The other night, reading Amor Towles' “A Gentleman in Moscow” on my Kindle, I looked up the word desultory the way you do on an e-reader—highlighting the word, and if you're connected to wi-fi, getting the answer from whatever dictionary has an agreement with Amazon. Yesterday, after hearing of the death of Joan Didion at the age of 87, I was looking through the books of hers that I owned, and in “Salvador,” which I'd read in the mid-90s, I found I'd underlined the word desultory and wrote its meaning in the margins. Lesson? Tech may change the way we read but I learn nothing. 

A lot of encomia for Didion in the usual places—The New York Times, social media, fans and fans and fans—but she's never been an author who blew me away with her insights. I remember reading “Salvador” and thinking, “Where's the oomph?” Norman Mailer roared in, demanded, made a fool of himself, then wrote about it. He was, in a word he liked to overuse, engagé. Didion wasn't. At all. She held the world at an ironic distance, and maybe I had too much of that in myself to admire it in others. She went to places and interviewed people but it all seemed a little distasteful to her. Apparently she didn't like interviewing people. She assumed they would lie, or miss the point, or self-mythologize. She wasn't wrong. 

She made a name for herself with her “Slouching Towards Bethlehelm” piece in The Saturday Evening Post, when you could say she was part of the media missing the mark or manufacturing the story (apparently the cover was designed before she turned the piece in); then she spent much of the rest of her career writing about the media missing the mark or manufacturing the story. I think those are some of her best pieces: “Insider Baseball,” for example, about the way the press covered the 1988 presidential campaign, and “Sentimental Journeys,” about the Central Park Jogger case. She was one of the first in the press to imply that the Central Park Five received nothing like a fair trial. The press and the politicians made a symbol out of the jogger, and another type of symbol out of the Five, and for the city to survive the negative symbol had to be punished and put away and forgotten. We still do this, by the way. We've actually gotten worse at it. We're all the press now and we make symbols of everything. 

I think she got Obama's 2008 election wrong, or she took the easy way out and mocked those who were way too exuberant in its aftermath; but at least she was less wrong than some, like Daryl Pickney, with whom her thoughts were partnered in The New York Review of Books. He wrote: “The election of Senator Obama to the presidency signals our return to a nation whose government respects law and order.” He wrote: “President Obama will certainly save the Supreme Court and therefore the US Constitution. The integrity of our institutions has been guaranteed, restored.” Ouch and ouch.

In my trip through my decades-old margin scribblings in her books, I didn't come across much worth repeating, save one thing in “Salvador.” It was about the crash of a helicopter that killed a colonel whom she was trying to meet, and subsequent reports were so vague as to be nonexistent. She writes; “In the absence of information (and the presence, often, of disinformation) even the most apparently straightforward event takes on, in El Salvador, elusive shadows, like a fragment of retrieved legend.” You can remove “in El Salvador” from that sentence now; that's all of us now. Then she went to interview Alvaro Magana, president of El Salvador during this time, but his hold was tenuous, as he knew above all. Her questions to him were answered with indefinites: “I read that,” and “I have that impression,” and finally, when she asks simply where the crash took place, he says “I didn't ask him.” The him is a general. Didion gives Magana a look, he shrugs and says:

I have a problem there. I'm supposed to be the commander-in-chief, so if I ask him he should tell me. But he might say he's not going to tell me, then I would have to arrest him. So I don't ask.

That feels like the GOP with Trump now. They're the officials, they should hold the power, but the power is elsewhere. It's with someone who lost in a way it's never been with someone who lost. Did she ever write about Trump? I'll have to search that out. (Apparently not.) I'll also have to get “Where I Was From,” whose subject, Menand says, is “American self-deception,” and good god that topic. That never ends.

I do recommend Louis Menand's 2015 review of a biography on her. There's a lot there. I also think she would think that much of the encomia following her passing misses the mark. I think she would have something biting to say about it all.