Golden Grouse.

Political Fictions, by Joan Didion (Knopf, 338 pp., $25)

Getting a hold on Joan Didion, the essayist and novelist, is tricky. She's someone who as a high-school girl in central California "on the whole preferred to spend time" with people who "hung out in gas stations." This she states on the first page of the first of the essays in this book. On the other hand, she writes mainly for The New York Review of Books, from which these essays about the last four presidential elections are collected, and sees the world much as do the bulk of its readers. You won't find the NYRB on sale in any gas-station magazine racks.

With all her contradictions, Didion is always worth reading; not chiefly for the conclusions she draws-here, about American politics and the "disenfranchisement" of voters by a quasi-conspiracy of the liberal media acting on behalf of right-wing pooh-bahs-but for her style. Or, more aptly perhaps, for her schtick.

The key to understanding this schtick is to realize that she comes from Sacramento, the wasteland of heat and boredom from which the state of California is governed. Her pioneer-stock family were Republicans from way back. As she tells us in her introduction, she would have remained a Republican, voting for Barry Goldwater in every presidential election if she'd been given the opportunity. But then came the usurpation of the party by inauthentic conservatives like Ronald Reagan, interested less in keeping government small and frugal than in using it to advance sinister designs having to do with "moral rearmament." So, out of loyalty to the Didion family's GOP roots, she became a Democrat.

In the decades since she graduated from Berkeley, she has moved back and forth between New York and Los Angeles; and everything she has written can be understood as a working out of her vision of herself as a Sacramento girl peering at this world from the perspective of her lost pioneer-stock Republican family. That's the schtick. The decay of families like hers has been a theme in her novels, beginning with the first, Run River, about a decayed old-stock Sacramento-delta family that had probably been voting Republican from way back.

The schtick manifests itself in a certain delicious paranoia, which can be enjoyed even in Didion's nonfiction if you think of the nonfiction as if it were fiction. The basic theme of this book is that somehow both liberals and conservatives have an interest in narrowing the field of crucial voters. Sometimes these voters are called the Reagan Democrats, sometimes the Perot voters; in Didion's view, both parties assiduously cultivate this swing vote through a symbolic language of campaign platitudes, while the rest of the public is progressively turned off from politics and ceases to vote altogether.

Now, Didion wonders what would happen if this swing constituency, which speaks to the political class in focus groups where they are fed cold cuts and paid $35 per sitting, were to turn "revolutionary." Already she has observed, in the impeachment of Bill Clinton, "certain factors that seemed distinctly exotic to the politics of the United States." In other words, a failed coup: "What we now know occurred was a covert effort to advance a particular agenda by bringing down a president." This is of course a fiction-a "political fiction," if you will-but it's expressed with such a distinct style, and creates such a delicately terrorized atmosphere, that a reader in the correct mood won't begrudge her the fantasy of her right- wing takeover plot. You have, of course, to be the kind of reader who enjoys Robert Ludlum novels.

For such a reader, the little Didionesque notes are highly enjoyable. There is, for example, the use of certain repeated phrases to enhance the atmosphere. For decades, she has been very keen on the word "certain," with its hint of paradox and danger: "There were certain people who ran the story in Vietnam, there were certain people in Central America, there were certain people in Washington." There is also the phrase "there is" or "there was"; the following series is taken from pages 138 and 139: "There was the picture, taken the day before the Georgia, Maryland, and Colorado primaries ," "There was, when Governor Clinton was campaigning ," "There was the apparently unmonitored decision ," "There was the equivocal response to the May 1992 Los Angeles riots ."

There is also the telltale use of middle initials. Anyone designated by his full name, including middle initial, is to be regarded as one of the covert operatives seeking to bring down the presidency, or a stooge of the covert operatives. Once she has included you in this dark fraternity, you are never again referred to without the middle initial: "William J. Bennett," "Robert H. Bork," "John J. DiIulio Jr.," even "Thomas L. Friedman." There is the use of scare quotes, which I recall ("I recall" is another Didion phrase) a high-school English-composition teacher warning me against but which in fact lend a delectable echo of dread. Thus, in Didion's view, the conservative Independent Women's Forum isn't a women's group but rather a "women's group." One doesn't homeschool one's children; one "homeschools" them.

Nor do you have to regard Newt Gingrich-"Newton Leroy Gingrich," in Didion's telling-as a weird, squirming spider to be held at arm's length, as she does, to enjoy her 1995 dissection of him ("Newt Gingrich, Superstar"). She has particular fun with the nutty Gingrich vision of the future in his book Window of Opportunity, which includes, among other things, his predictions of a "diagnostic chair" or "personalized health chair." She writes: "To know that large numbers of Americans are concerned about getting adequate medical care is one thing; to give them the willies by talking about their 'health chairs' is quite another, suggesting not the future but the past, the drone of the small-town autodidact, the garrulous bore in the courthouse square." This is joyfully mean writing that will give a guilty chuckle even to those who consider Gingrich a basically positive figure in recent political history.

Once the charm of the Didion schtick has worn off, however, the plain facts begin to appear: first, that her big observations aren't always very original. Often the punchline of her New York Review of Books political reportage is just a cliche from the trove of cliches you'd hear at any Manhattan Sunday brunch attended by the kind of people who read The New York Review of Books. So, for example, she concludes about President Reagan and his role in Iran-Contra: "This was a president who understood viscerally that what makes a successful motion picture is exactly a foolish enterprise, a lonely quest, a lost cause, a fight against the odds: undertaken, against the best advice of those who say it cannot be done, by someone Americans can root for. Cut, print." In other words, Reagan was basically just an actor portraying a president. For this news we needed to read an essay some 18,000 words in length?

Second, paranoia tends (another favorite Didion word: "tends") to go hand in hand with cynicism, and cynicism really does wear thin after 300-plus pages. There is almost nothing about which Didion is not cynical, from George W. Bush's motivation in embracing Marvin Olasky's concept of faith- based organizations (purely political) to the idea of medical savings accounts ("a way of phasing out the concept of medical insurance by calling the phase-out 'Medisave'"). There are a few exceptions to her pervasive cynicism. There is Jerry Brown's 1992 presidential candidacy (when campaigning in New York, Brown would "camp out" in the apartment of Didion and her husband). And, of course, there is anything having to do with old-time California, including Gov. Pat Brown and her old pioneer- stock grandfather, who warned her against the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. "It's not constitutional," he said, "so don't say it."

For paranoia to be really effective, there has to be something or someone- a beloved person or country-about whose safety you can be paranoid. This is what marks the best paranoid thrillers, whether movies or novels: There's always a wife, girlfriend, child, or whatever, in danger. To be the subject of paranoia, the beloved must exist-and not, like the Sacramento of the 1950s, have passed into oblivion half a century ago. It's not clear what Didion finds lovable about today's endangered America. Till the rise of inauthentic conservatism, she tells us, American politics was "an essentially pragmatic process by which the differing needs and rights of the nation's citizens [got] balanced and to some degree met." As an ideal to be striven for, this vision of politics is rather underwhelming; and her paranoia therefore tends to shade over into sourness. One of her essays in The New York Review of Books every couple of years is great fun; at book length, however, the reader himself is left feeling rather sour.