Not So Magical Thinking

Among the chattering class, it is common to assert that there were two Joan Didions. There was the Goldwater-voting conservative, who laid bare the hypocrisies of the hippie movement in "Slouching Towards Bethlehem." Then there was the "radical" Didion, as Louis Menand calls her, who saw clearly in "Sentimental Journeys" and Where I Was From that the only thing that matters in America is "money and power."