The "temperamentally unobtrusive" reporter of a decade ago is now a literary figure who is taking her own pulse in her pages, not just observing American styles and states of mind. And that pulse is racing with anxiety. In the title essay of [The White Album] Didion announces "I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself."… Obsessed by this radical disorder, Didion writes in an intense and agitated style—the style of the haunted characters of her novels. Instead of the often insightful, ironic, deft stories of her first collection, her new essays tend to lose their shape and sharpness in her angst.

The world outside this new and larger self in The White Album looks strikingly familiar. In most of the essays … Didion is still writing about the 1960s, and the golden land. But the revealing stories, the little ironies...