Disconnections.

Where I Was From, by Joan Didion (Knopf, 240 pp., $23)

WHERE I WAS FROM turns out to be a complex title, for this is by no means a conventional autobiography, but an accounting of an exceptional sensibility. It describes the "where" Joan Didion's distinctive novelistic prose came from, and also suggests its problems. Novelist Thomas Mallon recently described it as "one of the most recognizable--and brilliant--literary styles to emerge in America during the past four decades," and said Didion is so "famously distrustful of abstraction" that she likes to put "skeptical quotation marks ... around all but the commonest nouns."

The "I" of the title refers to the sensibility in Didion's first novel, Run River (1963), both in its narrative discontinuities and its facticity. It may be that we should say "Didion's," to remind ourselves that this is but one of a great many Didions, perhaps more factually designated by a number than by the generalization of a noun. Writing in NATIONAL REVIEW, the astute Guy Davenport commented on Run River: "She knows the particular ... desolation of soul that would seem to be built into hotel rooms, the rat's maze of six-lane traffic in cities. This awful confusion is reflected in practically all writing, but Miss Didion's version is distinguished by her terrifying sense of what has been lost and how irreparable the damage is."

The "Where" of the title thus becomes in this book not only California but a state of mind, the arena for Didion in which a personal agon takes place, an arena in which selected facts clash with various illusions or collective myths about California, which have been and remain powerful in the mind of California, and, more generically, in the myth-making capacity of the human mind itself. One such myth is that of Old California destroyed by newcomers (a myth that remained alive in her powerful 1968 book Slouching Towards Bethlehem). She writes today: "Much in Run River, as I believed when I was writing it and as I read now, some four decades later, has to do with the ways California was or is 'changing,' the detailing of which pervades the novel with a tenacious (and, as I see now, pernicious) mood of nostalgia."

The idea of a genteel and mannerly Sacramento of her childhood, destroyed by the commercial developers and "flotsam of the new California" after World War II, was a sentimental illusion. The actual California, in its early days and now, she shows in Where I Was From, has been overwhelmingly a product of public and especially federal largesse: a subsidized Southern Pacific Railroad (enabled by the purchase, cheap, of federal land); vast federally subsidized farms and cattle ranches; colossal dams and irrigation projects, state and federally funded, that turned the great Central Valley from a desert into an agricultural bonanza; and an economic network, made possible by the real Gold Rush in Washington, D.C., that put stock tickers in thousands of farm houses.

Didion includes here a very fine literary and economic analysis of Frank Norris's novel The Octopus (1901), about the extraordinary reach and political power of the Southern Pacific Railroad. We learn that some of her ancestors, genuine pioneers, started out with the ill-fated Donner expedition but split off before the cannibalism in the deep snows of the Sierra Nevada range. With no small irony, the dust jacket shows a locomotive of the Southern Pacific pushing through such deep snows amid those mountains. Didion reminds us of how much the defense and aerospace industries have done to create the present southern California, essentially continuous with the old, with its gigantic, uniform subdivisions, with their anomie and manic sexuality (and, no doubt, enthusiasm for John Wayne movies). But the California Dream continues to be celebrated, amid much else in song and story, in the popularity of such kitsch as the luminous mountains of Bierstadt and windows of Thomas Kinkade.

So in her fiction Didion has been purging the myth through particularity, wary of nouns as such, sensing their generalizing nature. Yet the negative teleology of the word "From" in her title here cannot but issue ultimately in sterility. This dilemma goes as far back as the beginnings of Western thought: the sandstorm Heraclitus saw of particulars becoming an unknowable and nameless flux. The despair of the pre-Socratics became ultimately the transcendent Ideas of Plato, "Beauty bare," in Millay's words.

Didion's powerful mind and acute sensibility have resulted in the repetitious and anemic quality of her recent fiction. Her reader, submitting imaginatively to that prose, may achieve independent unity in a headache.

She unquestionably realizes that the best modern writers, aware of the sterility of flux, have sought paradigms of form, as Stephen Dedalus tried to "forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race"; as the later Joyce used a universal "mythic method" on his Odyssean quest; and as Eliot developed a special sense of the "tradition" from Homer through the present, but one reaching far back behind Homer, which, contemplated with sufficient intensity, can form a "simultaneous order." Ezra Pound's own Odyssean quest petered out among the glittering particulars along the Aegean shore, but Pound was not famous for intellect.

It is not yet clear whether Joan Didion--her uniqueness deserves that this generalization be sensed as a particular--will end up in the nowhere of a sandstorm of particulars, as far from possible from "where I was from"; or find, instead, a paradigm--perhaps of universal order--implicit in syntax itself as well as in her authentic experience. We are informed by her dust jacket that Didion now "lives in New York." That city does possess still palpable history, a great architecture, a famous spirit, and neighborhoods: thus much there there. Los Angeles it is not; hope lives.