NP's California, but Joan Didion's California

[Jerome Park]

Joan Didion's California is a place defined not so much by what her
unwavering eye observes, but by what her memory cannot let go. Although her
essays and novels are set amid the effluvia of a new golden state peopled
by bored socialites, lost flower children and unsentimental engineers, all
is measured against the memory of the old California. And in telling what
has happened to California in the past few decades, Didion finds a metaphor
for some larger, insidious process at work in American society. The
theatrics of James Pike, Episcopal Bishop of California, became a parable
of the American penchant for discarding history and starting tabula rasa;
the plight of a San Bernardino woman accused of murdering her husband, a
lesson in misplaced dreams.

http://www.nytimes.com/1979/06/10/books/didion-calif.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
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