This is a tale of what makes ordinary Hollywood folk the way they are - ruthless ambition, adultery, abortion, drugs, booze, nervous breakdown and nihilism. Every time a novelist skilfully bares the psychoses of those most damagingly affected by the motion-picture industry, somebody exclaims "Ah! Nathanael West!" Sure enough, Joan Didion's publisher makes that citation. Didion's Maria Wyeth is a hopeless beauty on the way out, an expert on betrayal, who is overwhelmed by the nothingness of her life in Beverly Hills and Las Vegas and spasmodically on location with her husband in the Mojave Desert. Didion has been highly praised for discovering America's Zeitgeist, a rattlesnake under a rock, in the 1960s, and portraying it so intelligently. Since the novel's first publication in 1970, nothing much has changed.
Patrick Skene Catling