Pull and Retreat

Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That,” possesses a certain narrative pattern described by Howe as “first a pull toward the city, then a disheartened retreat”(308). Didion’s first taste of disenchantment comes the moment she steps into the terminal, “[s]ome instinct informed [her] that [New York] would never be quite the same again”(226). Romantic preconceptions like Didion’s often seem to be what draw people from afar to this city, preconceptions usually far removed from urban realities. She does manage to retain a sense of disillusionment for some time, professing to falling in love with the city and even admitting that “it never occurred to [her] that [she] was living a real life there”(230). New York was never meant, in her mind, to be her home; she was simply “a colonial in a far country”(231).
Inescapably, however, her sense of wonder about New York fades and she finds she has lived in the city for too long. Prompted by her age and consequential disillusionment, she "retreats" as Howe prescribed to her “point of origin” in California (308). Yet something remains for Didion, and this is something singular to New York. There is no other city, with perhaps the exception of Paris, with such a reputation to hold; there is no city so often made example of, so often written of, or so frequently made the archetypal urban setting. New York, for all its faults, is still the nexus of urbanity and the model which all cities are pitted against as centers of culture, art, and raw humanity. For this reason, it seems to stand alone as a city of the homeless, a place only to visit and forever unreal, even in the minds of those who have resided there.