The Piety of an Empty Heartn—Joan Didion:nA Book of Common PrayernFew executives at Gulf & Western —nwhose subsidiary published the book — arenapt to be caught by Joan Didion’s novel, butntheir daughters and wives are likely to benentranced. For that reason, if for no other, itnmight pay businessmen to dip into this talenof life gone awry amid the wealthy leftwing.nDidion is a star among liberated womennwriters, and her work epitomizes attitudesnthat regularly well from the pages ofnwomen’s magazines, the women’s sectionsnin newspapers, and the literature of thenERA movement, Such perfect samples arenhard to find, arid executives at Gulf &nWestern would be particularly rewarded bynreading Ms. Didion’s book, for they are innthe position of restaurant operatorsnunaware that some of the cooks arenpoisoning the soup.nThe plot is simple, once the readernunravels flashbacks and the folds of style.nMrs. Douglas, 40, a thin and wealthynCalifornian, married to an internationalnlawyer whose clients are mostly ThirdnWorld puppets, learns that her daughter hasnjoined a revolutionary group that detonated anbomb in San Francisco; she then hijacked a PSAnplane, set it afire in Utah, vanished — arid isnbeing sought by the authorities. The unknownnfate of her “child” •— as the daughters is alwaysndescribed — imhinges Mrs. Douglas who meetsnher misfortune in the Zeitgeist vein. She leavesnher husband to join her ex-husband in a dnmkennand extended ramble through the southern statesnof the East, pimctuated by innumerable copulations,nnasty scenes, three-person sex and glimpsesnof various homes, motel rooms and countrynclubs. IVfrs. Douglas is pregnant during this tour,nbut that does not distract her too much. Hernamniotic fluid breaks on a plane ride to NewnOrleans, but she delivers her baby in a clinic.nLearning her ex-husband has terminal cancer, shenflees the clinic with her newborn infant, thoughnshe knows it was bom encephalitic, with “nonviable” liver function, and cannot survive. Laternit dies — in her arms, of course — in the parkingnlot of a Coca-Q)la bottling plant in Mexico, anrefined touch of literary symbolism.n8- Chronicles of CullurennnMrs. Douglas then wafts into a mythicalnCentral American republic called BocanGrande, where she is watched and her sagannarrated in disjointicd snippets out ofnsequence by ^ locally important landownerncalled Grace Strasser-Mendana, annAmerican-born anthropologist and amateurnbiochemist.Boca Grande—or Big Mouth—nis at first described as consisting mainly ofncorrugated huts beside a “lifeless” sea, butnlater develops neighborhoods where nursesnpush baby carriages. Still later it becomesnclear that Big Mouth has a landscape whosenfeatures conveniently alter at the will of thenauthor, like the scenery in the old Krazy Katncomic strip.nSra. Strasser-Mendana (someone shouldntell the author that Latins do not hyphenatenlast names; that is an English custom),nresident seer in the novel, is also dying ofncancer. Her son Gerardo is depicted as anLatin lecher and politico; his wife as a fool.nHer nephew, Antonio, is termed an”sociopath” and in turn he repeatedly callsnMrs. Douglas obscene names that in somenbooks would be considered coarse, butnamidst Ms. Didion’s mock-litanies aboutnpestilences, diseases, parasites, Parisiannname dresses, limousines, emeralds, caviarnwith an Israeli general at Led Airport andnother haut mowde references of the sortnfamiliar to readers of Vogue, they mergeninto a style which successfully camouflagesna moral and psychological vapidity of thosenwho talk as well as the one who created thentalking. In the en/i, Mrs. Douglas is shot to.ndeath during a Big Mouth revolution, justnafter learning her missing daughter’snwhereabouts—and refusing to leave.nDramatic descriptions of settings andncreations of mood are Ms. Didion’s forte,nbut catharsis, that little philosophical gismonused for ages by writers who care aboutncredibility when they unleash the forces ofnlife and death, seems to be a word to whichnshe has not yet been introduced.nAs is usual in modern women’s novels thenmen are uniformly >veak and outclassed byn