'The Year of Magical Thinking': Goodbye to All That

The Year of

Magical Thinking

By Joan Didion.

227 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $23.95.

"O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap / May who ne'er hung there." That fearsome landscape comes from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, quoted by Joan Didion early in her exact, candid and penetrating account of personal terror and bereavement.

The geological imagery conveys the disparity of scale between any mortal intelligence and those immense, lethal gulfs and mountains. It is a terrain often lied about, and routinely blurred by euphemism. Hopkins's phrase "Hold them cheap" suggests the bromides, clichés and evasions we resort to, because the cliffs of fall are too awful to confront. Didion's book is thrilling and engaging -- sometimes quite funny -- because it ventures to tell the truth: a traveler's faithful account of those harsh but fascinating cliffs. Hopkins's verbal music, his gorgeously stammered consonant-harmonies and syncopated cadences, expresses one of Didion's true reports: grief makes us crazy.

In December 2003, the only daughter of Didion and her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, fell into septic shock from a runaway pneumonia infection. Her doctors at New York's Beth Israel North put the young woman -- she was married only five months earlier -- into an induced coma. On the evening of Dec. 30, her parents returned from the hospital to their apartment. While the couple were talking over supper, John Gregory Dunne slumped in his chair with one hand raised, dying so suddenly that for a moment his wife mistook the event for a failed joke.

I NEED to explain here that "The Year of Magical Thinking" is not a downer. On the contrary. Though the material is literally terrible, the writing is exhilarating and what unfolds resembles an adventure narrative: a forced expedition into those "cliffs of fall" identified by Hopkins. As in Didion's previous writing, her sense of timing, sentence by sentence and in the arrangement of scenes, draws the reader forward. Her manner is deadpan funny, slicing away banality with an air that is ruthless yet meticulous. She uses few adjectives. The unshowy, nearly flat surface of her writing is rippled by patterns of repetition: an understatement that, like Hemingway's, attains its own kind of drama. Repetition and observation narrate emotion by demonstrating it, so that restraint itself becomes poetic, even operatic:

"I had entered at the moment it happened a kind of shock in which the only thought I allowed myself was that there must be certain things I needed to do. There had been certain things I had needed to do while the ambulance crew was in the living room. I had needed for example to get the copy of John's medical summary, so I could take it with me to the hospital. I had needed for example to bank the fire, because I would be leaving it. There had been certain things I had needed to do at the hospital. I had needed for example to stand in the line. I had needed for example to focus on the bed with telemetry he would need for the transfer to Columbia-Presbyterian."

This is the opposite of hack "vividness." Instead of modifiers or the conventions of "description," the repeated, vague, nearly meaningless phrases "certain things" and "for example" and "needed to do" dramatize both the inner numbness of shock and the outer reality of the emergency, a terminal reality that is uniquely complicated and simple.

I focus on language because Didion tells her story largely by tracing a kind of dance between two kinds of deceptive language: on one side, there is the half-secret, personal language of "magical thinking" that creates needs, interdictions, omens: I need to be in the one city where the dead person would return, if he came back; I cannot give away certain of that person's shoes; the dead sea gull and the typo and the undeleted e-mail message are signs. That internal voice, "magical thinking" denying its own desperation, whispers that the funeral ritual will restore what is lost. It says that reading the obituary would be a betrayal. Didion quotes the mother of a 19-year-old killed by a bomb in Kirkuk who tells herself that as long as she doesn't let the uniformed messenger into her house, he cannot deliver the news she knows he is bearing.