• Published on: 2002-08-27
• Released on: 2002-08-27
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

From Amazon.co.uk
Political Fictions--a collection of eight essays covering US politics between 1988 and 2000--takes a critical look at what author Joan Didion calls "the ways in which the political process did not reflect but increasingly proceeded from a series of fables about American experience". The New York Review of Books originally published these writings and they hit all the major events of the previous dozen years: the election of George Bush (Senior), the emergence of Bill Clinton, the Republican takeover of Congress, Clinton's impeachment and the 2000 race between George Bush (Junior) and Al Gore. During this period, Didion worked and reworked a theme of political disconnect. In examining who cast ballots in 2000 (for the first time, more than half of all voters had incomes about $50,000), she notes acidly in her foreword:

That this was not a demographic profile of the country at large, that half the nation's citizens had only a vassal relationship to the government under which they lived, that the democracy we spoke of spreading throughout the world was now in our own country only an ideality, had come to be seen, against the higher priority of keeping the process in the hands of those who already held it, as facts without application.

She puts it a bit more succinctly elsewhere by describing "the largest political party in America" as "those who did not vote".

Didion brings a novelist's eye to her project and she delights in exposing fakery. In describing one of Vice President Bush's visits to the Middle East in the 1980s, she notes that his advance team requested that camels be present at every stop--so that photographers could capture the supposed authenticity of the trip. Many of the essays in Political Fictions are, at a fundamental level, book reviews--and Didion's observations can be withering. She calls Newt Gingrich's novel 1945 "a fairly primitive example of the kind of speculative fiction known as 'alternate history'". The accomplishment of Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, she says, is to have produced "books in which measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent". Her targets are not always other writers: "No-one who ever passed through an American public high school could have watched William Jefferson Clinton running for office in 1992 and failed to recognise the familiar predatory sexuality of the provincial adolescent". Needless to say, Political Fictions is not a celebration of American democracy. It is more like an indictment. --John Miller

From Publishers Weekly
Eight essays by noted novelist and nonfiction writer Didion (The Last Thing He Wanted, etc.), many originally published either in whole or in part in the New York Review of Books, cover politics from 1988 through the 2000 election. At her best, Didion is provocative, persuasive and highly entertaining. She presents a fresh perspective on the oft-analyzed Reagan and Clinton presidencies, especially the Lewinsky scandal. As the title implies, her focus is how the press, think tanks, political strategists and opinion makers conspire to create stories that reflect their biases and serve their own self-interest. Didion's willingness to skewer nearly everyone is one of the pleasures of the book. The bestsellers of Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, according to Didion, "are books in which measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent." Cokie Roberts, along with the rest of the Washington press corps, is depicted as a whining moralist aghast at the public's failure to grasp the message in the Clinton-Lewinsky story, which is, as Didion quotes Roberts, "that people who act immorally and lie get punished." Another pleasure is Didion's forthrightness. She tackles directly Vice President Gore's decision to run away from Clinton during the 2000 election. She is unafraid to closely examine the increase in religious rhetoric in American politics. On that topic, many Americans will find disturbing Didion's analysis of the relationship between President Bush's compassionate conservatism, faith-based initiatives and evangelical Christianity. This book will offend many Democrats, particularly of the Democratic Leadership Council persuasion, and many more Republicans, but it is members of the press who fare most poorly. To Didion, they are purveyors of fables of their own making, or worse, fables conceived by political strategists with designs on votes, not news. (Sept. 18)~Forecast: Higher-brow readers who missed Didion's pieces in the New York Review of Books will grab this, with its first printing of 40,000. She will do publicity in N.Y., L.A., and D.C., and national media including NPR, Charlie Rose and C-Span. This is a selection of Reader's Subscription Book Club.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
In this collection of pieces reprinted from the New York Review of Books, Didion reveals her discovery that much of what goes on in American political life is gasp! inauthentic, designed for media propagation. Moreover, a small political and media elite dominates the political discussion, excluding working-class Americans (with whom Didion laughably identifies herself) from any meaningful role (those pesky elections notwithstanding). These grumpy, ephemeral essays, in turn trivial and tediously repetitious, contain single sentences that run nine lines and many others that are shorter but still opaque. Didion fans interested in her explanation of Newt Gingrich's personal unpopularity or her analysis of Ken Starr's obsession with Clinton can hunt up these exegeses in the old issues of the Review. For Didion fans only; not recommended.
- Cynthia Harrison, George Washington Univ., Washington, DC
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Customer Reviews

A collection of mediocre material
This book is largely composed of Joan Didion's deeply researched -- but also deeply flawed -- articles that ran in magazines over the past 20 years. Keep in mind the dates at the beginning of each article, or you'll get lost in some of the obviously missing history, since these articles weren't well edited for current audiences.

