February 6, 2012

The Nation.

31

SHELF LIFE
by alexandra schwartz
memories
are what you no

longer want to remember, writes Joan Didion in Blue Nights (Knopf; $25), her meditation on the fears and risks of parenthood. Its an uneasy admission, at odds with her current preoccupations yet also their point of departure. Didions earlier book The Year of Magical Thinking, an account of the period after the death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, when their daughter, Quintana Roo, was hospitalized for a series of debilitating illnesses, was an explicit act of survival, its writing so inextricably tied to the necessity of passing through that initial stretch of loss and grief that Didion refused to amend the text when Quintana died of pancreatitis shortly after the manuscript was finished. Thoughts of the past registered as an ambush, their vortex effect triggered by the Pacific Coast Highway or ice floes on the East River. At half a decades remove from Quintanas death, Blue Nights is steeped in a memory, though a stringently selective one: the key hospital here is St. Johns in Santa Monica, whose obstetrician phones Didion and Dunne to report that a beautiful baby girl is up Joan Didion for adoption. Didion returns to Quintanas question forms: whom to notify in case of childhood as if to guard her there, but shes an emergency? I need to know if you want the last person to be deceived by such con- her, the obstetrician had asked in 1966. ceits. As she wanders through those early The most public of notifications and the years, examining photographs taken, stories most private of letters, Blue Nights offers written and phone calls made by a 5-year-old an answer: She is of course the one person Quintana to the Camarillo mental hospital who needs to know. (to find out what she needed to do if she was going crazy) and Twentieth Century in march the commission on Fox (to find out what she needed to do to Wartime Contracting gave Congress its evalbe a star) for signs of her daughters later uation of the State Departments ability to distress and depression, Didion circles the take over in Iraq after the Armys scheduled question all parents, adoptive ones perhaps departure at the end of 2011. The reports most poignantly, ask and avoid: What if I title alone, IraqA Forgotten Mission?, suggests the prognosis isnt good, a warning fail to take care of this baby? Other hospitals have cameos in Blue amplified by Peter Van Burens account of Nights, most startlingly New York Citys the misguided method to States madness, We Lenox Hill, where Didion is admitted after Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People (MetAlexandra Schwartz is a freelance writer based ropolitan; $25). A Foreign Service officer for in New York. more than twenty years, Van Buren had no

passing out in her bedroom and waking in a pool of blood. The image of Didion that lingers in the mind from The Year of Magical Thinking is of a woman standing in an LA hospital lobby, dressed in scrubs as if surgical gear could grant healing powers: So profound was the isolation in which I was then operating that it did not immediately occur to me that for the mother of a patient to show up at the hospital wearing blue cotton scrubs could only be viewed as a suspicious violation of boundaries. Didion is now the inpatient, her strength failing at home and in the street. A cruel

experience in the Middle East when he signed up in 2009 to lead Provincial Reconstruction Teams embedded on two US military bases. As he tells it, the State Department, scuttling around in the shadow of the militarys wealth and clout, is operating according to a kind of paupers logic, playing at luxury by squandering taxpayers cash on soft-power projects that run the gamut from the unconsidered to the spectacularly dumb. There are the beekeeping kits purchased for widows before anyone bothers to wonder whether widows are interested in keeping bees; the Internet connection supplied to schools that lack furniture and electricity; the multimillion-dollar chicken-processing plant that never opens because the market research claiming Iraqis would pay premium for fresh halal chicken had been invented for press releases. On the afternoon a few Embassy war tourists stop by the poultry plant for a jaunt outside the Green Zone, State stirs the Potemkin operation into the semblance of functionality by shelling out for chickens no locals can afford. When it comes to photo opportunities, lunch, apparently, is on the house. We dined well, Van Buren quips, and, as a bonus, consumed the evidence of our fraud. Despite the risks of such frankness for Van Burenhe is currently the subject of a State Department investigationhe writes with the sardonic candor of a man too intent on recounting the absurdities he has witnessed to worry about what he has to lose. We Meant Well has none of the polish or reportorial expertise of classics in the Iraq-disaster genre like Rajiv Chandrasekarans Imperial Life in the Emerald City (2006) and Thomas Rickss Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (2006), and its slapdash sourcing of facts and figures seems more indebted to Wikipedia-style research than to reporting. The virtue of the telling is, of all things, its hilarity, the politically incorrect, pop-inflected gallows humor exposing the litany of bungles through the damning lens of farce. It is like I am standing naked in a room with a big hat on my head, Van Buren quotes an Iraqi as saying. Everyone comes in and helps put flowers and ribbons on my hat, but no one seems to notice that I am naked. If the image suggests a tea party held at Abu Ghraib, it may prove as representative of the flippancy and ineptness of a State Departmentrun Iraq as the photos of torture were of an earlier n phase of a shapeless, unnecessary war.
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