Democracy A Novel Author:Joan Didion Democracy takes place in the Tropics, a background of rich colors, of soft winds, of sensuality, the background against which a marriage collapses, a love affair begins and ends, a murder takes place. — At the center of the novel is Inez Christian Victor, wife of a United States Senator who wants to be President of the United States, mother of ch... more »ildren adrift in the persistent ebb of the 60's; the daughter of a privilege she no longer accepts, a woman whose life is held together by a liaison over a period of twenty years with a man named Jack Lovett, who moves in the shadow world of intelligence and destabliization.
In Inez, Didion has created her most memorable heroine, an impenetrable observer of the dislocations of her own history; a woman at once deeply romantic and strangely remote, who has come to view most occasions as photo opportunities.
She has also evoked with unforgettable precision the twenty-some years that ended with the fall of Saigon, a period in which politics were inseperable from private life and in which celebrity seemed to combine inevitably with public and private disaster.« less