A Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion

First published: 1977

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Allegory

Time of work: The 1960’s

Locale: Boca Grande, a fictitious country in Central America, with flashback scenes to San Francisco and New Orleans

Principal Characters:

• Charlotte Douglas, the protagonist, an attractive middle-aged woman
• Grace Strasser-Mendana, the narrator, an anthropologist who has married into Boca Grande’s richest family
• Leonard Douglas, the second and current husband of Charlotte
• Warren Bogart, the first husband of Charlotte
• Marin Bogart, the daughter of Charlotte and Warren Bogart

Form and Content

A Book of Common Prayer presents the central character, Charlotte Douglas, through the first-person narration of Grace Strasser-Mendana. Joan Didion has developed and finely honed a style which is abrupt and journalistic, stripped of any expansive descriptions or explanations. The strength of her fiction rests in this dramatic style, which she uses in this novel not only to bring the reader close to the events and characters but also to render Christian allusion, imagery, and symbolism. Sometimes through dialogue alone, she presents ironic and complex relationships. Didion makes use of Grace as a seemingly objective narrator to present the past through Charlotte’s memories—with their disordered sifting, overlapping, and repetition.

The novel relates the story of Charlotte’s journey from San Francisco to Boca Grande, a fictitious country in Central America, and her sacrificial death at the hands of undetermined assailants. Boca Grande (literally “big mouth” or “big bay”) is a place with no history and no future, only intermittent revolutionary takeovers that create no real change and make no real difference to anyone. Boca Grande is a country of dead ends, of eight-lane boulevards going nowhere, of unfinished buildings, and of collapsed causeways.

Charlotte’s arrival in Boca Grande is a last stop on a meandering journey south. She has accompanied her former husband, Warren Bogart, to New Orleans, leaving her current husband, Leonard Douglas, in San Francisco. She has buried her dead baby in Mérida and has continued to Antigua, Guadaloupe, and finally to Boca Grande. There she meets Grace, who is part of the wealthy ruling family of the country. Grace, also a norteamericana, is a former anthropologist who is now an amateur biochemist. She is also dying of pancreatic cancer.

While in Boca Grande, Charlotte has brief affairs with Gerardo, Grace’s son, and with Victor, Grace’s brother-in-law. Through these affairs, she is presented as shallow and sensual. She is also a rather naïve and innocent American tourist, who wants to open a chic boutique in Boca Grande and who writes Letters from Boca Grande, which she hopes to publish.

Paradoxically, she also shows great strength and determination along with her innocence and naïveté. She performs an emergency tracheotomy on a worker who is choking on a piece of steak. She kills a chicken cleanly and efficiently, preventing the hatchet work of machetes. She gives inoculations for thirty-four hours without sleeping during the cholera epidemic. She works as a volunteer adviser at the birth control clinic, taking her work seriously, but at the same time naïvely unwilling to recognize that the diaphragm is not the most practical contraceptive in Third World countries. She worries about the three children who crawl under the fence and leap into the deep end of the hotel pool, so she eats breakfast there every morning; one morning she jumps into the murky, unchlorinated pool when she sees only two of them. When a bomb explodes in the clinic, she pulls people to safety.

During one of the revolutions, ironically financed by Leonard Douglas, Charlotte is arrested for interrogation and is shot. Her body is thrown on the lawn of the American embassy, a token North American, and she is buried with a child’s T-shirt printed with an American flag on her coffin.

After Charlotte’s death, Grace must piece together Charlotte’s life and the meaning of her death. She faithfully reports the story and also makes a pilgrimage to find Charlotte’s daughter Marin, a refugee from the 1960’s protest movement, hiding in a room in Buffalo, New York. Grace is able to reach the hardened revolutionary, who finally breaks down and shows some emotion in response to her mother’s death.

Context

Like Didion’s other novels, A Book of Common Prayer provides a feminine perspective on both social and political issues. This novel focuses on a double perspective of two women in relation to political and social violence during the turbulent decade of the 1960’s. The antiwar revolutionary movement in the United States is ironically paralleled by the revolutionary coups in Boca Grande. Charlotte Douglas’ daughter Marin is a Patty Hearst-like revolutionary figure. Grace has a son involved in the revolution in Boca Grande, the same revolution that results in the death of Charlotte.

Didion’s use of a woman (a sometimes silly, vain, adulterous one) differs from the traditional presentation of a God figure as masculine. Charlotte Douglas is not a Christ (nor is Kesey’s McMurphy) but a Christ figure, a person who cares about other human beings and who changes the lives that she touches.

The communion and bonding between Charlotte and Grace form the greatest contribution of Didion’s novel to women’s literature. While at the surface level the two women are presented as being opposite in temperament and strength, they eventually bond and the death of one serves a meaningful purpose for the other. Both Didion’s novel and the Anglican book of sacrament for which it is named focus on communion. Didion stresses the bond between women, a bond formed by common experience, a kinship of both strength and dreams which Grace comes to recognize.

Bibliography

Friedman, Ellen G., ed. Joan Didion: Essays and Conversations. Princeton, N.J.: Ontario Review Press, 1984. A collection of essays by Didion, interviews with her, and critical essays on her work by several writers. Provides a good overview of Didion’s work. The essay by Victor Strandberg on A Book of Common Prayer discusses the novel in terms of the links between the novel and W. B. Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming.”

Hanley, Lynne T. “To El Salvador.” Massachusetts Review 24 (Spring, 1983): 13-29. This article discusses women writers and the experience of war and the battlefield, an experience generally limited to men. Hanley discusses the parallels between the real civil war in El Salvador, for which Didion served as a reporter, and the events in the mythical Boca Grande described in A Book of Common Prayer.

Henderson, Katherine. Joan Didion. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981. Presented from a context of American culture and literature, this book examines Didion’s novels and essays as expressions of the moral dilemmas and the human failures resulting from the confrontation between traditional American values and new social and political views. The chapter on A Book of Common Prayer analyzes the novel in terms of theme, characters, and style. Includes a bibliography and an index.

Loris, Michelle Carbone. Innocence, Loss, and Recovery in the Art of Joan Didion. New York: Peter Lang, 1989. This book examines Didion’s novels as expressions of the story of the American West and her female protagonists as being compelled by a frontier vision of an Edenic life that is marred by political violence. The chapter on A Book of Common Prayer argues that the protagonist sees Boca Grande from this perspective. Includes a bibliography and an index.

Winchell, Mark Royden. Joan Didion. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Focuses on Didion’s nonfiction prose and then examines her novels in light of those essays. The chapter on A Book of Common Prayer analyzes the narrative voice used by Didion and the two women characters, Grace and Charlotte. Includes a chronology, a selected bibliography, and an index.