Basilisk On The Red-Eye

By R.Z. Sheppard

TITLE: AFTER HENRY

AUTHOR: JOAN DIDION

PUBLISHER: SIMON & SCHUSTER; 319 PAGES; $22

THE BOTTOM LINE: Having cut the '70s dead, the author now draws blood from the '80s.

Joan Didion's latest collection shuttles between coasts, examining the past decade as played out in Los Angeles, New York City and Washington. A basilisk on the red-eye, Didion turns a deadly gaze on the centers of entertainment, journalism and politics. Her evidence indicates a blurring of distinctions in show business, news business and government. Careful distinctions seem, in fact, to be out of fashion. Thought and art increasingly imitate life in its simplest and least attractive forms.

A eulogy for her former editor and friend, the late Henry Robbins, is also a tribute to a vanishing species and a knock on bottom-line publishers with little patience for editors who nurture talented but not immediately profitable writers. A 1990 report on the revamping of the Los Angeles Times suggests what can happen when market research turns leaders into followers, and a doleful look at the rape and beating of Manhattan's Central Park jogger blends past and present without confusing the island's energy with its ugly tensions.

The political fictions of the nation's capital leave Didion baffled, but not the sociology of Hollywood. She separates status from class with the observation that L.A.'s beauties and beasts may angle for the best tables at Spago, but they can't get into Chasen's, the stronghold of old celluloid royalty. Judging from Didion's account of the 1988 Writers Guild strike, the standing of the men and women who provide the words for the sound tracks has not changed much since a studio head once called his scriptwriters "shmucks with Underwoods."

About half this collection deals with such Didion standbys as California's earthquakes, airheads and the mayhem found on what she likes to call the "freak-death pages" of the newspapers. Readers should welcome the chance to savor the vintage sotto voce style that more than 20 years ago distinguished this careful writer from New Journalism's noisier competition.