There’s a gentle restraint to “Uptown Local” — a quick read, at barely over 200 pages — that partly redeems it. Such a book could easily exploit the hunger for revelations about Didion, but Leadbeater avoids that impulse. The woman who emerges is funny and gentle and voraciously curious about the world. The only thing that might qualify as “dirt” is a moment at a dinner party where Didion, who leaned conservative her whole life, declares that the Democratic candidate in the next year’s elections — presumably Hillary Clinton — “strikes me as being not totally there.”
Yet the book is bound to disappoint devotees who picked it up because Didion is in the subtitle. She isn’t central; whole chapters go by without her.
Instead, a great deal of the book is devoted to how astonished, even ashamed, Leadbeater feels in Didion’s orbit. Despite spending college and graduate school in posh, highly selective environments, Leadbeater feels Didion’s world, where he might find himself at dinner with a Supreme Court justice or a movie star, has it out for him. “She insisted I sit with her at dinner parties when her famous (or less famous) friends would’ve preferred I disappeared,” he recalls, in a sentiment that pops up several times
After the interment of Didion’s ashes at St. John the Divine, Leadbeater is invited to lunch, but “I wished never again to speak to several of them,” he writes. “They had long regarded me as the help, the unfortunate necessity that had come with Joan’s age and aloneness.” He accuses “several of those closest to her” of “the banal vulgarity that came with class superiority.”
This blank-faced characterization, unlike Didion’s own omissions, seems more designed to raise an eyebrow than provide insight, a subtweet in literary form. Plenty of “Uptown Local” is almost painfully self-conscious. But the giant chip on its shoulder — about Didion’s circle, and Leadbeater’s family, and fate and fortune and the universe — makes it hard at times to appreciate.
It’s to Leadbeater’s great credit that he doesn’t try to imitate Didion’s distinctive style; yet one might wish, at times, that he’d learned a bit more from her substance.
THE UPTOWN LOCAL: Joy, Death, and Joan Didion: A Memoir | By Cory Leadbeater | Ecco | 224 pp. | $28
