After Henry.

AFTER HENRY

Joan Didion 

Simon & Schuster, $21.50, 336 pp.

The title piece of Joan Didion's new collection of twelve essays coveting politics and culture in Washington, California, and New York refers to Henry Robbins, one of Didion's early editors, who "had fallen dead, age fifty-one, to the floor of the 14th Street subway station...." It sounds the leitmotif that ties together most of these essays, all written within the last several years. Didion is persuaded that we live by the "narratives" we tell ourselves or that get told by others, the most potentially distorting being those "public narrative[s] based at no point on observable reality." Henry Robbins, according to Didion, was the kind of editor who "gave the writer the idea of himself, the idea of herself, the image of self that enabled the writer to sit down alone and do it." After Henry, the author could no longer reassure herself with his narrative about her gifts. Yet she kept writing despite her loss. If she can live without her narrative, she seems to be saying (with a strangely detached indifference to the part of Henry Robbins's life that had nothing to do with her), we can live without ours, private or public.

As an agile choreographer of deadpan ironic contrasts--a Hollywood screenwriter as well as a journalist and fiction writer, she edits her prose for dramatic effect like a scenarist--Didion has a sharp eye for the fabricated public moment. In 1988, she writes, the "polls indicated that the electorate wanted 'change,' and this wish for change had been translated, by both [the Bush and Dukakis] campaigns, into the wish for a 'change back,' a regression...." True, that's what the polls said, and both candidates predictably responded with varying degrees of cant. But the country' s yearning for some brake on cultural flux wasn't a product of the polls. Rather, it stemmed from a real social and political development. Though Didion does a lot of expert seeing-through in these meticulously created essays, she has a habit of not seeing through to anything. She methodically takes the cynical response to phenomena for the phenomena themselves. And since she regards both the Democratic and Republican responses as equally artificial narratives, she comes to believe that each one is as good as the other--that they make up, in fact, one seamless deceit. The "notion," she declares, "that the citizen's choice among determinedly centrist candidates makes a 'difference,' is in fact the narrative's most central element, and also its most tictive."

The fictiveness will surprise people on opposite sides of the debate over health care, abortion, the environment, entitlement programs, urban assistance, defense spending, gun control, tax credits for private schools, etc. But they are probably looking under a party's rhetoric for its social and political values. Didion likes to look under a party's social and political values for its rhetoric. For her, the worst abuse of power is the way politicians make up stories to try to trick people into voting for them. For the weakest among us, or the most outraged, the form of power that matters most is the fact that some people vote for one candidate and not for another.

Didion is the Walter Pater of American journalism. Her aesthetic critique of aestheticized events tellingly muddles After Henry's lengthy centerpiece, "Sentimental Journeys." Originally published in the New York Review of Books, the highly touted essay is Didion's meditation on New York's jogger rape case, which involved the sexual assault and vicious beating in Central Park of a young woman three years ago. The trial of six black and Hispanic teen-agers accused of attacking a white investment banker who had been arrogantly, some people said--taking her usual late-night run through the park roiled the city with racial, sexual, and class politics.

Didion crafts a lot of understated sarcasm toward the local media's "sentimental" concoction of an "encouraging promise of narrative resolution." At the same time, the "narratives" of the city's black and white communities, men and women, rich and poor, provoke something like amazement in this transplanted Hollywood writer, both for the sensationalist way they were reported and for the striking differences between them. What Didion doesn't grasp is that the New York media's mindless opportunism does the most surprisingly democratic things to the city's discourse of information. It creates what you might call an accidental conversation, in which opposing interests find themselves tossing about cheek to jowl on indiscriminate waves of images, print, and spoken words. Didion misses the general tendency of a very unsentimental New York not to divide itself neatly into "narratives" but, instead, to entangle itself chaotically in a very real web of mutual conflicts. She doesn't much care, however, about the common context that energizes antagonistic interests. T 0 apprehend that takes a thinking-through, not just a seeing-through. She is too busy guiding us through the way antagonistic interests and the sensationalist reporting of them look.

Consequently, Didion inaccurately interprets some of the city's least deceptive layers of appearance. The tabloids did indeed stress the jogger's "superior class," as Didion says, by referring to the "light gold chain around her slender neck" (Newsday) and her accent "suited to boardrooms" (the Daily News). But the tabloids were not, as she goes on to claim quoting from the News, divisively teaching "the city a lesson 'about courage and class."' If that' s what they had been doing, it might not have been so divisive after all--some narratives are a lot less pernicious than others and have unexpectedly universal effects. With their typical flair for the exploitable, the tabloids were offering an unlovely catharsis to the secret resentments of their readers, most of whom have little sympathy for the accent of the boardroom. To add another wrinkle of complication, those readers were black and Hispanic, as well as white. No matter what their color, many of them shared the same resentments; but they also shared the same openness to a "narrative resolution," and even to a lesson in "courage and class."

Maybe because she has the West Coaster's antipathy to wrinkles of whatever variety, Didion eventually drops the jogger case altogether and applies herself to pondering the nature of New York. Seeing stories everywhere perhaps inspires the urge to come up with your own, and Didion feels certain that in 1989 this city of 8 million people was "rapidly vanishing into the chasm between its actual life and its preferred narratives." Her sense of the occult mounts as she shifts her attention from the politics of race, crime, rape to the "system" itself, to the "chain of direct or indirect patronage extending deep into the fabric of the city." Ever the Californian, she makes an esoteric connection between New York's tragic violence and the fact that "there were in the five boroughs in 1990 only 581 supermarkets" and that--an even graver injustice in a city where everything is going down the tubes--"the in-sink garbage disposal unit is for example illegal in New York." She advises an immediate tax cut and a stronger hand with the unions.

Encumbered by the simplifying critical tools of narratives and subtexts, Didion is so convinced that the realities of big-city patronage and corruption make New York an abyss of malignant power structures that she sounds just as much like Dan Quayle as like her good friend Jerry Brown--who on occasion also sounds a lot like her. But the mismatch between New York's Byzantine tumult and Didion's like-wow cynicism might introduce a valuable truth. It could be that in her rumination on her new home, Didion is simply enacting her own point about the blurred lines between political positions. If so, we are confronted with the beginnings of a new narrative: the difference between a Hollywood liberal and a California conservative is only about three thousand miles.

LEE SIEGEL is a free-lance writer living in New York City.