There is an exquisite, stark bleakness to Didion’s writing. Now having her fiction to compare it to, I think I prefer her non-fiction work as her style has a journalistic quality that doesn’t always feel right for a novel. I think she captures the lie undergirding mid-20th-century American prosperity--that the material bounty of post-war America belies an existential crisis. A realization that all of that is empty.