The end of promise

BLUE NIGHTS are the long, twilight evenings that help define midsummer. To most, they conjure notions of romance and serenity, but for Joan Didion they know a different timbre, warning of things to come, “the dwindling of days, the end of promise”.

For half a century Miss Didion has been one of the most distinctive and intelligent voices in American Letters. In 2005, she wrote a highly acclaimed memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, which dealt with the death of her husband, the novelist and screenwriter John Gregory Dunne. By the time of publication, she was also grieving the loss of their only child, their 39-year-old daughter, Quintana Roo. Blue Nights is a sequel of sorts, yet it would be wrong to dismiss it as mere addendum.

To categorise this book would be to reduce its scope. More than merely another treatise on the loss of a child, it offers clear-eyed considerations of motherhood, of the trauma and shadows of adoption, of time’s fleeting nature, and of slowly crumbling into old age. It is also nothing less than a philosophical attempt to understand our reasons for being. Almost every chapter ends with a tumbling of questions that give this book its impact but which cannot help but hang unanswered.

We glimpse Quintana’s adoption and the privileged life that follows. Named after a Mexican region, she is a precocious child, one who develops a taste for caviar, begins to write a novel of her own and who thinks deeply about things like her terror of ‘the Broken Man’ or what would have happened if her parents had been out when the doctor who was offering her to them had phoned.

The narrative style mimics little of its predecessor’s intentional focus. Rather, in a revelation of authorial technique, it employs a non-linear, scattershot effect, achieved to resemble the loose, random spill of a whole life’s worth of recollections.

This is how we get to know Quintana, as Miss Didion herself did, through morsels of detail and things said, punchlines that somehow stick and endure against the passage of time. Her daughter occupies every page, but this is not biography and it is the author herself who remains the focal point.

The details she has chosen to recollect are those that matter to her, and echo something of who she is.

This is not an easy book to read; no writer as gifted as Joan Didion can suffer such loss without bleeding into the sentences. But sad without being maudlin, Blue Nights moves in genuine ways and never seeks melodrama, only understanding. Or, if that is asking too much, forebearance.