Democracy was published by Simon & Schuster in 1984, and it is Didion’s most formally complex novel — a book that includes its own narrator (“Joan Didion”), who interrupts the narrative to comment on her difficulties in telling the story, to acknowledge what she does not know, and to reflect on the relationship between fiction and the political realities it attempts to address.
The story itself concerns Inez Victor — the wife of a senator running for president — and her long affair with Jack Lovett, a CIA operative. The narrative spans twenty years and reaches its crisis during the fall of Saigon in 1975, when the private betrayals of the characters become entangled with the public betrayals of American foreign policy. Inez’s husband deals in the language of democracy while operating within systems of unaccountable power; Jack deals in the realities of covert operations while maintaining a personal code of honor that the institutions he serves do not share.
The novel’s fragmentation — its temporal jumps, its metafictional intrusions, its refusal to provide a conventional narrative arc — reflects Didion’s conviction that political reality cannot be captured in linear narrative. The truth about American power is not a story with a beginning, middle, and end; it is a collection of fragments, some classified, some merely forgotten, that no single narrator can assemble into coherence.
Collecting Democracy
First edition (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1984): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $30–$80
- Signed first edition: $100–$300
- Without jacket: $8–$20