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Having fallen hard for Joan Didion during and right after college (and reading "The White Album," "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," "Play It As It Lays" in quick succession), I next moved to her first novel -- and found it to be a real slog. What you see here, I think, is a young Didion trying to write the kind of first novel that first novelists were expected to write in the early 1960s. Forty years later, in one of her very best books ("Where I Was From", 2003), Didion unpacks some of "Run River's" themes -- the dreamily misinformed self-made California pioneer essence -- and judges the novel more harshly than any of us ever will. "Run River" is an important edge-piece of the Didion puzzle and it should be read by anyone who wants to know more about how she formed herself as a writer of both fiction and non-fiction. But my review of it, purely as a novel? Meh.