Doubting Didion

Re “The Golden State’s Fool’s Gold,” Commentary, Sept. 8: Unlike most writers, Joan Didion’s prose slips further and further into incoherence and cant the older she gets. Note the clear, unaffected sentences and ideas in her eighth-grade essay and compare them with the mushy musings she gives us “deep into adult life” (whatever that means).

Didion seems to think that Californians are more riven with doubt about their state than residents of, say, New York, Florida or Oregon, which is patent nonsense. One of these days a fearless editor is going to ask, “What, exactly, is Didion trying to say? And who cares?”

Don Anderson

Oak View