‘Run River’ by Joan Didion

Joan Didion is one of America’s most respected writers. She also happens to be a real favourite of mine. It may therefore come as a surprise that Run River is my first experience with Didion writing as novelist rather than as essayist or reporter. In the past when I’ve featured her on my blog it has been to discuss the non-fiction for which she is perhaps best known, such as the essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem and the 2005 memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, but I am now, at long last, dipping into her fiction work.

Run River was first published in 1963 and is, or was, Didion’s debut novel. It tells the story of Everett and Lily McClellan, husband and wife, the great-grandchildren of pioneers who pitched out west and settled in California. Didion, herself a born-and-bred Californian and a Berkeley graduate to boot, imbues every sentence of Run River with the spirit of her native state - a kind of narrative spin on Slouching Towards Bethlehem, or parts of it. Having grown up alongside one another, Everett and Lily marry almost by default, producing two children, one boy and one girl, in rapid succession. However, as in any marriage made by default, the cracks soon begin to show, and their refined Valley life becomes rather more complicated than they bargained for. 

As familiar as I am with Joan Didion’s writing, Run River was still something of a revelation to me. For a debut novel it is remarkably assured, as clear and concise as anything Didion has written since. On the one hand it is a vividly imagined and idiosyncratic tale of a marriage gone bad, while on the other it is a history of the author’s home state; a portrait of California. This rare dichotomy, combined with Didion’s ever-precise prose, makes for a learned and wholly memorable read. Run River really has taught me a lot.

This piece was originally published on alisonlaurabell.tumblr.com in January 2013.