A Book of Common Prayer
by
Simon and Schuster, $8.95
Charlotte Douglas, the hapless heroine of A Book of Common Prayer, is the quintessential American innocent. As she is described by the book’s narrator, “She was immaculate of history, innocent of politics . . . She understood that something was always going on in the world but believed that it would turn out all right.” Nothing alters her self-centered perception of events-not two disastrous marriages nor the fact that her daughter has turned overnight into a political outlaw.
With impeccable although inscrutable logic, Charlotte retires to Boca Grande, a shabby banana republic, to wait for things to turn out “all right.” There she meets Grace Strasser-Mendana, the narrator of the novel, like Charlotte a norteamericana, an anthropologist by training, and a local political power by marriage. Grace unwittingly involves Charlotte in a coup d’état. Charlotte in turn provides the subject matter for Grace’s final inquiry into human behavior.
Though it is Grace who speaks to us, her voice is familiar from Joan Didion’s earlier fiction and nonfiction. Didion writes with a cool, cynical irony which suggests that to expend energy is vulgar, or at any rate pointless. She creates characters who are neither likable nor admirable and pits them against each other in situations which she warns us in advance will end badly for them all. Chilly ingredients for a novel. Yet Joan Didion’s patented brand of intelligence, craftsmanship, and caustic wit makes A Book of Common Prayer an absorbing story and a touching one. A.H.