By Daniel Goldin

THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING
by Joan Didion
Alfred A. Knopf, 10/05, $23.95

I know from Augusten Burroughs’s recent book of essays that “magical thinking” is the self-proclaimed ability to affect the future. In Didion’s case, this would be an ironic pronouncement, as she would have hardly wanted her husband John Gregory Dunne to die of a massive coronary at the same time her only daughter was in a coma.

Didion reconstructs the period before her husband’s death, searching for clues that he might have known what was coming. She documents the mundane details of her life that follows, punctuated by memory, mourning, and the continued setbacks of her daughter Quintana. There is no question that every death is painful, and every lost person deserves at least one tribute in writing, if not several. The question posed—is this tribute also to be seen as something that is meaningful for general readership? This is something that as a buyer I ask of numerous self-published and print-on-demand authors. I’m not sure of the answer.

Other readers have been quite moved by Didion’s account, but there were a couple of reasons why it had less of an effect on me. My first issue was with the name dropping. Calvin Trillin and David Halberstam speak at the funeral. Brian Moore and Katherine Ross help make dinner at Lee Grant’s place. When her mega-agent Lynn Nesbitt comes over and suggests they contact “Christopher,” Didion confuses Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times chief obit writer and former book critic, with the writer Christopher Dickey. What is the book about, Didion’s personal experience or all the semi-famous friends she has? Of course she can’t pick her friends, but I prefer the perhaps false modesty of referring to celeb friends by first name only, which Didion does for John’s brother Nick (Dominic Dunne).

My other quibble was Didion’s continuing references back to her own and her husband’s writing, with passages reprinted. The coup of being able to easily negotiate the reprint rights aside, it seemed a bit like filler and an insecure reaffirmation of their literary abilities. These two peeves came together in triumphant fashion during Dunne’s Princeton reunion, where “Rummy” Rumsfeld proclaimed John the best writer of the class of 1954. This of course called for a short excerpt from True Confessions. Such cries of egocentrism demand a confession of my own self-absorption. When Quintana’s hospital was referred to as the now-closed Beth Israel North, also known as the Old Doctors Hospital, all I could think was “Doctors Hospital? That’s the hospital I was born in. It’s closed?” A short period of mourning followed.

JESUS LAND
by Julia Scheeres
Counterpoint, 10/05, $23.00

When Julia Scheeres’ parents adopted her African American siblings David and Jerome, they probably did so out of Christian charity. After all, they’d already raised three other children in Lafayette, Indiana, sending them to the Lafayette Christian Academy where they were schooled in strict Dutch Calvinist style.

But the beatings that follow are just the tip of the iceberg; Dad drives a Porsche while mom serves the children her special “garbage soup” and sends her savings to missionaries. Mom pipes in Christian music and uses the intercom to spy on the kids. We get the feeling that this hasn’t prevented any child, including the older kids who’ve now left home, from misbehaving. It doesn’t help that the family has moved to a rural area outside Lafayette, and they aren’t sending their children to Westside High School, where the children of Purdue Professors predominate, but instead to Harrison, populated by rednecks quite aware that this once was prime Klu Klux Klan territory.

David, a shy and nerdy kid who longs for a happy family, reacts to his parents’ punishments by withdrawing. Jerome, a petty thief and delinquent whose size and skills on the basketball court make him immune from the racial epithets that taunt David, takes revenge on the parents through their daughter Julia, who attempts to keep Jerome out of her room at night with a shoddy door lock. The parents, who have more empathy for the family dog than for their children, eventually send David and Julia to Escuela Caribe, the notorious Christian reform school in the Caribbean.

The Hispaniola horrors, somewhere between summer camp, prison, and cult indoctrination, still seem to pale in comparison to Julia’s family life. One gets the feeling that Julia’s parents were sociopaths, living their lives by doctrine rather than actual emotional relationships. Alas, the father is a bit sketchily drawn, compared to the mother’s over-the-top antics. I also was confused by the lack of action taken by Julia’s otherwise sympathetic older siblings, but there are signs that Julia did not reveal to them the extent of her family troubles. The story is simply told, using as material some of David’s left-behind journals. For readers who are members of “You’re not going to believe my horrible childhood” Book Club, I would suggest you not send back the negative reply card, because this one is compellingly horrible.

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