A Book of Common Prayer
by Joan Didion
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Book Summary Information
Author: Joan DidionEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1995-04-11
ISBN: 0679754865
Number of pages: 272
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of A Book of Common Prayer
Book Review: "She died, hopeful. In Summary."
Summary: 4 Stars
I may be too much of a lover of Didion's non-fiction works to take her fiction seriously. This being the third novel following detached and deluded female protagonists (after Run River and Play It As It Lays) into the extremes of their antipathy, it seems clear that, simply, her stories are too much work. A great Didion essay states its facts with such brutal lucidity, you barely notice the incisive, enraged, impassioned consciousness at their center. Her fiction makes you all too aware of the artifice behind the words, and though I believe A Book Of Common Prayer to be the best of the Didion novels I've read, I don't know that I fully bought the whole thing.
It begins strangely framed, like Didion's take on Cat's Cradle, an expatriate telling stories of other expatriates in Central America. Charlotte Douglass, the detached and deluded protagonist at its center, has details of great speculation - in the syntax of her storytelling and the odd personal attributes that get her, initially, under the investigation of a revolutionary government. But it's not until we visit her past in San Francisco, about her elusive daughter and two failed marriages, that the character really begins to come alive. Attached as Douglas's narrative is to the backdrop of a small revolutionary country, the story finds itself headed in an entirely different direction, quite successfully - it turns into Didion's That Obscure Object Of Desire rather than Didion's Cat's Cradle. There's a number of Didion's tendencies that still, I think, don't quite work in her fiction - her surprising leap into synopsis, her repetitive intrusion of key phrases, even her attempt to bookend the story in the same line seems a little (to be perfectly honest) stupid. But A Book of Common Prayer has undeniably more narrative verve than any of her previous fictional works - you may, in a sense, not enjoy watching a clueless protagonist amidst a quietly revolutionary backdrop, but you begin to need to see it play out.
Summary of A Book of Common Prayer
Writing with the telegraphic swiftness and microscopic sensitivity that have made her one of our most distinguished journalists, Joan Didion creates a shimmering novel of innocence and evil.A Book of Common Prayer is the story of two American women in the derelict Central American nation of Boca Grande. Grace Strasser-Mendana controls much of the country's wealth and knows virtually all of its secrets; Charlotte Douglas knows far too little. "Immaculate of history, innocent of politics," she has come to Boca Grande vaguely and vainly hoping to be reunited with her fugitive daughter. As imagined by Didion, her fate is at once utterly particular and fearfully emblematic of an age of conscienceless authority and unfathomable violence.
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