Echoes

By Martha Duffy

DEMOCRACY

by Joan Didion

Simon & Schuster; 234 pages; $13.95

Joan Didion's fourth novel carries a few unnecessary burdens. There is the silly pink book jacket, the pompous flap copy ("a precise and pitiless exploration of lives lived in the harsh glare of public scrutiny") and, worst of all, the title, which is as ostentatious as that of the author's last novel, A Book of Common Prayer. Nor is the reader reassured when this most confident of stylists lodges herself as an extraneous character in the book, discussing narrative ploys that she has considered and rejected and alerting the reader to real or imagined difficulties ahead. This process is known as throat clearing, and Didion, with her clarity and candor, has no need for it.

If Democracy is a flawed novel--sometimes portentous, sometimes over-directed by the author--it is also very fast and shrewd, one of the funniest books of the year. Much of the time, Didion seems to be laughing at her own romantic yearnings. Her heroine resembles a paper cutout Jackie Kennedy. Inez Christian Victor is the daughter of a rich, mercantile Hawaiian clan and the wife of a dashing Democratic Senator who wants to be President. In her daily life, Inez must contend with a randy husband, his groupies ("Girls like that come with the life") and standard-issue disaffected children (Jessie shoots heroin, Adlai maims people in car crashes). The harsh glare of public scrutiny, it turns out, means that Inez is so frequently photographed that she thinks of most occasions in life as photo opportunities. In an antic interview, she tells a reporter that the major cost of political life is not loss of privacy but of memory ("You might as well write it from the clips, because I've lost track").

Romance lives for Inez in the person of Jack Lovett, a CIA freelance with unspecified trading interests in the Far East. They had a brief affair when she was 17, a "crazy little girl with island fever" who wore gardenias in her hair. For the next 20 years they met mostly in international airports, and the mutual obsession flourished. She scanned the departure lounges on her endless political trips and was sometimes rewarded. For her lover, an actual sighting was not necessary: "She had always been there in his peripheral vision, a fitful shadow, the image that came forward when he was alone in a hotel room or at 35,000 feet." In the best romantic tradition, this pair of high flyers is reunited only in time for Jack to die of a heart attack. "We were together all our lives. If you count thinking about it," concludes Inez. Isolde could not have said it better.

The vigor of the book lies not in this intractable couple but in the hardy supporting cast. Senator Harry Victor barely appears, but Billy Dillon, his aide and campaign manager, and Frances Landau the most dedicated and humorless of his female followers, are dead-on figures of political fun, far fresher than the stock characters that people most political fiction.

Inez's family, especially her outspoken sister Janet, makes a miniature of a comfortable colonial society, charming and eccentric at home, but living by hard deals everywhere else. The crisis in Democracy comes when Inez's father Paul, a voluble lunatic, shoots Janet to death, and Inez, mystified but somehow released, leaves her old life to go with Lovett to Hong Kong just before the fall of Saigon in 1975.

In its lush settings, its febrile descriptions and its search for lost connections, Democracy is a fictional echo of Didion's White Album, essays written between 1968 and 1978. Those were the years when the author spent "what seemed to many people I knew an eccentric amount of time in Honolulu," and when she published "In the Islands," a breathtaking meditation on depression and fragmentation that became an emblem of the late '60s. Those were also the years when Didion did some chilly observing of Nancy Reagan in the uncomfortable role of the perfect Governor's wife. Although the Victors have Kennedyesque political notions and glamour, the hilarious backroom detail in Democracy may come from Sacramento.

In the '80s, the author is more relaxed and rueful about the previous decade or so. The material is so firmly under control that only a few strokes--Frances Landau's "slightly hyperthyroid face," Paul Christian's saying, "Sorry, I've made other plans" to people wishing him a nice day--are needed to fill out a character. One is left to ponder why Didion nudges the reader so, insisting that her story keeps getting away from her. The truth may be that she is reluctant to let go of it, and of times that were full of imaginative and moral possibilities for a novelist. An odd case of nostalgia but a sympathetic one. --By Martha Duffy