a dark season; With her trademark forthrightness and precision, Joan Didion has written about the most difficult year of her life.(The Year of Magical Thinking)(Book Review)

Byline: Dana Goodyear

Born fearful," and born in California, Joan Didion had long prepared herself for death by cataclysm: landslide, earthquake-an event impersonal, tectonic, and complete. To ward off or at least defer this imagined doom, she says in her new memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking (Knopf), she performed for many years a set of protective domestic rites: "Setting the table. Lighting the candles. Building the fire. Cooking. All those souffles, all that creme caramel, all those daubes and albondigas and gumbos. Clean sheets, stacks of clean towels, hurricane lamps for storms, enough water and food to see us through whatever geological event came our way. These fragments I have shored against my ruin, were the words that came to mind then. These fragments mattered to me. I believed in them." But Didion's was the kind of wishful pact with fate that seems, in retrospect, designed to be betrayed, and her life as she had grown used to living it ended at home, in a New York apartment, unaccompanied by highway fires or floods or houses collapsed like decks of cards. It ended just after she had laid a fire and poured a scotch for her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, while she was mixing the salad and he was talking about World War I. "The entire point slipping into the sea around us was the kind of conclusion that I anticipated," she writes, referring to a place where she and her husband used to swim near their house on the Palos Verdes Peninsula. "I did not anticipate cardiac arrest at the dinner table." Dunne died on December 30, 2003, a month before their fortieth wedding anniversary.

The descendant of a pioneer family (her ancestors traveled partway West with the Donner Party), Didion herself has consistently cut new paths through the American landscape, writing definitively about the sixties, Los Angeles, San Francisco-it's hard to have an idea about California in general that is free from her influence. Her nonfiction is distinguished by its deliberate, still-life-like assemblages of portentous detail: Patty Hearst in a blue terry-cloth robe, moments before her kidnapping, making tuna-fish sandwiches for her fiance; the "hot dry Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and whines through the eucalyptus windbreaks and works on the nerves."

What baffles her now as she sets out to cover the ever-strange terrain of death, and what lies at the heart of this astonishing book, is how seriously she was caught off guard. Didion knows herself to be a careful person, one who pays attention to signs-how could she not have known? She remembers Dunne's insistence that they go to Paris in November-he said it was his last chance-and how a few nights before his death he dictated to her an idea for a book he was planning. "You can use it if you want to," he said. (Not to mention the concrete indicators: Dunne's father died young of a heart attack; he himself had a bad heart and, in the late eighties, was told by a doctor that he was "a candidate for a catastrophic cardiac event.") The horror of Dunne's death-any death-is that it fixes the deceased in time. Frustrated and full of self-reproach, Didion is left to look (illogically and, she knows, futilely) for fresh possibilities in the past: missed clues, wrong turns, alternate endings, places to correct the record, to, as she says, "get it right."

But the magical thinking to which Didion refers in the title is not the thinking that left her undefended against the prospect of Dunne's death. It is the necromancy she finds herself practicing in the aftermath. On the first night, she ...