["The White Album" is] full of Miss Didion, the dreamer of bad dreams. Doris Lessing, she says, registers "every tremor along her emotional fault system." So does Miss Didion—the migraine headaches; the "vertigo and nausea;" the "condition" that has "the kind of name usually associated with telethons;" the contemplated divorce; the bottle of bourbon in the hotel room; the dread in the sunlight; an inexplicable desire to be in Honolulu; her conviction that "narrative" no longer suffices, the script has been mislaid, happy conclusions are impossible, certain images refuse to make sense, and life ends up like so many feet of film on the cutting-room floor of a movie never finished. Her nervous system is a San Andreas Fault. (pp. 269-70)

"The White Album" is full of Miss Didion as a reporter and a Californian. Perhaps because her last two novels, "Play It as It Lays" and...