num_pages: 234
description: Joan Didion's new novel is a precise and pitiless exploration of lives lived in the harsh glare of public scrutiny, written with that unique Didion gift of capturing a whole world of human feelings with a single word or phrase.Yet Democracy is anything but spare. Its images are those of the tropics, where much of it takes place, 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 children adrift in the persistent ebb of the '60s; 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 destabilization.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 inseparable from private life and in which celebrity seemed to combine inevitably with public and private disaster.--From the book jacket.
language: English
title: Democracy
titlecomplete: Democracy
genres: Literary Fiction, Literature, Fiction, Contemporary, Americana, Historical Fiction, 20th Century, Novels, American, Politics
ratings_count: 3302
places: Hawaii
awards: awardedAt: 441792000000
name: Los Angeles Times Book Prize
category: Fiction
publisher: Simon & Schuster