Woody Allen's BANANAS - 1971 - slapstick events in banana republic.
Joan Didion's A BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER - 1977 - the depressing novel about several ex-pats in Central America.
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Banana Republics for Beginners:
How Woody Allen May Have Accidentally Ghost-Written
Joan Didion’s A Book of Common Prayer
It’s not widely discussed in literary circles—possibly because it sounds like a joke—but there’s a strong case to be made that Joan Didion’s A Book of Common Prayer owes a surprising debt to Woody Allen’s 1971 film Bananas. Not in tone, of course—Didion doesn’t do pratfalls—but in structure, setting, and the overall idea of “somewhere vaguely south of Miami where revolutions happen mostly for symbolic purposes.”
Bananas follows Fielding Mellish, a hapless New Yorker who stumbles into a revolution in the fictional nation of San Marcos and, through a series of escalating absurdities, becomes its president. It’s a Cold War fever dream, full of fake uniforms, ersatz ideology, and slapstick coups. The point isn’t Latin America—it’s America’s bizarre relationship with it. Fielding doesn’t understand anything about the country, but he’s somehow the protagonist anyway. Sound familiar?
Fast forward six years to 1977. Didion publishes A Book of Common Prayer, her first novel set entirely outside the United States—specifically in Boca Grande, a country that exists on no map but has plenty in common with San Marcos. It, too, is caught in a foggy revolution. The American protagonist, Charlotte Douglas, is also out of her depth, emotionally unraveling while the politics swirl around her. But while Allen plays it for laughs, Didion plays it for dread and existential unease. Same ingredients; different soufflé.
Here’s the kicker: Didion, by her own admission, didn’t spend much time in Latin America. Her idea of research wasn’t so much “boots on the ground” as “scarf on the typewriter.” If you told me she based Boca Grande mostly on watching Bananas with the sound turned off and a gin and tonic in hand, I’d believe you. It’s the literary equivalent of setting a novel in Europe after a quick reading Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad and skimming an old Fodor’s guide you found in a dentist’s office.
This tendency to use fictional banana republics as metaphorical dumping grounds for American angst reached its comedic apex two years later with The In-Laws (1979). There, we find Alan Arkin and Peter Falk tangled in another made-up Central American nation—Tijada—where the revolution mostly serves as a backdrop to CIA mishaps and airport tarmac hijinks. It’s Bananas meets National Lampoon, and it closes the loop: from satire (Bananas) to literary existentialism (Prayer) to dad-joke espionage (The In-Laws).
So what do we make of this? It turns out that for much of the 1970s, if an American writer wanted to explore personal disintegration, Cold War confusion, or vague guilt about the global south, they didn’t go to Latin America—they invented one. San Marcos, Boca Grande, and Tijada are all less about geography than psychology. They’re fantasy backdrops, cardboard sets wheeled onstage so American characters can fall apart in interesting ways.
And while Didion’s Boca Grande is definitely the most poetic of the bunch, we shouldn’t be afraid to say it: she might’ve borrowed the paint from Woody Allen’s prop room.
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For an ernest comparison of Didion's novel and Vietnam, here.
