Democracy

But the people around her have made careers out of losing track. Her senator husband wants to forget the failure of his last bid for the presidnecy. Her husband’s handler would like the press to forget that Inez’s father is a murderer. And, in 1975, the year in which 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. These personages/events constitute the terminal fallout of democracy in Joan Didion’s novel; a fallout zone that suffers from the Orwellian newspeak of the political class. Witness her tour de force dissection.