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Joan Didion
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Democracy Paperback – April 25, 1995

by Joan Didion (Author)
4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 164 ratings
See all formats and editions
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From the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I Mean—a gorgeously written, bitterly funny look at the relationship between politics and personal life.

Moving deftly between romance, farce, and tragedy, from 1970s America to Vietnam to Jakarta, Democracy is a tour de force from a writer who can dissect an entire society with a single phrase.

Inez Victor knows that the major casualty of the political life is memory. But the people around Inez have made careers out of losing track. Her senator husband wants to forget the failure of his last bid for the presidency. Her husband's handler would like the press to forget that Inez's father is a murderer. And, in 1975, America is doing its best to lose track of its one-time client, the lethally hemorrhaging republic of South Vietnam.

As conceived by Joan Didion, these personages and events constitute the terminal fallout of democracy, a fallout that also includes fact-finding junkets, senatorial groupies, the international arms market, and the Orwellian newspeak of the political class.
Previous page
  1. Print length
    240 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Vintage
  4. Publication date
    April 25, 1995
  5. Dimensions
    5.2 x 0.61 x 7.97 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0679754857
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0679754855
  8. Lexile measure
    1130L
  9. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"A gem . . . a beautifully composed story that moves with effortless authority and becomes astonishingly moving. . . . Stirring and memorable." —Newsday

"Striking, provocative, and brilliantly written." —The Atlantic

From the Inside Flap

knows that the major casualty of the political life is memory. But the people around Inez have made careers out of losing track. Her senator husband wants to forget the failure of his last bid for the presidency. Her husband's handler would like the press to forget that Inez's father is a murderer. And, in 1975, the year in which much of this bitterly funny novel is set, America is doing its best to lose track of its one-time client, the lethally hemorrhaging republic of South Vietnam.

As conceived by Joan Didion, these personages and events constitute the terminal fallout of democracy, a fallout that also includes fact-finding junkets, senatorial groupies, the international arms market, and the Orwellian newspeak of the political class. Moving deftly from Honolulu to Jakarta, between romance, farce, and tragedy, Democracy is a tour de force from a writer who can dissect an entire society with a single phrase.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; 1st Edition thus (April 25, 1995)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 240 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0679754857
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0679754855
  • Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1130L
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.2 x 0.61 x 7.97 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 164 ratings

About the author

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Joan Didion

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion was born in Sacramento in 1934 and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1956. After graduation, Didion moved to New York and began working for Vogue, which led to her career as a journalist and writer. Didion published her first novel, Run River, in 1963. Didion’s other novels include A Book of Common Prayer (1977), Democracy (1984), and The Last Thing He Wanted (1996).

Didion’s first volume of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, was published in 1968, and her second, The White Album, was published in 1979. Her nonfiction works include Salvador (1983), Miami (1987), After Henry (1992), Political Fictions (2001), Where I Was From (2003), We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order to Live (2006), Blue Nights (2011), South and West (2017) and Let Me Tell You What I Mean (2021). Her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2005.

In 2005, Didion was awarded the American Academy of Arts & Letters Gold Medal in Criticism and Belles Letters. In 2007, she was awarded the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. A portion of National Book Foundation citation read: "An incisive observer of American politics and culture for more than forty-five years, Didion’s distinctive blend of spare, elegant prose and fierce intelligence has earned her books a place in the canon of American literature as well as the admiration of generations of writers and journalists.” In 2013, she was awarded a National Medal of Arts and Humanities by President Barack Obama, and the PEN Center USA’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

Didion said of her writing: "I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” She died in December 2021.

For more information, visit www.joandidion.org

Photo credit: Brigitte Lacombe

Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5 stars
4.3 out of 5
164 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Totally unbiased reviewer
5.0 out of 5 stars My favorite Didion book.
Reviewed in the United States on September 11, 2015
Verified Purchase
I have four of of Didion's five novels (I haven't read the first one yet) and this is my favorite. And although I haven't yet read all of her non-fiction, this is my favorite so far of any of her books.

The writing is pristine. It is very spare. Every word, every sentence well chosen.

There actually isn't much of a story. It's more a study in character. It's really more like a long short story than a novel.

But it held my interest throughout.

If you love the craftsmanship of writing, include this book on your list of great examples.
17 people found this helpful
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Jon Linden
4.0 out of 5 stars Glimpses Of Democracy
Reviewed in the United States on March 6, 2006
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Didion's style in this book is truly arresting. At points, the reader is just stopped, in consideration of what the author has just revealed. Her book is interesting in its style. She does in fact talk to the reader several times through the book. She develops the characters in glimpses and the plot as well; as she moves through the story of her protagonist's life. She describes a prior attempt at Democracy, that did not come to fruition. And she mixes in a dash of American Democracy and its elections and nominations.

Set in circa 1975 mostly, it speaks about the end of the Viet Nam war, but through the side long glances of people who were involved, but not talking about the fighting. Her depiction of the era and the locales is very precise, despite its exposition in little bits and pieces. The story is gripping, although not suspenseful. The book surely does exhibit Didion in one of her best written fictional books.

