Verylyn Klinkenborg published today interesting travel notes in the NY Times.

Rereading the Landscape of an Essay by Joan Didion

SAN BERNARDINO, Calif.

Forty years ago this month, a housewife named Lucille Miller - just turning 35 - came to trial in San Bernardino for the murder of her husband, a dentist who was named Gordon Miller and called Cork. The murder was a clumsy one. Cork Miller burned to death in the back seat of a 1964 Volkswagen. According to the district attorney, Lucille Miller intended to make it look as if the car had rolled over an embankment and burst into flames. She would have had time in that deserted neighborhood to get home before the accident was reported. Instead, the car got stuck in the sand in low gear, and burst into flames anyway.

The trial was a sensation, and not only because Lucille Miller was pregnant when it began. It was also a trial of the pretensions of the “New California,” out at the edge of the subdivision frontier.

And so it remains. All the local papers covered the case, as did Joan Didion, who wrote about it in one of the great essays of the 20th century, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream.” It is an essay of almost biblical wrath and dispassion. Behind its keening rhythms and daylight horrors lies Ms. Didion’s sense that this new California, perpetually subdividing, perpetually suckering its dreamers, is guilty of a kind of misprision that she, a native Californian, refuses to share. The essay is often misread as an indictment of Lucille Miller. It is not. It is an indictment of a false promise, the “revolving credit and dreams about bigger houses, better streets,” the cascading of debt and adultery and sedatives and lies behind a facade of religious, socially ambitious respectability.

Ms. Didion begins with an almost tidal surge that condenses the history of the San Bernardino Valley into its debris, circa 1965, and its strange jumble of na