The water off Malibu is neither as clear nor as tropically colored as the water off La Jolla. The beaches at Malibu are neither as white nor as wide as the beach at Carmel. The hills are scrubby and barren, infested with bikers and rattlesnakes, scarred with cuts and old burns and new R.V. parks. For these and other reasons Malibu tends to astonish and disappoint those who have never before seen it, and yet its very name remains, in the imagination of people all over the world, a kind of shorthand for the easy life. I had not before 1971 and will probably not again live in a place with a Chevrolet named after it.
Joan Didion, “Quiet Days in Malibu” from The White Album
Sometimes I wonder if I’m just a stuffed shirt, out of step and out of touch. I grew up before Whole Language napalmed American literacy so I learned to read the language itself, its sound and rhythm and meaning. I read copiously because I had fun reading, because every closed book pestered me find out what lurked within. I bumped my noggin on books that were too hard for me. I re-read my favorites down to wood pulp. I still do. Later, old-biddy schoolmarms laid seige to my passion. We diagrammed sentences but we didn’t read them. We memorized words but never used them. We passed tests but learned nothing. Eventually a healer would gallop to the rescue, cure my broken heart and let me love again. Most precious were the tribal shamans who worked me to exhaustion while subtly monitoring my muse’s health, alert to the slightest malaise.
I have quoted three sentences above by Joan Didion as a reproach to anyone who thinks that writing is easy. Prose this good does not pour out with nary a spill or splash along the way. Didion is enormously gifted. But she hones, polishes, and crafts her prose with immaculate care. I wonder just how many revisions she needed to whittle and sand those sentences into their final shapes. They’re breathtaking.
There’s nothing special about Malibu: La Jolla has better water, Carmel has better beaches. A pair of sentences snap together like the antecedent and consequent of a musical period. Then comes the real tour de force: paired adjectives describe the hills’ natural state (scrubby, barren) then, as nouns, become dangerous living beings (bikers, rattlesnakes) that cause traumas: cuts, burns, R.V. parks. How carefully Didion avoids rhythmic tedium! Two clauses contain paired items (the adjectives, the living beings) but the third clause breaks the rhythm with a triplet (three traumas) but retains an interior pairing (old burns and new trailer parks) for balance.
For these and other reasons: the pair leitmotif again. Another pair: newcomers are astonished and disappointed—but the astonishment must precede the disappointment, not the other way around. A final pair: I had not before…not again. Then the screwball non-sequitur punchline, delivered with the bang-on timing of a master comedian.
Water, beaches, hills. Bikers, rattlesnakes, cuts, burns, trailer parks. Disappointment. Chevrolet.
116 words.
Wow.