best essays in slouching towards bethlehem

But Las Vegas seems to exist only in the eye of the beholder. One is standing on a highway in the middle of a vast hostile desert looking at an eighty-food sign which blinks “STARDUST” or “CAESAR’S PALACE.” Yes, but what does that explain? This geographical implausibility reinforces the sense that what happens there has no connection with “real” life Nevada cities like Reno and Carson are ranch towns, Western towns, places behind which there is some historical imperative. It’s a haunting piece, underscored with a sense of the dissolution of the American Dream.ĭidion is particularly good on the eerie nature of Las Vegas, a place where the notion of time, at least in the traditional sense, does not seem to exist.Īlmost everyone notes that there is no “time” in Las Vegas, no night and no day and no past and no future neither is there any logical sense of where one is. Some Dreamers is an account of love and death in the golden land, the story of a marriage that has broken down, a woman who was tried for murder and judged for perhaps wanting too much. The San Bernardino Valley lies only an hour east of Los Angeles by the San Bernardino Freeway but is in certain ways an alien place: not the coastal California of the subtropical twilights and the soft westerlies off the Pacific but a harsher California, haunted by the Mojave just beyond the mountains, devastated by the hot dry Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and whines through the eucalyptus windbreaks and works on the nerves. One element that runs through several of the pieces, irrespective of their central theme, is a palpable sense of place – nicely illustrated by this passage from the opening paragraph of the first essay in the collection, Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream. The book comprises three sections: Life Styles in the Golden Land Personals and Seven Places of the Mind. There are some standout pieces here, many of which would stand up to a second or third reading – I hope to give you a flavour of them in this review. It’s a perceptive, erudite collection, piercing in its ability to capture a certain time and cultural mood, reflective in its observations on the social context of the day. Published in 1968, Slouching Towards Bethlehem brings together twenty of Didion’s essays, mostly articles that were originally written for magazines between 19. I’ve already written about three of this writer’s books: her debut, Run River her seminal novel, Play It As It Lays and, probably my favourite so far, her remarkable memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking. Longstanding readers of this blog may recall my admiration for Joan Didion’s work, both her fiction and her non-fiction pieces.

Best essays in slouching towards bethlehem