But the people around Inez have made careers out of losing track. Her senator husband wants to forget the failure of his last bid for the presidency. Her husband's handler would like the press to forget that Inez's father is a murderer. And, in 1975, the year in which much of this bitterly funny novel is set, America is doing its best to lose track of its one-time client, the lethally hemorrhaging republic of South Vietnam.As conceived by Joan Didion, these personages and events constitute the terminal fallout of democracy, a fallout that also includes fact-finding junkets, senatorial groupies, the international arms market, and the Orwellian newspeak of the political class. Moving deftly from Honolulu to Jakarta, between romance, farce, and tragedy, Democracy is a tour de force from a writer who can dissect an entire society with a single phrase.

    With his train of horses he carried salt and silk across distances incomprehensible to his ancient and static community. He brings ideas as well as gifts that have come, by many short journeys, from market town to market town, and from places as distant as the campfires of the Silk Road. John Turner's death in the 18th century leaves an emotional charge Ian and Sal find affects their relationship in the 21st, challenging the perceptions they have of themselves and of each other. A visionary fable firmly rooted in a verifiable place, this novel is an evocation of the lives and the language of all people who are called to the valley of Thursbitch.