Reviews - Slouching Towards Bethlehem

3.73k reviews for:

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Joan Didion

4.12 AVERAGE

reaganne's review against another edition

3.0

Sometimes Didion makes me want to claw my skin off in a good way and this made me want to do it in a bad way

thetarantulalounge's review against another edition

3.0

reflective fast-paced

Joan Didion and Bob Dylan are two peas in a pod – insightful, elusive, bug-eyed sunglass’d. I enjoy reading/listening to both of them, if for nothing else than to see what it’s like for an artist to be at the top of their game.

I think Didion is at the top of her game when writing about California, and when writing about her family. Sometimes she writes about both. While Didion generally strikes me as someone who presents “Joan Didion” to the world, her tenderness towards her family always shines through, which I find endearing. In Slouching, this is especially obvious in an essay in which she gently pokes fun at her husband about not getting her extended family, and the joy she has in seeing her young daughter (Quintana) get to experience that family. Also, in a later essay, Didion is content to be out west with her husband (John) rather than in the social scene of New York City. Of course, these essays are bittersweet for the reader, knowing about the back to back deaths in the nuclear family that would one day come for Didion. When she writes “mine has a double death symbol,” in an essay, I had to put the book down for a bit.

My favorite essays are early in the collection, when Didion writes about California, and why people have the urge to move west:

Here is the last stop for all those who come from somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways. Here is where they are trying to find a new life style, trying to find it in the only places they know to look: the movies and the newspapers.

And:

That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells us that the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake (Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power), but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one’s own rules.

Why only three stars, then? I don’t like rating collections, because some essays will resonate while others will not. Three is a compromise. Some of the essays are timeless, and some are of a time and place (as they should be). My own personal contemporary Didion, I think, is Jia Tolentino mixed with Henry Rollins. I’m aged between them, so that makes sense.

Which insightful essayists are you enjoying these days?

m3i3r3r's review against another edition

4.0

I first read most of the essays in this collection in 11th grade english at my san francisco high school. when I did, I had only ever lived in california, and california felt to me like the whole world. after college in massachusetts, a post-grad move back to my mother’s house in san francisco, and now staring down a likely move “back east” for graduate school, I can easily say that Didion’s essays about california resonate much more deeply than they did when I was 17.
I don’t have much more to say than that, I think.

spacerock's review against another edition

3.75

Many of these essays didn’t say anything to me and the style sometimes feels directionless in a bad way

BUT the first and last essay are both unbelievable
Read all when feeling in a bad way about a man, read thinking about him, perspective might not be accurate