Athena's Head
Martha Nichols Online
I’ve back home from our four-month stay in Singapore, feeling both sad to leave it and happy to be home. If you’d like to check out some of my adventures overseas, take a look at my “Singapore Column.” In any case, I’ll soon be back to posting on Athena’s Head.
There’s no doubt that Joan Didion is a lightning rod for women writers of my generation. In fact, she’s been a skinny pole defying the whole big thundering sky of publishing and journalism for the past five decades.
With Didion, you love her or you hate her or you have decidedly mixed feelings about her work—as I do. But until I read Caitlin Flanagan’s “The Autumn of Joan Didion” in the January/February 2012 issue of the Atlantic, I wouldn’t have believed anyone could dismiss her in quite this way:
“Ultimately Joan Didion’s crime—artistic and personal—is the one of which all of us will eventually be convicted: she got old. Her writing got old, her perspective got old, her bag of tricks didn’t work anymore.”
Her personal crime? Even as a punchy magazine exaggeration, this feels ungracious. I have trouble with Flanagan’s article for a host of reasons, many of which have nothing to do with her pan of Blue Nights, Didion’s latest memoir. Flanagan is right about Didion’s stylistic tics, but she is profoundly wrong about the impact of her later work.
I know how easy it is to be seduced. I’ve been in Singapore for three weeks now, and it still conjures all sorts of exotic imagery: heat, jungle, monkeys, pith helmets, temples. There are also the more modern extremes of skyscrapers and food courts—the delights of chili crab and air-conditioned shopping malls in vast underground warrens.
But what I find most exotic here is the altered point of view, one that’s not obvious at first glance, because so much of the urban area of Singapore seems like an upscale version of Los Angeles
"Monkey at MacRitchie" © N.H. Howe
Last weekend, my husband, son, and I visited MacRitchie Reservoir, which turns out to be a manicured public park that abuts a nature reserve. I expected something wilder—more exotically jungle-like—and at first was disappointed to see picnickers and pots of bougainvillea.