Didion Goes 'South and West' For Fragments of Americana

The prose of Joan Didion is a kind of fog, rendering everything opalescent with fresh, weird light. It's the world you know, except not quite. Her idiosyncratic genius is in full evidence in , a slim new volume that collects two fragments that never quite turned into published essays. Ideas and images come into quick relief: the “morbid luminescence” of New Orleans, the entire notion of California summoned up with unteachable prose: “Rattlers in the dry grass. Sharks beneath the Golden Gate.”