OK, I did read the book. I was yearning to wallow in California’s olden times. Sonja’s post-coital departure to the downtown Zürich’s Farmer’s Market had left me pensive; “sentimentality, look what you’ve done to me!”, I roared down at Sonja from the terrace. I read all 15 chapters in less than 20 minutes, using Speed-Reading techniques.

A few impressions of this work. Firstly, Bingo’s character follows a path similar to Roger Moore’s character in John Ford’s 1955 “The Searchers”. Indeed, much of the book is given over to reworking “The Searchers”, albeit in print. The two most telling examples of this are from Chapter 12, but I’ve written about these elsewhere. Likewise, in Chapter 15, in the middle of page 223, a sort of climax is reached: the female protagonist and her favorite male prostitute are killed while driving south on I-5 at more than 100MPH, high on Ecstasy, using their hands to pleasure each other. They didn’t see a deer (symbolizing innocence) standing in the fog. There is nothing wrong with this, nor is any part of this inconsistent with reality. There is little lacking with Chapter 8′s slow-paced dialog and technical details during an illicit drug sale in a Los Banos “restroom”. Sample USGS topo maps show the location of the exchange, an authentic touch. But what does Didion mean to convey when an apparently disturbed Dick Cheney, described as an “ex-con biker dude”, shaves his goatee, flushes his steroids, waggles his shriveled penis, inserts a butt-plug, mounts a Harley Davidson, sets himself on fire, and drives directly through the plate glass window of a woman’s clothing store in downtown Modesto? By this time, I had tired of the entire project.

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