How to Read Now

by Elaine Castillo

With the haughty vim of a good colonial soldier, Didion writes: “I do not believe that the stories told by lovely hula hands merit extensive study. I have never heard a Hawaiian word, including and perhaps most particularly aloha, which accurately expressed anything I had to say.” Anyone familiar with the travel genre of dissolute white women finding themselves in the tropics will recognize the tone of the following lines: “I am going to find it difficult to tell you precisely how and why Hawaii moves me, touches me, saddens and troubles and engages my imagination, what it is in the air that will linger long after I have forgotten the smell of pikake and pineapple and the way the palms sound in the trade winds.”