Slouching Towards Bethlehem is an assortment of essays by observed American author Joan Didion. Recently published in different magazines, they were written as independent essays somewhere in the range of 1965 and 1967. Here they are specifically connected to introduce a sharp, insightful, severe, and frequently interesting portrait of a woman searching for her character and for the spirit of her country while caught in 1960s boredom. Slouching Towards Bethlehem is viewed as an advanced classic, frequently held up as the best quality level for the contemporary essay and instructed generally in college classrooms.
The principal segment of the book, "Lifestyles in the Golden Land," contains eight essays that to a great extent chronicle Didion's experiences in her native California. The image that Didion presents of the Golden State is inconsistent with the image of California that was well known at the time. She challenges the idea that the state is a land where there is garish celebrities, influencing palm trees, untainted beaches, and a practically achievable degree of excitement and riches—as such, and the American Dream writ enormous. Didion discovers California a heartless landscape verging on a no wasteland of tract lodging, lost dreams, and broke endeavors at rehash.
For proof of this vision, Didion's essays catch the narratives of a diverse gathering of Californians. In one essay, "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream," she gives a journalistic record of a San Bernardino woman on trials for setting her husband ablaze. In another, "John Wayne: A Love Song," she investigates the profession of the amazing famous actor, not in typical biographical terms, however as a folklore that he and the film industry made, both about Wayne himself and about the American West all in all.
The title essay shows up in this segment of the book, diagramming Didion's time in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco during the 1960s; her experience, nonetheless, is not that it is a position of hippie love and quiet ideals however a nook of aimlessness, dependence, and alienated youth. These stories, Didion is stating here, could just originate from California, testing the common thought of the Land of Milk and Honey.
The second section, suitably titled "Personals," is a progression of essays about Didion's own life. In one of her most acclaimed pieces, "On Keeping a Notebook," she investigates her inclination to keep notebooks to document the careful subtleties of her life and craftsmanship. In "On Self-Respect" and "On Morality," she takes a gander at the ideas of confidence, self-esteem, and moral standards when all is said in done, and what they mean in mid-twentieth-century America. In "I Can't Get That Monster Out of Mind," Didion inspects her association with Hollywood, which she feels has sucked the masterfulness and imagination out of filmmaking. In "On Going Home," Didion exhibits an individual story of visiting her family of origin to praise her daughter's first birthday celebration.
"Personals" takes a large number of the themes examined on a bigger and more extensive scale in the first section and laser-centers them around explicit emotions, occasions, and perspectives from Didion's very own life. Subsequently, the reader sees that Didion is both a result of her time and place and furthermore separate from it. She exhibits a consciousness of the constraints of the American dream—yet, simultaneously, an association with the vastness of the inventive imagination.
The third and final portion of the book is "Seven Places of the Mind." Here, Didion relates episodes from her life that occurred in places other than California. These were regions she either lived in or visited. Among them is a dismemberment of her visit to Newport, Rhode Island ("The Seacoast of Despair"), home to some of America's most established and most superb ocean side chateaus. As Didion strolls through their hallowed halls, she adjusts to the enduring of the women who once lived in these spots, subdued by their social orders and families and compelled to resign to their bedchambers depleted from headaches.
As she visits Hawaii ("Letter from Paradise, 21° 19′ N., 157° 52′ W"), Didion is less moved by the magnificence and greatness of the Islands and more devoured by musings of World War II and the deaths that happened at Pearl Harbor. The final essay, "Goodbye to All That," is about the first time through Didion lived in New York City as a young woman. Upon first arrival, the giganticness of the spot cringes her however fills her with expectation and assumption regarding every one of the conceivable outcomes it holds. Before the finish of the essay, she is planning to leave New York (she would return for good years later), having become worn out and bored with all the "promise" that she at first felt.
This third segment is not travel writing in the customary sense, however place figures noticeably in the essays. Or maybe, it is a travelogue of the psyche. The absence of satisfaction Didion finds on her adventures represents the pessimism and disappointment of a huge number of Americans trapped in the social, political, and cultural upheaval of the 1960s, demonstrating, maybe, the old saying that where you go, there you are.
At last, nonetheless, Slouching Towards Bethlehem is not a discouraging series of meditations on American life during a specific period in our modern history. It is a determined voyage through the different stories that make up both the life of one author and the country she calls home. Recounting to our accounts stories is important to the endurance of the individual and to society. In one of her later essays, "The White Album," Didion would examine this subject in more profundity; one of that piece's progressively well known lines can envelop the extent of Slouching Towards Bethlehem, as well: "We tell ourselves stories in order to live."
