These faux adults of Woody Allen’s have dinner at Elaine’s, and argue art versus ethics. In their preoccupations and pretensions, they were overgrown teenagers: Rather, she was describing - with exasperated precision - a body of work whose popularity she professed to find “interesting, and rather astonishing.” Allen’s characters possess “the false and desperate knowingness of the smartest kid in the class,” Didion wrote. Didion was not unleashing a tirade tirades were not her style. And, if only in a certain sense, the essay that followed was restrained as well. “Letter From ‘Manhattan’” was the restrained headline that appeared above her 1979 New York Review of Books essay on Woody Allen’s late-’70s oeuvre. What readerly experience matches the pleasure of a well-executed, well-deserved takedown? When the critic is sharp enough, the subject praise-glutted enough, the results are exquisite - succulent, tart, worth any mess.įorty-two years ago, Joan Didion - who died today at 87 - delivered one such delectable specimen.
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