by Joan Didion
my very quick goodreads review: forgoes any sense of narrative structure to be “meta” / self aware, but only fictionally. I liked the style, but I could definitely understand not liking it–it gets confusing and muddle-ly in its way.
for example:
“Billy Dillon once asked me if I thought Inez would have left that night had Jack Lovett not been there. Since human behavior seems to me essentially circumstantial I have not much feeling for this kind of question. The answer of course is no, but the answer is irrelevant, because Jack Lovett was there.” p. 186 … or … “It occurs to me that Inez Victor’s behavior the night she flew to Hong Kong may not have been so circumstantial after all. // She had to have a passport with her, didn’t she? // What does that suggest? // You tell me.” p. 188
“When novelists speak of the unpredictability of human behavior they usually mean not unpredictability at all but a higher predictability, a more complex pattern discernible only after the fact.” p. 215