The hackneyed American dream turned into a dream. Since the definition of what that dream was, which appeared for the first time in 1931 from the mouth of James Truslow Adams and who entrusted an exponential prosperity to ability and work exclusively, without other conditions, reality has been in charge of converting the idea in a slogan orwellian.
At least in most of the cases where prosperity did not come and everyone insisted on keeping up the appearances that prosperity was just one last stroke of luck.
This novel takes us back to 1959. We inhabit the house of the married couple formed by Everett McClellan and Lily and with a final shot as an echo before the complete silence that extends through the residential neighborhood of replicated houses and symmetrical lives.
Because beyond the sinister fact, which serves as an excuse for the flashback that explains everything, the shot itself or rather the trigger is prolonged towards the general ideology of that middle class determined to thrive to move to a new social conquest, a gold rush that continues among the mimetic townhouse neighborhoods.
American frustration as the greatest tragedy, everyone convinced and even almost abducted by the idea that without prosperity there is almost no identity. And without being anyone, living becomes that tragic ideal, especially if you have made a strenuous effort to escape from that middle class that tries to climb a wall where the slogan reads in gigantic letters "American dream on the other side."
An idea, a space and a time of which the author Joan didion knows a lot. She herself grew up in that Californian setting of bright dreams like mirages under a blazing sun.
You can now buy the novel Troubled river, the new book by Joan Didion, here: