Members of this Society know Maggie McKinley as one of Mailer’s most careful readers — the author of Understanding Norman Mailer and Norman Mailer in Context, and the scholar who has done as much as anyone to map the full arc of his work. Her new book points that formidable attention in a new direction, and the result should interest Mailer enthusiasts.
The Art of Looking Back: Joan Didion and American Nostalgia (LSU Press) takes up a quality in Didion’s writing that readers tend to mention and then move past — her backward glance, the ache for a California and an America that may never have existed. McKinley’s argument is that we’ve been misreading it. Nostalgia in Didion, she contends, is not soft, escapist, or regressive. It is a tool. Didion looks back in order to take things apart: the national myths, the rhetoric of progress and innocence, the stories a country tells itself to keep from seeing clearly.
From that premise McKinley works outward into the full Didion — her sense of American history and hubris, her gender politics, and the late, devastating books on grief and loss. The thematic arc is that Didion’s relationship to the past was never sentimental but diagnostic, and that this is precisely why her work still resonates in the twenty-first century.
Mailer readers will find the territory familiar, even if the temperament could hardly be more different. Didion and Mailer were two of the great anatomists of the American self-story, working the same New Journalism decades from opposite ends of the register — his maximalism, her restraint — and both spent their careers refusing the country’s official version of itself. McKinley is unusually well placed to hear that conversation, and her instinct for how a writer interrogates national fictions, honed on Mailer, serves Didion well.
It’s good to see a scholar from the Society’s circle publishing something this ambitious. Congratulations to Professor McKinley — and to LSU Press for the handsome cover. You can find the book at LSU Press.