The Nathanael West Project

Joe @ The Huffington Post

JOAN DIDION -- LATE IN LIFE

By Joe Woodward

@ The Huffington Post 1/10/12

Excerpt of review of Didion's Blue Nights

"Old age in America is a humorless state of spent energies—a time-desert laced with lost economic and political power and long hours in medical waiting rooms skimming back issues of National Geographic.  Old age in America is a commercial loop stuck on the pros and cons of Medicare Part B and unmeasured time in wall-papered kitchens trying to get child-proof caps off orange prescription bottles.  Old age in America is simply the loss of youth.

The American canon on old age is as unreliable and overstuffed as America itself.  It does not contain the truth.  Rarely, save an occasional AARP advertisement in a magazine or television pitch for “Boost,” the energy drink, do “old people” appear in media at all.  When they do appear, they are most often interested in “eating right” and “exercising” and playing ball with their grandchildren in comfortable shoes and ironed khakis.  There must be more!  

Read more at... The Huffington Post

 

 

The Day of the Locust: Faye Greener

The Day of the Locust

Chapter 3

The novel, right up to the end, was called The Cheated by West.  It wasn't perfect, he realized, but nothing else seemed as true and right.

Certainly "cheated" fit Faye Greener.  Faye, his heroine-grotesque, takes up the whole of chapter 3 and prepares us for one of the magnificent sequences in the book--Claude Estee's party.

"She was a tall girl with wide, straight shoulders and long, swordlike legs.  Her neck was long, too, and columnar.  Her face was much fuller than the rest of her body would lead you to expect and much larger.  It was a moon face, wide at the cheek bones and narrow at the chin and brow.  She wore her 'platinum' hair long, letting it fall almost to her shoulders in back...

"She was supposed to look drunk and she did, but not with alcohol.

"Her invitation wasn't to pleasure, but to struggle, hard and sharp, closer to murder than to love.  If you threw yourself on her, it would be like throwing yourself from the parapet of a skyscraper.  You would do it with a scream.  You couldn't exactly rise again.  Your teeth would be driven into your skull like nails into a pine board and your back would be broken.

"He managed to laugh at his language, but it wasn't a real laugh and nothing was destroyed by it."

And onto the party he goes....