#36: Book Review: 'Run River' by Joan Didion

Published 1963

This book came to me via The Joan Didion Group Project that was started by Petya. In the last decade of my life I’ve gone from reading a book every week to hoping I would make it to the end of the year with twelve new books in my pocket. A book a month sounded easy and accessible. However, year after year, I failed. I saw my books lying around and decided to use them to stuff my bags instead. I scolded myself into reading only Dostoyevsky in slow motion; if I could not read anymore, I might as well turn to him.

A while ago, I stumbled across Petya’s page. Her devotion to reading and making a world of the things she read is both infectious and envy-worthy. There was no other thought in my head when I saw her Joan Didion post—I had to join in and start reading again. But also, I wanted to find out what the international obsession with Joan Didion was all about and why I wasn’t a part of it. I chose to read Run River, Joan’s debut novel, with the promise of a book review at the end of October. My choice was a random one, and for once, my randomness and lack of effort actually took me somewhere.

Spoilers ahead.

I sat with my eyes closed, the purple paperback on the dining table in front of me, thinking last thoughts after finishing the book. It was after everyone had gone to bed that I read the final words and I was too tired to write, although my mind, like a typewriter on speed wouldn’t stop forming and unforming opinions, thoughts, thoroughly wringing out emotion after emotion. It’s the kind of exhaustion you feel after a really, really good time and you wonder: is there anyone out there who wants to listen to me talk about it for the next three weeks?

I appreciated the way the book started off with the shocking events of 1959 and then broke away and went back in time to 1938 in order to bring us closer to the worlds of Lily, her husband Everett, their kids, and Everett’s sisters. At the end of the book we come back to 1959, back to that opening scene by the river, where Everett shot and killed possibly the last one of Lily’s lovers.

I read most of the book in the middle of the night, crouched near my sleeping baby, waiting for her to either wake up for a feed, or for myself to fall into a lull that would send me to sleep. Those nights were glorious, enchanting, filled with the hot California air, painted with layers and layers of Americanism and the deep-rooted history of life on a ranch. The characters scattered with my thoughts, doing this and that, and I loved every minute of their dulled lives. Joan was able to dig us into that soil of unresolved family trauma while describing miniature moments of what I understood as a contentment that goes mostly unnoticed by the characters.

It’s always a treat to go into a book that tells you things you’ve never known before, while sitting on the other side of the world, one that take you places you’ll never be able to go to. The kind of book that needles you into the details and personal lives of its characters, and Run River won on all fronts.

I’ve read Joan Didion before, once, a long time ago. She wasn’t very memorable then. I never thought I’d read her again, much less feel my heart fall down an inch as she wrote her lines, dreamily, wearily, with prose so strong yet so fragile that I almost wept when at one point I found myself sitting by myself with the afternoon sun sinking behind the shades, and really wept afterwards with my hands covering my eyes because I missed my husband who works most of the days of the week while Lily moves around hers with the utmost insouciance and lack of interest.

I believe that books read at the right time with the right frame of mind have the ability to alter your life and take you so far ahead of yourself that you begin to spin. This was my experience with Run River. The opening pages set a detective-novel tone that made me wander around the house for a few days, asking myself if I could go on, must I go on? Knowing how unfair it was to judge a book based on the first chapters I forced myself to.

I’m resisting the urge to be dramatic (and how could I not when books are involved?) but this is how it went: my mind grew wider and wider as the story unfolded, where I was taken into the corners of Lily Knight’s bedroom talking politics with her father, making sense of her mother after her father’s death, and into the scores of the furniture in Lily McClellan’s house, the children showing up as half-characters, having puréed carrots at two months old, and growing up in a space where their father, Everett, shows little to no interest in knowing them, or being in close proximity to them or the woman who carried them.

Everett McClennan, a man whom I felt less than curious about, called for no empathy or resentment from my side, as he wafted through the pages like a mellow ghost whose only solace was making it to the end of the day. You confuse his tendency to overlook her silent cries for attention with neglect, although we are shown that he does have thoughts like the rest of them. But all he is able to do is crumble his feelings like paper and stuff them into his pockets, waiting for no one to see, not caring for anyone to know how he truly felt or wanted things to be. You can tell he cared about his family, his sisters mostly, but you could also squint really hard in attempt to believe it was genuine.

Lily, on the other hand, I warmed up to in a completely unnatural way. I wanted to dislike her actions and judge her with the rest of them but I couldn’t. What made her who she was? What created that side of her that can only be described as the adulterer, the women still being called by her maiden name because she was seen by the rest of them as “the easiest to get in bed”? I don’t understand her and in my lack of understanding I found a safe space for her in my heart. I wanted to take her by the bony shoulders and tell her it was okay, everything was okay, the same way she assured Everett after he pulled the trigger.

A couple of scenes stay with me. You see Lily lying in a hospital bed after giving birth, her husband nowhere to be seen, and Joan trying to tell us she cared, she cared so much that she thought about her first time with Everett down by the river. And despite his lack of interest in her now, and her devastation at the distance between them (created purposely by him), she held her memories tenderly and often went back to them as a soothing mechanism. In another scene, coming back from the city after aborting her lover’s baby, she sits and watches the rest of the town and her guilt sets in, for not being the right wife for him, the tan-skinned woman dressed in clean linen, waiting to be taken to dinner in a country club, instead of what she was, sat paralyzed in her stained-silk suit, utterly numbed and shut off the world she knew. Over the pages you get to appreciate the necessity of her legs—an apparatus that are able to take her places looking for comfort in anywhere, anyone, and anything.

Run River, published in 1963, holds memories of a California sunset no more, and even though the land and the sky may seem the same today, the people who walked through it once upon a time have changed. It was a brilliant leap back, a deep plunge into the lives of people who held different values, memories, and dreams for the future. I tried my best to give this book less than a five star rating but didn’t want to be unfair. It will probably stick with me for a long, long time. It’s a beautifully written adventure, wrapped with sorrow and violence, but like a garden that has been exposed to the sun for too long, it holds within it secrets of decomposed glory, hidden deep under the roots.

I finally understand why the world has been salivating and obsessing over Joan Didion for so long. I will probably join the masses, as much as I try to avoid the mainstream. I can still appreciate that there is no avoiding Joan, who is no doubt in my mind one of the greatest writers of our time. I still have a long way to go to delve into the rest of her work. But for now I’ll keep my heart and mind in this book, next to the river, where everyone and everything seems to start and end.