The pleasures of this short book…are found in observing the South through Didion's eyes. She is particularly sensitive to Southerners' relationship to history, a relationship that stands in sharp contrast to the prevailing attitude in California.

At a remove of more than four decades, [Didion] maps the divisions splintering America today…As bookends to each other, the pieces in this book give us two Americas, two ways of looking at history: the South, deep in the grip of the past—a place where many people are invested in holding onto ancient prerogatives of race and class; and California, insistently focused on the future and the horizon—a place where the frontier ethos of shucking off roots is the one real tradition…[South and West] shows Didion at work, as a writer and reporter, gathering details, jotting them down and running her observations through the typewriter of her mind. Even these hurriedly written notes shine with her trademark ability to capture mood and place…More than that, this book illuminates Didion's later work, containing the seeds of both Political Fictions and her elliptical 2003 book on California and the West, Where I Was From. It is weirdly prescient—pointing the way not only to where she would go as a writer but also a path the country would take in the years to come.

2016-12-26
A revealing publication from the celebrated prose stylist.In 1970, Didion (Blue Nights, 2011, etc.) took a sojourn in the Deep South, beginning in New Orleans and then heading to Mississippi and Alabama before returning to the Big Easy. (Also included are some pages about the author's California homes in her youth.) Didion had intended to write a book about the South, but she just never got around to it. However, she retained her notes and observations, which compose this slender volume. Here are many of the splendid, sharp-eyed sentences for which she has long been admired. There are also brief notes, snippets of overheard conversations (in restaurants, on the street, in motels, libraries, around motel swimming pools), and sights along the road, viewed from her rental car. Didion writes about snakes, heat, sports, racial issues, and a strange coolness she experienced from many of the locals. In Oxford, she mentions that she could not find William Faulkner's grave, which is hard to miss these days. She also bemoans the lack of bookstores in town, hardly a problem now. But what will strike readers is—as Didion declares—her inability to "get into it"—to interview the people she ought to (some avoided her) and to venture more deeply into the Southern heart. She does chronicle her interviews with some locals and others, including a visit with Walker Percy (for which readers will certainly yearn for more details). Didion also confesses that she was ready—just about at any time—to hop on a plane for home. But some of her observations are classics: a man with a shotgun shooting pigeons on a street in a Mississippi town; a comment about the fierce heat: "all movement seemed liquid." An almost spectral text haunted by a past that never seems distant.