Not to be confused with “The Book of Common Prayer”from the Anglican Church, one of Didion’s few fiction works follows two happenings on the fictional South American nation(state?) of Boca Grande. First is the appearance of a strange American woman with seemingly no connections to the island and nothing to do but wait around and be mildly inconvenient. The second being the political uprising happening within the controlling family which the narrator belongs to.
The novel slowly unfolds as if told much later in the future (or after blocking out some of the memories) by the main heiress of the Boca Grande and step-sister to the main political leaders. We learn that the American, Charlotte, is traveling while her daughter is wanted for a left-wing terrorist attack and seems to expect that she’ll show up on the island. There’s an obvious contrast here between the American leftist and the situation in an apparently communist country. As the political situation unfolds we see how the convergence of her (difficult) husband and (more difficult) ex-husband led her to escape. Throughout these events, the narrator tries to break through the conception of her daughter as an innocent child.
I still think that Joan Didion never put out a bad work but this one felt a little contrived. For example, there’s a whole introduction about the narrator being an amateur biochemist which only results in occasionally bad metaphors or Didion making both sides of the political divisions seem a little ridiculous. Some of the Cold War politics don’t really age well. The terrorist daughter is a bit of a caricature of an educated “champagne socialist” gone extreme without really adding much to the conversation. But the novel still holds together and unfolds wells. The character study of Charlotte and the narrator are both good as expected for a Didion critique of the California hippie type. This is a novel about the rich being out of touch both at home and abroad.
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