Sunday was the Brooklyn Book Festival, and I had Joan Didion on the brain. She was speaking on a political panel at 5 p.m., and since I’d never seen her speak before, I made sure to get in line early for the free tickets, which went quite fast. Then of course there was the line to get into the actual event, below, which turned out not to be so bad either.
Robert Silvers, editor of The New York Review of Books, was somewhat funny because he insisted that the four panelists—Didion, Mark Danner, Ronald Dworkin, and Darryl Pinckney—issue a response regarding the presidential election alphabetically. I had expected more of a heated debate format among the four, but I enjoyed it anyway. Didion read a brief essay about story or narrative and how we, as a culture, delight in the “story” of Sarah Palin or the “story” of Barack Obama or John McCain, while suggesting that stories do nothing but “downplay the potential for trouble.” In other words, it’s easy to go on about narratives, but what are the real issues at stake? What do stories conceal? Stories, too, contribute to our amnesia, or (I rather enjoy the term) “national coma,” and Didion offered the example that 70 percent of eighth graders in America cannot read at an eighth-grade level.
But this stat, too, is clouded by stories—like Sarah Palin’s rags-to-riches tall tale. She succeeded by working hard, and so can you! Even if you go to a shitty school where no one can read! Anyone who still believes that America is a meritocracy is completely deluded. But perhaps I digress.
I also attended a conversation between A.M. Homes, who wrote one of my favorite short stories, “Adults Alone,” and Richard Price, a novelist who also writes for TV and film. They digressed—like a lot—but it was nonetheless an entertaining chat, and it made me want to read some of Price’s work. I learned that David Foster Wallace had passed away a couple of days before—sad, sad, sad—when Nathaniel Rich attempted an apologetic eulogy before his reading. And I finished the evening, waiting in yet another line, for Joan Didion to sign my hardcover of The White Album. I was pretty nervous, so I didn’t say anything except the usual pleasantries—Hi there! Thank you so much!—but I suppose those words were sufficient. She probably just wanted to get out of there at that point. Hell, I did too.
