Democracy; A Novel

New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Good. Quintana Roo Dunne (Author photograph). [2], 234, [4] pages. DJ has fading/sunning at spine and front cover, some wear and rear flap creased. Some wear at bottom of rear board. Joan Didion (December 5, 1934 - December 23, 2021) was an American writer. She is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism along with Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe. Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Hollywood lifestyle, California culture, and California history. Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s often concentrated on the subtext of political and social rhetoric. In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted. In 2005, Didion won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir of the year following the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. She later adapted the book into a play that premiered on Broadway in 2007. In 2013, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama. Didion was profiled in the Netflix documentary entitled, The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, in 2017. Democracy, Joan Didion's fourth novel, was published in 1984. Set in Hawaii and Southeast Asia at the end of the Vietnam War, the book tells the story of Inez Victor, wife of U.S. Senator and one-time presidential hopeful Harry Victor, and her enduring romance with Jack Lovett, a CIA agent/war profiteer whom Inez first met as a teenager living in Hawaii. Democracy is unusual in that its narrator is not a character within the novel's world but a voice whom Didion identifies as herself, a writer self-consciously struggling with the ambiguities of her ostensible material, the ironies attendant to narration, and the inevitable contradictions at the heart of any story-telling. Didion's deft and economical use of this conceit allows her to comment not only upon the novel she chose to write, a romantic tragedy, but also upon the novel she chose not to write, a family epic encompassing generations of Inez's wealthy Hawaiian family, artless emblems of the colonial impulse. At the time Democracy was published, the work was widely recognized as Didion's best novel to date for the skillful way she combined reportorial skill with literary style.