As a journalistically styled piece the book does a very fine job of helping people start to understand the ephemeral attitude of the people and the country in the days of the war. Disillusionment abounds. Death and destruction and human suffering are implied, but not explicitly discussed. And the message, that of one who is always trying to find oneself, but may be lost in her own mind, is universal.

The book is especially recommended for readers who are interested in the late `60's early `70's era in America. The book is truly a fine piece of literature, surrounded by events and scenery, much more than driven by the plot. But the statement is well worth reading.
20 people found this helpful
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PtrD
5.0 out of 5 stars One of the great writers of our time.
Reviewed in the United States on November 11, 2015
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Just another great Didion tale. This one, of an Hawaiian WASP family and their travails. One of the great writers of our time.
3 people found this helpful
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Dana Hufford
5.0 out of 5 stars is Joan Didion great, or what
Reviewed in the United States on February 18, 2018
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Boy, is Joan Didion great, or what?
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David J. B. Singer, MD
5.0 out of 5 stars DIDION A GREAT WRITER OF THE 60'S AND BEYOND
Reviewed in the United States on October 17, 2015
Verified Purchase
MS. DIDION A GREAT WRITER OF THE 60'S AND BEYOND...DESERVING TO BE READ
2 people found this helpful
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Jameel
3.0 out of 5 stars Democracy: A Dud
Reviewed in the United States on June 14, 2001
Joan Didion's novel "Democracy," is one about American Politics and the Vietnam War, public and private live, the media, and to an extent image management. The story, however, focuses mostly on Inez Victor, the daughter of a powerful Hawaiian congressman. I personally found the book to be quite a bore, as there simply weren't many "jolts" to keep a teenager like me interested. This being said, I did enjoy a couple of things about the novel. The first would be the way that Didion inserts herself into her novels. She puts herself into the novel as a character narrating the events and inserting her own thoughts as if she was there, in the novel. I also enjoyed reading about the mysterious Jack Lovett. I felt that this character was a brilliant creation by Didion. This is simply because, although he is very close to Inez, no one ever knows what he actually does. He is described as an army officer, a man who sets up export credit programs and AID funding, and an aircraft executive. He refers to himself as a "business man." Those were probably the only two things I really enjoyed about this novel. I wouldn't recommend it as a summer reading, but if you choose to defy my wishes, then read it for stylistic analysis of Didion's writing, if anything.
4 people found this helpful
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Justin
4.0 out of 5 stars Decent
Reviewed in the United States on August 12, 2013
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Enjoyed the book, but it is not at the same level as Didion's essays which are masterful. The fictional Joan Didion that is inside the pages of the novel is an interesting ploy but becomes a little tiresome as the book continues. If looking for thought-provoking employment of metafiction I'd go for Pale Fire or If on a Winter's Night a Traveller.
One person found this helpful
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Paul Frandano
5.0 out of 5 stars Kenneth, What Is the Frequency?
Reviewed in the United States on January 16, 2020
Ah...Joan Didion’s Democracy…opaque, discursive, mysterious, hums with a sense of quietly lurking menace, fragmented time, a time, Didion observes...as "Joan Didion," inserting herself into her work of fiction, an observer in this novel, who is relating her imaginative yarn as a journalist's quest for an assembled-and-organized meaning, a "Rosebud," to all these disparate snippets of time, place, personality, calling cards, rumors, last-minute flights to exotic destinations, press clippings, photos, oddly angled interviews, flash back, flash forward, all against the backdrop of the 1975 American evacuation from Southeast Asia...a time, a fantastic time, captured in the detached, almost surreal DidionVoice, observently, taking all into consideration as what one character notes as "'the long view' (by which) I (Didion) believe she meant history, more exactly the particular undertow of having and not having, the convulsions of a world largely unaffected by the individual efforts of anyone in it," a characterization various men and women of a certain disposition, including a central character, the well-heeled political wife Inez Christian Victor, tend to deny by virtue of their own experiences but yet are randomly, indiscriminately swept up in...

This is a novel of ellipses. Things fall apart, but they also trail off… Haunting, with sentences so sharp and surprising and economical and hinting at such depths of facticity and reasoned consideration that I had to stop and stare at these...these...these gists of worlds below the surface, trying to imagine how Didion manages to thread so much together into tight, lucid epigrams and aphorisms.

That said, a Didion “like” does not mean “for every taste.” She seems to piss off as many people as she delights. I'm a Vietnam-era vet, and the evacuation is vivid in my memory, as is the surreality of Michael Herr’s Dispatches and Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato, and there were still Jack Lovett-style cowboys/international men of mystery aboard when I joined the US intelligence community. I enjoyed—no, I delighted in--the book's patient, deflecting discursiveness more than most readers will. Reviewers go off on her for her seemingly random structures.

As some literatus has blurbed on the back cover, "Didion can dissect an entire society with a single phrase." Well, here, she dissects a world at a very specific moment in chaotic time. I’m absolutely stuck on Joan Didion and have begun ripping through her oeuvre, fact, fiction, essays and all. I really go for her gonzo style…
5 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

hampsre
5.0 out of 5 stars Like a trip back in time to the 20th century
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 31, 2017
Verified Purchase
Like a trip back in time to the 20th century... True Didion I actually passed it on to share it with friends. Funny this was not seized for a movie or or TV mini series at the time.
One person found this helpful
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