Innocence, Loss, and Recovery in the Art of Joan Didion by Michelle Carbone Loris (review)

382 Western American Literature The Humanization of Willa Cather: Classicism in an American Classic. By Erik Ingvar Thurin. (Lund, Sweden: Lund University Press, 1990. 406 pages, SEK240.) Willa Gather’s interest in classical arts and culture has long been acknowl­ edged, but Thurin’s study is the first book-length examination of classical influences in Cather’s writing. The book is commendable for its scope, for it covers classical allusions, form, and themes in all phases of her career, ranging from her journalistic reviews in Nebraska to her later novels and short fiction. The reader must have a rather extensive awareness of classical literature and the biography of Cather in order fully to appreciate this study. The work is helpfully divided into separate chapters on all major works and phases of Cather’s career, and each chapter discusses specific classical influences for that particular work, as well as placing it in the context of Cather’s development as a writer who incorporates both the literary form and philosophical under­ pinnings of classicism. Thurin is helpful in his consideration of both primary and secondary sources for Cather’s classicism, as he includes sources ranging from notated classical volumes in the author’s own library to second-hand literary sources, such as nineteenth-century romanticism or Shakespeare’s plays, that rely heav­ ily on classicism. This study notes Cather’sstrong interest in Roman culture, as it adapts and filters Greek civilization, and in the extension of both Greek and Roman culture through the Roman Catholic Church and French civilization. Thurin notes other ancient sources, primarily the Bible and medieval litera­ ture, but perceives Cather accommodating those influences to her more pervasive classical thought. The study is less convincing when parallels are drawn without sufficient textual evidence between Cather’s writings and classical works. In the impres­ sive mass of classical references, the study sometimes fails to provide sufficient explanation for its arguments or stretches an admittedly valid thesis beyond its reasonable limits. This book is being published in both Swedish and English. It will be helpful to Cather scholars in the thoroughness of its consideration of specific classical influences on individual works and in its evaluation of the interplay between Cather’s life and development as a writer and classical techniques and ideals. DONNA MAPLES Howard Payne University Innocence, Loss, and Recovery in the Art of Joan Didion. By Michelle Car­ bone Loris. (New York: Peter Lang, 1989. 160 pages, $22.95.) At one point in Joan Didion’s essay collection, The White Album, Didion tries to level with her readers, confessing, “You are getting a woman who for Reviews 383 some time now has felt radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest other people. You are getting a woman who somewhere along the line misplaced whatever slight faith she ever had in the social contract, in the meliorative principle, in the whole grand pattern of endeavor. . .” (WA 1979, 134—135). Dust jacket covers to her books show her tp be small, waiflike, and apparently very sad. How could this author be a prophet, striding out of the desert with jeremiads and calls to repentance? Michelle Carbone Loris, in her American University Studies book on Joan Didion, tells us how. I found myself resisting the assertion that a Biblical code of morality forms the pattern and presentation of all of Didion’s writings. But then in me you are getting a woman who resents critical reductionism. “So show me,” I was telling Ms. Loris as I read, and she did. Does. Her contention that Didion, even as the Old Testament prophets, intends to warn us, to call us to repent­ ance, becomes credible as she systematically traces Biblical symbol, parable, allegory, and metaphor, through each of Didion’s works. And the examples throughout the study are specific and telling enough to convert any skeptic. Furthermore, in reading deep moral intent and Biblical method into Didion’s works, Loris overturns common notions about the author. If the wilderness is redemptive, as Didion herself states outright—then labels of nihilist or existentialist do not fit Didion. Joan Didion in Biblical light is no more existentialist than Amos or Hosea; no...