After God, there is no more skilled practitioner of parataxis than Joan Didion. "Miami" opens by juxtaposing two short lists of the possessions with which recently deposed presidents have fled Cuba. Didion does not use parataxis merely for effect, though effective it is at evoking both dislocation and intimacy -- dislocation because the austere use of coordinating conjunctions tends to leave the reader adrift in a haze of objects and social conventions whose relationships to one another and to the author are neither accessible nor transparent, and intimacy because of the presumption that they are (both accessible and transparent; in other words, that Didion and the reader are on the same page).

So, for example: "The rain that day had been blowing the bits of colored glass and mirror strung from the tree in the Malaga courtyard and splashing from the eaves overhanging our table and we had been talking in a general way about action of the Left and action of the Right and Carlos Luis had said that he had come to wonder if silence was not the only moral political response." You can almost hear the chills running down Hemingway's spine.

No, parataxis is not just a syntactic conceit but the logic by which Didion's pieces unfold. She does not seek to set us adrift; we are adrift. She just wants to make sure we don't forget that the horizon won't get any closer, no matter how fast we paddle.

Central to her project are three recurring devices: one is the dis-editing or disaggregation of a popular narrative so as to reveal all the material left on the cutting room floor; another is the identification of the social cues and codes from which the kind of narratives she takes apart are assembled; and the third is the use of quotation marks around otherwise unremarkable bits of dialogue to distance the reader from the tropes of everyday life so she (the reader) can begin to look at them critically.

Here is an example of all three: "That the [Miami] Herald should have run, on the 1985 anniversary of the Bay of Pigs, a story about Canadian and Italian tourists vacationing on what had been the invasion beaches...was, in this view, not just a minor historical irony, not just an arguably insensitive attempt to find a news peg for a twenty-four-year-old annual story, but a calculated affront to the Cuban community, 'a slap,' I was repeatedly told, 'in the face.'"

Syntactically innovative and lexically precise, her sentences may also be the best crafted of any I have ever read. (Except for L's, he wanted me to add. He also points out that this excerpt is not paratactic, which is true. It was selected to do different work in this post.)

Adding to the distance and alienation and also the intimacy is the fact that Didion never quotes herself, only other people. When she figures in her own scenes, she is always listening or taking notes or watching. The only voices we hear are those from which we are being critically distanced, and the author herself seems to reach us across a span of silence. No one, the reader is tempted to believe, has heard her voice but me.

i have now read all the words in "infinite jest"

but the term "finished" in no way applies to my relationship with the book.