A Book of Common Prayer

Grace Strasser-Mendana, an American-born biochemist who married into the family that effectively runs the coup-prone country of Boca Grande, narrates Charlotte Douglas's last months in the studied vocabulary of her old training: she calls herself a witness, catalogs facts, insists repeatedly that she isn't sentimental, even as the narration keeps circling back, helplessly, to how much she came to love a woman she barely understood. Didion makes Grace's professional detachment as much the novel's real subject as Charlotte's story itself, a narrator who trusts only observable data telling you, despite herself, about a grief she can't fully account for.

Charlotte's defining trait is a willed, almost professional incuriosity: she refuses to learn where her fugitive daughter Marin, wanted in connection with a plane hijacking carried out in the name of some vague American radical cause, has actually gone, and she performs an American housewife's domestic normalcy, grocery shopping, elaborate dinners nobody eats, even as Boca Grande tips toward armed revolution around her. Didion doesn't read this as stupidity but as a specifically American form of self-protection, an innocence maintained by refusing information rather than lacking it.

Charlotte's two marriages, first to the earnest, unremarkable Warren and then to the radical lawyer Leonard Douglas, chart the same pattern from opposite directions, a woman who keeps attaching herself to men whose certainties, domestic or political, she can borrow instead of having to build convictions of her own. Boca Grande itself, with its interchangeable coups and its airport departure lounge Charlotte treats as a kind of home, becomes the geography that finally exposes how thin that borrowed certainty always was.

The novel borrows its title from the Anglican prayer book's fixed forms for birth, marriage, and death, ceremonial language built to make sense of events too large for improvised speech. Didion structures Grace's own narration the same way, returning again and again to the same handful of facts from different angles, performing a kind of secular liturgy over Charlotte's story because the actual events, a coup, a missing daughter, a woman who won't leave, resist any other kind of ordering.

Grace's scientific training gives her a second, competing liturgy, the language of pathology and dissection, and the novel keeps both registers running at once: a woman trained to look for hard evidence, narrating a story that offers her almost none, borrowing whichever form of ritual language, prayer book or laboratory report, gets her closer to saying something true about a friend she is otherwise unequipped to explain.