Democracy: A Novel.

DIDION, Joan.

$650.00

Item Number: 149589

New York : Simon & Schuster, 1984.

First edition of this gorgeously written, bitterly funny look at the relationship between politics and personal life. Octavo, original half cloth. Boldly signed by Joan Didion on the title page. Near fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Lawrence Ratzkin. Author photograph by Quintana Roo Dunne.

Moving deftly between romance, farce, and tragedy, from 1970s America to Vietnam to Jakarta, Democracy is a tour de force from a writer who can dissect an entire society with a single phrase. Inez Victor knows that the major casualty of the political life is memory. But the people around Inez have made careers out of losing track. Her senator husband wants to forget the failure of his last bid for the presidency. Her husband's handler would like the press to forget that Inez's father is a murderer. And, in 1975, America is doing its best to lose track of its one-time client, the lethally hemorrhaging republic of South Vietnam. As conceived by Joan Didion, these personages and events constitute the terminal fallout of democracy, a fallout that also includes fact-finding junkets, senatorial groupies, the international arms market, and the Orwellian newspeak of the political class.