At least four of Didion’s five novels have as their central characters wealthy or upper-middle-class women with both significant strengths and profound weaknesses. They are prone to flee rather than fight, and usually make a series of poor choices that lead to insanity or death. In A Book of Common Prayer, Charlotte Douglas, the central character, leaves her second husband, stable attorney Leonard, in San Francisco and flees through the United States with her first husband, irresponsible Warren Bogart. Pregnant with Leonard’s child, Charlotte drifts south with Warren, the father of her first child, Marin, a revolutionary fugitive, finally settling alone in the fictitious Central American country of Boca Grande.
Charlotte is strong enough to perform a tracheotomy on a choking man but too weak to resist the sexual attractions of her first husband or any other man—and they are usually not nice men—who appeals to her sexually. Warren Bogart is portrayed as a sexually compelling alcoholic with a mean tongue who occasionally has tender moments. After leaving Warren, who is dying of cancer, Charlotte travels from city to city, delivering a premature baby girl who dies in her arms in Mérida. Her journey ends in Boca Grande, a hot, small country on the verge of revolution. There she becomes friends with Grace Strasser-Mendana, a widowed anthropologist who narrates the novel, and has affairs with Grace’s brother-in-law as well as her son.
Grace is the character whom the reader comes to know best. Fiercely intellectual, always striving for detachment, Grace was a well-published anthropologist from Denver when she married a wealthy planter from Boca Grande and gave up her profession. To occupy her time, however, she studied biochemistry in depth, discovering that fear of the dark is a protein that can be synthesized in the laboratory. Now dying of cancer at age 60, Grace remains in the country because she finds peace in its “opaque equatorial light.” Grace is narrating events after their conclusion. Thus we know at the beginning that Charlotte will die in Boca Grande, and the movement of the fiction is not chronological but thematic, focused on incidents of characters’ lives and on the changes that take place in Grace’s attitude toward Charlotte. She states at the opening that the novel is her “witness” to the life and death of Charlotte Douglas, but by the book’s conclusion she has become a player in Charlotte’s life. Charlotte insists on considering Boca Grande as a series of tourist attractions, while Grace tries to show her the depressing realities. Grace fails to persuade Charlotte to leave the country when a revolution is imminent, and when she returns, she finds Charlotte’s body on the lawn of the American embassy. No one knows which side shot her.
Grace takes care of Charlotte in death, securing a coffin and sending her body to San Francisco. She also fulfills Charlotte’s implicit request that she find Marin and inform her of her mother’s love and her death. She finds Marin in a dirty room in an apartment in Buffalo, still openly rejecting her mother and her values, but breaking down when Grace reminds her of a particular childhood trip that they took together.
No one in A Book of Common Prayer expresses love for anyone else in words, but Grace, Leonard, and Charlotte express affection and commitment through their actions. Grace and Leonard each try to protect Charlotte both emotionally and physically. Charlotte tried to save her premature baby, and in Boca Grande she devotes herself to a clinic providing vaccinations for children and birth control for women. In the end Charlotte dies, her baby dies, and Grace is close to death. Through loving actions as well as the title of the book, Didion is dramatizing ideas that are both spiritual and existential. We have death in common, but we can care for each other in this life. We can also use words to pray for each other; the book is in fact a prayer for Charlotte, her family, and the little country that is torn by revolution on a regular basis. Although Grace planned to be a “witness” to Charlotte’s life in a dispassionate account, she actually served as a maternal, spiritual, and mentoring figure who loaned Charlotte the “grace” of truth and love.
Delusion is another prominent theme, as it is in most of Didion’s work. Charlotte persists in claiming that she is part of a loving, orderly family. She believed that Marin was an enrolled student at Berkeley when her daughter was part of a radical group plotting to blow up the Transamerica building in San Francisco. She repeatedly tells Grace that she and her husband are “inseparable” and she and Marin are “inseparable.” She makes innumerable trips to the airport, expecting vainly that Marin will come to Boca Grande to join her. In fact, there are no stable, happy families in the novel.
Charlotte is similarly deluded about cultural differences and about the meaning of wars and revolutions, which she regards as part of an inevitable progression toward an orderly society in an orderly world. Grace describes her as “immaculate of history, innocent of politics.” When Leonard comes to Boca Grande to try to persuade Charlotte to leave, however, Grace learns that she also has lived her life under delusions about people close to her. She thought of her dead husband as a planter who did not engage in politics, but learned from Leonard that he, with Leonard’s help in importing arms, had financed the Tupamaros guerrillas.
Neither Charlotte nor either of her husbands change in the course of the novel’s events. The narrator’s perceptions are substantially changed, however. Grace started by believing that human personality can be explained by biochemistry and concluded by viewing it as essentially mysterious. She began by being detached from her past and from other people and concluded by caring profoundly about Charlotte. Didion sees both dignity and pathos in such situations: even when the protective impulse fails, the person who cares is ennobled. Human life is not guided by rational or scientific principles. The book cannot explain the fates of its characters, so it becomes a prayer for all of them, but a prayer to an elusive deity.
SOURCES
Didion, Joan. A Book of Common Prayer. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977.
Felton, Sharon, ed. The Critical Response to Joan Didion, Critical Responses in Arts and Letters, vol. 8. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1994.
Showalter, Elaine, Lea Baechler, and A. Walton Litz, eds. Modern American Women Writers. New York: Collier Books; Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan Canada; New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1993.
Stout, Janis P. Through the Window, out the Door: Women’s Narratives of Departure, from Austin and Cather to Tyler, Morrison and Didion. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998.
Winchell, Mark Royden. Joan Didion. Boston: Twayne, 1989.
Categories: Novel Analysis
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