The Partly Cloudy Patriot
by Joan Didion
Knopf

Given the current political climate (a sincerely felt patriotism not seen on these shores since the 1940s), Joan Didion's "Political Fictions," a collection of essays produced for the New York Review of Books, seems irrelevant — remote, strident, deeply cynical and entirely inappropriate at this moment. Ten days ago, the book might have been received as challenge, a clarion call to the American Left, but now it resounds, alas, with a thud. That said, Didion will stand the test of time, and when American politics is back to its usual state of partisan bickering the observations collected in "Political Fictions" will ring true and, given the brevity of our collective memory, may well seem prescient.

Didion is a magnificent writer. Her best work — the novel "Play It As It Lays," the essay "The White Album" — shares a studied, incisive quality much remarked upon and widely imitated. "Political Fictions" is classic Didion, the prose in this collection of dispatches on American politics spare, erudite, elegant and never florid, as she writes about the 1988 Presidential primaries, the American intervention in the Salvadoran civil war and the meaning of compassionate conservatism. Because the essays were produced for the Review, a venerable but ultimately obscure publication, Didion's reportage is markedly different from the commentary found in the national dailies or newsweeklies. Didion has accomplished the unlikely task of making the publication relevant to those unlikely to read it.

The book opens with the essay "Insider Baseball," her analysis of the failed Dukakis campaign. Didion traveled with the candidate, but rather than file the behind the scenes claptrap favored during major election years, she writes of the disconnect between life on the campaign trail and life as it is lived among the people who will ultimately decide the election, the voters themselves. The title of the essay refers to a moment when Dukakis and his press secretary deplane to play catch on the tarmac in the summer heat, a moment orchestrated for the benefit of the ever-present camera crews, meant to illustrate the candidate's average American-ness. This vignette demonstrates that the electoral process is little more than carefully stage-managed theater. Of course, we already knew that, didn't we?

Didion feigns surprise, but it's impossible to accept that a woman of her intellect would not have anticipated the illusory nature of campaign life. That she doesn't allow her reportage to fall into the realm of the press release (though have no doubt that she wears her liberal sympathies quite on her sleeve) makes this dispatch worth reading in a way that say, a New York Times piece on the Dukakis campaign would almost certainly not be worth reading today.

The lessons and observations one is meant to glean from "Political Fictions" are predictable but nonetheless important. In several of these pieces, Didion laments the apathetic non-voters who constitute the electoral majority in several of these pieces. In "The West Wing of Oz," she condemns the passivity of the Reagan presidency. In "Newt Gingrich, Superstar," she muses on the unlikely ascension of the former speaker of the House. In "God's Country" she offers one of the most cogent examinations of "compassionate conservatism" and the Bush administration's support of so-called "faith based organizations."

But her central point is encapsulated in the title of the collection, that politics in this country is, essentially, a fiction in which we are all complicit. That said, it's not really a lesson we need to be reminded of at a time like the present one. More than ever, we need to believe in the myth of our political processes. We need to embrace it wholeheartedly, for it's all we have. Nevertheless, Didion's observations have been eloquently and powerfully entered into the record, and perhaps someday soon we'll be able to learn from them.

— Rumaan Alam (rumaanalam@hotmail.com)