Synopsis
In her fifth novel, set in 1984, Joan Didion writes about a wealthy Washington reporter named Elena McMahon who impulsively travels to Florida to see her father, an arms dealer, who is ill. There she faces a complex, shady, and dangerous world when she allows herself to get involved in a scheme to run American arms to Central America--a situation reminiscent of the Iran-Contra scandal. Narrated from the standpoint of many years later, THE LAST THING HE WANTED is a fragmented, elliptical look at innocence and corruption, and at--always an interest of Didion's, in both her fiction and her essays--the intricacies of American geopolitical interests.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1996-10-01 |
| Size | | Length: | 227 pages | | Height: | 9.0 in | | Width: | 5.3 in | | Thickness: | 1.0 in | | Weight: | 13.6 oz |
Publisher's Note
This intricate, fast-paced story, whose many scenes and details fit together like so many pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, is Didions incisive and chilling look at a modern world where things are not working as they should and where the oblique and official language is as sinister as the events it is covering up.The narrator introduces Elena McMahon, estranged from a life of celebrity fundraisers and from her powerful West Coast husband, Wynn Janklow, whom she has left, taking Catherine, her daughter, to become a reporter for The Washington Post. Suddenly walking off the 1984 campaign, she finds herself boarding a plane for Florida to see her father, Dick McMahon. She becomes embroiled in her Dick's business though "she had trained herself since childhood not to have any interest in what he was doing." It is from this moment that she is caught up in something much larger than she could have imagined, something that includes Ambassador-at-Large Treat Austin Morrison and Alexander Brokaw, the ambassador to an unnamed Caribbean island. Into this startling vision of conspiracies, arms dealing, and assassinations, Didion makes connections among Dallas, Iran-Contra, and Castro, and points up how "spectral companies with high-concept names tended to interlock." As this book builds to its terrifying finish, we see the underpinnings of a dark historical underbelly. This is our system, the one "trying to create a context for democracy and getting [its] hands a little dirty in the process."
This is a story that begins when Elena McMahon, estranged from her powerful husband in California and covering the 1984 primary campaign for the Washington Post, makes her way to Florida to see her father, Dick McMahon, who does deals. Tracing Elena's fevered trajectory, the narrator makes it clear that this is her version of what happened, not the version offered by the F.B.I. interviews or by Senator Mark Berquist or by the late Ambassador-at-Large Treat Morrisson. What happens is a story that shifts quickly from Elena's well-mapped life expensive people and political fund-raisers to a journey without maps, an investigation into the randomness of history, into intentions spun out of control and gone wrong, arms dealing, covert action, assassination. As connections are made between November 22, 1963, and Iran-Contra and Castro and Cuba, we begin to see what the narrator/author calls history's subtext. Joan Didion has given us an exploration of menace and ellipsis charged with irony, exciting in its storytelling and intellectual reach - a story that clicks into place only in the final pages.
Industry Reviews
"...[A] study in political intrigue featuring the standard Didion heroine: a female stray who finds herself walking through a colorful hell. What distinguishes this novel from Ms. Didion's earlier work is that she doesn't loll around in languorous alienation. The writing is insistent, jabbing. She's trying to get at something. But what?...[M]uch of 'The Last Thing He Wanted' is written like bold captions for the reading-impaired--Hemingway for half-wits. And yet the novel does compel....What keeps the reader going isn't the converging lines of drama--it's tracing the true intent of her thought processes to their final destination....[A] novel that begins so worldly and knowing ends up fishing around for a handkerchief to dab away its own Hollywood tears."
Wall Street Journal - James Wolcott (08/29/1996)
"Perhaps because Ms. Didion has already defined this sort of character so authoritatively, Elena often comes across as a cartoon version of her earlier heroines....With each of her novels, Ms. Didion has moved further and further from the realm of the personal toward that murky realm where the private and the political intersect....In the end, what's meant to be existential angst feels more like self-delusion; what's meant to be disturbing feels more like paranoia. Peter Handke: meet Oliver Stone."
New York Times - Michiko Kakutani (09/03/1996)
"The story comes to us in fragments, out of sequence, full of mystery, littered with glances at the movie it might make--will make, if we are lucky."
New York Times Book Review - Michael Wood (09/08/1996)
"...[R]ock-hard and highly burnished, a novel that can easily be read in one sitting. it has an unnostalgic edge that is rare in fiction these days....It is precisely in the economy of her personalities that a kind of dramatic strength emerges. If Edith Wharton captured her day in richly detailed human portraiture, Joan Didion reflects our time in the starkness of her fictional characters..., cool mirrors of a very modern anomie. But there is something more that becomes apparent in the final pages....For all its macho swagger, [it] is a razor-sharp parody of the 20th-century American male novel."
Washington Post Book World - Marie Arana-Ward (09/08/1996)
"Together, [Didion's] works provide a chronicle of personal and political change over the past thirty years, told in the irresistibly observant tone of a compulsively reflective prose stylist....There's an animating tension in Didion's fiction between her achingly sure control as a storyteller and stylist and the numbing vagueness of the people she depicts....Didion's novels are thus simultaneously lucid and surreal....The result is entrancing--a dream without the logic of a dream, the way we live now."
New Yorker - John Weir (09/16/1996)
"...[T]he narrator of Joan Didion's new novel is amazingly self-conscious. But since she seems to have to actual self--we learn hardly anything about her, and she goes unnamed--she is merely self-conscious about self-consciousness....The problem...is that our narrator is not quite a person. Moreover, she is not telling a difficult story, for all its fog of secrecy, arms-dealing and murder. Didion's tale is a thoroughly conventional one. Didion's narrator tells her story not like a person, but like an author: she tells it like Joan Didion....The story has grip. The novel observes the conventions of the paranoid political thriller....[I]t should not be confused with literature."
New Republic - James Wood (10/14/1996)
"By the end, Didion exerts a stylistic and thematic control that is close to suffocating, though elegant. On the other hand, if you speak low while speaking thrillingly, the thrill is doubled. Her tone irksomely low and undeniably thrilling, the narrator struggles through a maze of secrets, lies, concealments and partial accounts told in complex shifts of time and focus....Didion has created a menacing world where the reader is held hostage by shadows..."
Los Angeles Times Book Review - Richard Eder (08/25/1996)
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