Mainly, the articles/essays are a rehash of the evils of corporate-owned, far-right operated government in the '80s and '90s. As a rah-rah piece for the older The Nation crowd (or a primer for the younger Michael Moore/Ralph Nader fans), it's not so bad.

At last: The real Ronald Reagan exposed!
Fed up for years and years with the fiction that Reagan's and the GOP's fantasts have spun about him, Joan Didion gives us the truth about that airhead. Yes, this book is worth buying just for the chapter on him, in my opinion. I'll never foget watching as his fans named buildings and freeways after him across the country, as if he were a founding father! Thanks, Joan, for breaking the mold!

Shrewd and Absorbing Look At The Political Elite!
More than seventy years ago H.L. Mencken satirized the politicians of his day by counseling the American people that we had the best Congress money could buy. Even then many observers seemed to understand that power politics served the needs of the elite, not the man in the street. Yet gradually this trend toward a polity more and more exclusively organized and perpetuated for the sole purpose of benefiting a small upper class has become noticeably more decadent and extreme, and it is this trend toward extremism that noted social commentator Joan Didion takes issues with in this absorbing series of essays centering on the dangerous drift toward an elitist polity. Miss Didion is an author with an incredibly diverse background, and while she is primarily known for her works of fiction, she has also delivered some provocative and thoughtful best-selling non-fiction works such as "Slouching Toward Bethlehem". Here, with her set of essays, "Political Fictions", she demonstrates her wry and sardonic insight into the political machinations and creative politics that characterize the American polity. While the reading is enjoyable and edifying, her protestations sometimes get to be a bit much.

For Didion literally nothing is holy or sacrosanct, and she savagely lambastes the cynical manipulations she attributes to the political elite in this country, who she pictures as systematically and ruthlessly engaging and using their power in the act of exploiting current events in inventing what they then characterize as the political drama of democracy in action. And, to Didion's credit, she understands that nothing is really quite as simple as it seems on the surface. Thus she describes a cynical manipulation of a national yearning for a nostalgic view of America in what is a mind-boggling juggling of the truth. What she discovers in this search through the highs and lows of the political landscape is a solipsistic political view, engendered by an almost comically vapid attempt to pander to the public in an attempt to perpetuate their vulnerabilities in order to maintain power and control. It is difficult not to empathize with her observations, and to subscribe to most of what she says, especially her pointed observations of how much worse, i.e. how much more extreme and more vicious the political process seems to have become. Yet I have to admit to a bit of surprise at the level of shock she professes at finding the political process, especially as represented by the two political parties, to be a patently self-serving enterprise that both individuals and groups engage in to serve their own selfish interests.

Thus, in tracing the plethora of ways in which such themes as a imagined American past are manipulated in order to further the aims of the political powers that be, she expresses horror to find that the two major parties, in concert with the electronic media, have consciously worked to deliberately narrow the forces within the electorate to a small but manageable cadre. Finally, in disgust she explore the ways in which this state of affairs winds up spawning a ruling class that is oblivious to, and unconscious of, the needs and wants of the general electorate. This leaves the reader to wonder whether her expressed rage is a creative tool, or if, on the other hand, she really was so naïve that all of this genuinely surprises her. Perhaps she was on Holiday from Smith the semester they taught about H.L Mencken and his celebrated works regarding the American political system. Yet this truly is a worthwhile book and one I recommend, because it is entertaining and very well written. Ms. Didion has a unique way with turning a phrase on its ear and making the thought she is making most unforgettable in the process. Just be sure you understand before doing so that much of what she says seems a bit disingenuous given her reputation for considerable street smarts and basic common sense. Enjoy