Fourth Estate £12.99 pp227

“We call it the widowmaker, pal,” said the cardiologist who corrected the faulty connection to John Gregory Dunne’s heart in 1987. His wife Joan Didion saw the operation as a reprieve; to him, it never felt more than a suspended sentence. “When something happens to me”, was the phrase he used from then until his abrupt death two years ago. Not if, but when.

Didion finds an echo there of the medieval knight Gawain’s premonition: “I tell you that I shall not live two days.” For 16 years, her self-aware, sharp-witted husband had accepted that his life was on loan; revisiting a shared past, turning over the clues, the facts, the medical details, Didion obliges herself to accept that a marriage, however close (theirs lasted almost 40 years, with few periods of separation), can contain a chasm. A part of the mind she thought she knew as well as her own existed behind a closed door.

A knight of the Round Table is an appropriate figure with whom to draw analogies. The Dunnes were among America’s literary royalty. As respected writers (both began their careers as journalists) they helped to form the moral conscience of their country. They remained impressively uncorrupted by several screenplay collaborations — among others, Up Close & Personal and the remake of A Star is Born — which brought them a privileged life (writing holidays in Honolulu, prolonged sojourns at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel). I dined at their Malibu home in 1978, the year Didion published The White Album, her second, and widely admired collection of essays on the 1960s. I remember a sense of awed dazzlement, not just from the candlelit table in a house overlooking the ocean, but at the sense of being welcomed into the life of a couple who thrived in, and maintained, their privacy. Quintana Roo, the daughter they adopted two years after their marriage, was with them. A blonde adolescent, round-limbed and smiling, she was most evidently adored. This was a blissful trinity; the writer’s life never showed itself to me with a more appealing glow.

Didion’s book is about the dissolution of that trinity: the year of Quintana’s illness and Dunne’s death. The heart attack struck Dunne down in 2003, five days after Quintana, newly married, was taken into hospital with septic shock. The parents had just visited her when he collapsed; Dunne told his wife on the way home that he was unsure that he could cope. He died that evening. Didion, superficially assessed by her appointed social worker as “a pretty cool customer”, survived. She went through the motions of required bureaucracy with chilled efficiency. She arranged the funeral, buried the ashes. She continued to deal with Quintana’s needs, and fight her corner against doctors who did not always respond adequately to the severity of her condition.

In lesser hands, such a book as this could seem an act of self-indulgence, an outpouring of misery from a woman who has enjoyed an exceptionally good life. In Didion’s hands, a masterpiece of restraint and perception emerges. Her style — terse, gnomic, arrestingly direct and spare — has never been put to better use than in this lucid examination of the state of grief. Her references, to Auden, Matthew Arnold, Shakespeare, Euripides, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Freud and Melanie Klein, are apposite, not showy. They never divert us from the central fact, the death that must be accepted, cannot be avoided. Discussing the vortex, the way each thought she forms, each unconsidered stroll she takes, may open the gate to memories of a finite past, she skilfully illuminates past happiness, a marriage close as a shared breath.

“The way I write is who I am,” Didion tells us. Writing was the method she chose to escape from stasis, from a period during which rational thinking became impossible. Lacking faith in an afterlife, a sceptic to her well-manicured fingertips, Didion found herself the shocked prey of extreme superstition as she struggled not to accept the inevitable. The magical thinking of the book’s title refers to this, to the keeping of shoes for a husband’s impossible return, to her decision not to read the obituaries that would confirm the fact of his death. More poignantly, she found herself incapable of changing a single word in a novel he had not had time to complete: “Any choice I made could carry the potential for abandonment, even betrayal.”

It’s not all black. There’s glee in her sardonic memory of Dunne’s warning, when she went to work at Life magazine, that she might find the experience similar to being nibbled to death by ducks. You can hear the relish in her voice when she describes the first column she wrote for Life, and announced in it that she and her husband were on a Pacific island “in lieu of filing for divorce”. Readers were dismayed: they couldn’t know that Dunne had edited the column and driven her down to the post office so that she could file it. There’s more celebration than distress in Didion’s recall of a marriage that was, in the best sense, a perfect collaboration. Forty years of almost trouble-free intimacy is evoked with tenderness but without sentiment. A double tragedy has been confronted and, through the operative intelligence of a remarkable writer, overcome.

I would call this a brave book if it were not so apparent that it was also a necessary rite of passage for a writer who needed words to make meaning where none showed itself. It has a tragic postscript: Quintana, the absent presence at the heart of the book, died of acute pancreatitis this summer at the age of 39, shortly before its publication. The Year of Magical Thinking stands as a memorial to her and to Dunne. In a little over 200 pages, Didion takes her readers from disbelief to sorrowful acceptance. She does this with complete integrity.

CROSSING PLACE

Didion made her mark in 1968 with Slouching towards Bethlehem, essays about her native California. Where I Was From (2004), returned to the subject, tracing complex feelings about the state her pioneer ancestors reached in the 1840s. Didion’s own journey, with Dunne, she saw as an abandonment: a reverse crossing, to Manhattan.

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