South and West by Joan Didion (2017)

 This is a very short book, covering some notes Didion took towards magazine pieces that never happened, and some additional memories from much later on. It's divided into two sections, one on the South and one, much shorter, on California. She goes back to the South with her husband in 1970, for the first time since visiting her father where he was stationed in North Carolina in 1942, when she was a child. I can imagine that this part has what might be politely termed a mixed reputation in the South itself. It is not entirely, in fact quite rarely, complimentary. Some of the criticisms are associated with conservatism and prejudice and seem entirely fair, but others feel prejudiced themselves and to be narrow views of the social spread of the region. But there's no doubt that it's an evocative view, with rich colour built into its picture of those small towns and cities. The comparison it brings to my mind are those Youtube videos of almost abandoned American small towns, where most of the main street is empty and tumbledown. My thought is that Didion was seeing some of these while they were still fully functioning, in fact probably just as their death warrants were being signed by oncoming neoliberal decay. It's also good to experience her work without overshadowing melancholy - the books on the death of her husband and daughter and her own ageing had a current of tension and lowering. The part on California is tiny, only a few pages, and basically simply says "I feel comfortable here". Too little to it. I'm not sure what was happening with the publication of this book; it seems too minimal to amount to one. The part on the South could have been expanded upon, perhaps, if she'd felt travel-able at that period? A bit thin, but the main part has flavour.