The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion

The New York Times review by Ben Brantley of the production of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. Of course I’m going but I just wanted to point out a couple of things in this review that reiterates my love for Ben Brantley. He’s very perceptive – and not too snobby – although I want my theatre critic to be a little bit snobby, thankyouverymuch. But one of the main reasons why I love him is that he has not forgotten how to be an audience member – if something works for him, he doesn’t over-think it (for example – his glowing review of Mamma Mia – which opened in the wake of September 11 – still has the power to bring me to tears today. You can read my thoughts about that here) What I have always liked about Ben Brantley is his ability to hone in on why something works – and to pull out specific moments to illustrate his point. That’s harder to do than you might think.

For example – I reference his review of Christine Ebersole in Grey Gardens here – and the excerpts I post show what I’m talking about. When I eventually saw Grey Gardens – it’s not that I wouldn’t have noticed Ebersole’s genius without Brantley pointing it out – but it’s that he did what a critic should do. He provided context. He enlarged the conversation. By that I mean, his message was: Make no mistake. Generations to come will be referencing this performance – so just know that – and see it while you still can. I appreciate that. Especially when I agree with it. He wasn’t 100% rah-rah – he didn’t like the first act (I didn’t either), he wasn’t wacky about the younger lead (neither was I) … but to throw out the baby with the bathwater and not give Ebersole the props she deserves – would be ignorant. Too many critics do that.

So here is Brantley’s review of The Year of Magical Thinking – the adaptation of Joan Didion’s stunning book of the same name. It’s starring Vanessa Redgrave. As most everybody knows, Didion’s husband John Gregory Dunne (brother to Dominick Dunne) died suddenly in 2003. Didion’s book is about her immediate response to grief – the unreality of it, the inability to throw away his clothes … the ‘magical thinking’ that death is not really real. Now no matter what I say here cannot convey the power of that tiny little book. I had to endure it and force myself to finish it it was so painful, and searing. She’s one of my favorite writers anyway – and there’s always been something spare and chill about her prose – it’s what appeals to me. It’s stripped down. It’s like you can feel the hot desert sun of her home state beating down on her head, burning away all that is unnecessary. She has been known to spend weeks editing one of her own paragraphs – she’s that specific with what she wants. Omit needless words, omit needless words, omit needless words ….

And Year of Magical Thinking is the opposite of what one would expect in our Quick-Fix culture. It’s not self-help. It’s not a “how to” book, eg: how to deal with your husband’s sudden death. No. Anyone who fears being widowed, anyone who fears losing a loved one will find no comfort in this book. It’s a woman’s impressions from within the maelstrom of her grief. Things are not logical in immediate aftermaths like that. Your thoughts don’t go to healing the wound. Your thoughts go (sometimes) to searing regret (thank you for the phrase, Richard Ford), or turning back the clock, or obsessively going over the last moment you spoke to the now-dead person … trying to reverse time … It’s a horror. Didion does not write with retrospect – that is the main key to the book’s power. She writes from the middle of it. It’s relentless, comfortless. Open-eyed horror at what has been lost.

Didion’s daughter Quintana – who is around my age – got mysteriously ill right before her father passed and was lying in the hospital in a coma when the death occurred. Imagine waking up from a coma to find you have lost your father. And then – even more horrifying – Quintana – who had this mysterious fever and heart condition which came over her quite suddenly – passed away as the book was going to print. Apparently And Didion decided not to include it. But my God. Quintana – not even 40 years old yet – engaged to be married – passed away. Joan and John had no other children.

So Didion’s old age now … will be alone. No daughter to keep her company, no grandchildren. That’s it.

Didion’s sentences are cold and clear, horrifying in their brutal spareness. Tough book to read.

And now she has adapted it as a one-woman show for Broadway. Here is a photo of Joan and Vanessa Redgrave – who is playing Joan in the production.

Brantley’s analysis of what works in book-form and what doesn’t quite work in theatre-form is quite perceptive – but my main interest here is his discussion of Vanessa Redgrave’s acting, which makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

Listen. Listen to the details of his observation:

As Ms. Redgrave continues to slide through the narrator’s past and present — from the gray world of hospitals and funeral arrangements to a sunny shared familial past — she gives sharp life to a variety of moods: fury at medical incompetence and evasiveness, passionate maternal solicitude, conspiratorial feyness as she speaks of her belief that her dead husband will come back to her if only she performs the right actions.

Some moments — yes, silent ones — are remarkable. I have not, for example, been able to erase from my mind Ms. Redgrave’s face from an early scene. It’s after she, as Ms. Didion, has spoken of seeing her husband silent and slumped in a chair in their apartment at the end of a trying day. “I thought he was making a joke,” she says. “Slumping over. Pretending to be dead.”

Ms. Redgrave’s expression conveys two levels of consciousness: She is in the moment she has just described, irritated with what she perceives to be an ill-timed joke. And she is in the present tense — still angry with herself and the grotesque cosmic prank she has participated in — because her husband wasn’t joking at all.

In that small second or two Ms. Redgrave’s magnificent face, wry and wounded, is the reproachful emblem of the guilt and exasperation that the living so often feel toward the dying and the dead. There is also reflected that disorientation that comes from a death’s abrupt way of changing the rules by which you have always lived your life.

And then an observation like this:

Watch, for example, the attention she gives to a bracelet on her arm, and how she develops it. It will break your heart.

Full review here.