![]() ![]() She visits landed gentry, suspicious of Southerners like Willie Morris, who had gone East to seek literary fortune, or even those, like Walker Percy, who had stayed but reserved private views on race and other local customs. The death had seemed serious but casual, as if it had taken place in a pre-Columbian city where death was expected, and did not in the long run count for much.” “‘Dead,’ pronounced an old woman who stood with me on the sidewalk a few inches from where the car had veered into a tree. Charles Avenue I saw a woman die, fall forward over the wheel of her car,’’ she writes, of a visit to New Orleans. The road trip through Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama skirts the easy caricatures of race and rapacity of well-meaning journalists of the time, to capture moments that might have taken place anywhere, but are nevertheless locked in Faulknerian geography. ![]() In “South and West: From a Notebook,” they exemplify Didion’s signature brand of reportorial haiku - her pitiless camera eye, razor-sharp wit and telling techniques of self-deprecation that only bring the reader - at least this reader - further along for the ride. ![]()
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