In 1970, Joan Didion traveled through the Deep South for a piece she was writing. "I had only some dim and unformed sense... which I could not explain coherently, that for some years the South and particularly the Gulf Coast had been for America what people were still saying California was."
South and West is culled from the notebooks she kept on that trip. Also included are 14 pages from a 1974 journal, when Didion returned to California to cover the Patty Hearst trial with the ulterior motive of writing about the state. Neither piece was ever completed.
Didion's style always seems effortless. In South and West, we see the effort. This is a study in the process of writing. Her prose, even in draft form, is remarkable. She constructs paragraphs with the precision of a journalist and the ear of a poet. Known for her restraint, Didion works into her prose a filigree that can be breathtaking, as in the first sentence: "In New Orleans in June the air is heavy with sex and death, not violent death but death by decay, overripeness, rotting, death by drowning, suffocation, fever of unknown etiology."
Didion offers her shrewd, deadpan observations of a decayed South (in a Biloxi motel, "the swimming pool is large and unkempt, and the water smells of fish"). It is not a kind portrayal, and indeed is an outsider's view of the South. This is writing by antithesis; it paints the West in negative. --Zak Nelson, writer and bookseller