Democracy (novel)
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| 1995 trade paperback cover | |
| Author | Joan Didion |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Simon & Schuster (orig. publisher) & Vintage International |
| Released | 1984 |
| Media Type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 240 pp (Vintage International paperback edition) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-679-75485-7 (Vintage International paperback edition) |
Democracy is a 1984 novel by Joan Didion. Set in Hawaii and Southeast Asia at the end of the Vietnam War, it tells the story of Inez Victor, wife of U.S. Senator Harry Victor, and her romance with CIA agent Jack Lovett, who dies extricating Inez's daughter Jessie from Vietnam, where the girl has ventured out of feckless idealism.
Like most of Didion's novels, Democracy has a narrator with a dry wit who intrudes her own opinions on the novel's events. But Democracy is unusual in that the narrator is not a character within the novel's world but is identified as "Joan Didion" herself, a writer struggling to get a grip on her difficult material. The narrator "Joan Didion" describes not only the novel she is writing, a tragedy focusing on two doomed lovers, but the novel she chose not to write, a family epic encompassing the generations of Inez's wealthy Hawaiian family. She even comments on her own commentary, suggesting ways that a student may want to begin an essay on the novel by discussing the author's self-consciousness about her project. This turns Democracy into something like metafiction, but the qualities it shares with Didion's other novels - its close observation of character and understanding of the way politics determines social behavior in America - keep the book grounded in reality.
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