“After Henry’ by Joan Didion

I’d never thought of Joan Didion as dependable before. But after reading these 11 pieces of superior reporting and criticism, I now think of her as a writer who can be relied on to get the story straight.

In her previous collections of essays, “The White Album” and “Slouching Toward Bethlehem,” Didion seemed a slender reed to lean on. The voice in “The White Album,” was intelligent and analytical, but seemed to say, “Don’t speak sharply back to me, I’ll get a migraine.”

Some of the themes in “After Henry” are familiar. Raised in Sacramento, Didion shows off her take on California history in essays on Patricia Hearst and her forebears, and Otis Chandler and his.

But where she seemed to be drawn to horrible anomalies before--abandoned children, mass murders--she now finds subtler ways of communicating more deeply rooted or regularly recurring dangers. “

Four or five years ago Didion seems to have said to herself: Maybe I have headaches, maybe I did start my writing career at Vogue, but I’m beginning to see that I’m as good a reporter, in fact better, than these other guys and I have the leisure and the inclination to find out things they can’t.

In “New York Review of Books” pieces on the Reagan presidency and the 1988 presidential campaign, Didion pits herself against the best-known national political reporters and demonstrates a clairvoyance they lack.

She’s clairvoyant, for example, in explaining how we got stuck with “character issues” as the sole basis for voting for President: “It was by 1988 generally, if unspecifically, agreed that the U.S. faced certain social and economic realities that, if not intractable, did not entirely lend themselves to the kinds of policy fixes people who run for elected office, on whatever ticket, were likely to undertake.”

Her review of presidential speech writer Peggy Noonan’s Washington memoir sums up the Reagan Administration: “In the absence of an actual President, this resourceful child of a large Irish Catholic family sat in her office in the Old Executive Office Building and invented an ideal one . . . “

Covering the Dukakis campaign, Didion casts a cold eye on the Washington political reporters along for the ride, especially their excessive tolerance for the staged event. Particularly, poor Mike tossing a baseball out on the airport Tarmac trying to look like a regular guy. He tossed the baseball in San Diego, and then again in Phoenix. Why, Didion wonders, have the reporters developed “so arresting an enthusiasm for overlooking the contradictions inherent in reporting that which occurs only in order to be reported?”

On the local political front, Didion doesn’t wonder why voters in Los Angeles don’t notice that Tom Bradley hasn’t faced the city’s worst problems. “On the whole,” she says, “life in Los Angeles, perhaps because it is a city so largely populated by people who are ready to drop everything and move to San Diego (just as they or their parents or their grandparents had dropped everything and moved to Los Angeles), seems not to encourage a conventional interest in its elected officials.”

The best piece in “After Henry” is “Sentimental Journeys,” about Didion’s current home, New York City. Didion’s goal, fully achieved, is to fight the “sentimental narrative” by which a 29-year-old woman who was nearly beaten to death in Central Park was “wrenched, even as she hung between death and life and later between insentience and sentience, into New York’s ideal sister, daughter, Bacharach bride.”

In the storm of emotion after the attack, crime itself became a scapegoat for all of New York’s longstanding problems. Didion gives serious examples of the criminal ways of city officials, including a covered-up murder. The fact that New York City is a place quite apart from the developed world also explains why she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, can’t get a garbage disposal installed in their New York kitchen.

Though this book is more about the outside world than Didion’s personal Angst , she reveals something about herself. “At 19, I had wanted to write,” she says. “At 40 I still wanted to write, and nothing that had happened in the years between made me any more certain that I could.”

“After Henry” demonstrates that writing is something you do best when you are not certain you can do it at all.