Henry Reichman at The Hedgehog Review:
“It was just as nice as I hoped and dreamed it would be,” sobs a young bride in the final line of Joan Didion’s piece “Marrying Absurd.” Just a few pages and slotted neatly in the Slouching Towards Bethlehem collection before more renowned essays, Didion’s portrait of the Las Vegas wedding industry is full of jarring details. Shotgun marriages, chapels that churn through many ceremonies in one night, panic weddings to improve one’s Vietnam draft status—it is, of course, an essay about the institution of marriage run amok, but it is also a piece about how meaning is created and conferred, a meditation on how ceremonies can convey great emotion through semblance and not substance, and the ways in which we yearn to feel connected to deep things we desire yet barely know.
It is an exercise we bestow not just on weddings but on our literary consumptions. Young people facing centuries’ worth of Great Books to pore over in an age of distraction often take shortcuts. Authors and their entire bodies of work can be encapsulated in fragments: a few underlined sentences from their books endlessly reposted on Instagram, influencers flaunting book covers on the beach, photographs of authors appearing lost in melancholy—or best of all, smoking—making rounds on the Internet. To encounter a couple of these images is to recognize the author; to see a few more is to know them.
Since her death in December 2021, no one has been subjected to this peculiar process more than Joan Didion.
More here.
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