Customer Reviews

Last Thing He Wanted

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Joan Didion's The Last Thing He Wanted is a mysterious, gentle little book that ultimately is quite sad. Elena McMahon does a favour for her father and through that favour and through her we see the large unfathomable world of conspiraces and esponiage boiled to very human elements. There is a cold spareness to the writing that left this reader unmoved until after it was over and then the sadness powerfully washed over me. It is an unique and haunting look at the choices people make and the lives and events that one can affect with simple, irrevocable gestures. A beautiful novel.

I'm a fan of Didion's pitch-perfect deadpan prose, but if you aren't, there are other joys in this novel. It offers a post-Orwellian assessment, in human, personal terms, of 1984, with a particular focus on the Fourth of July on an unnamed Caribbean island. Along with Don DeLillo's "The Names," Didion's novel is a masterpiece of American paranoia. It offers a dark yet plausible scenario of the collapse of American democracy under the weight of expansionist ambitions, mass media, and the stunning sang-froid of the silent majorities. A bit confusing at times, the novel is psychologically (and syntactically) complicated but apparently well researched--it is also very confrontational, relentless in its outrage and hopelessness.

I bought this novel from a bargain bin (because of the cover design), put it on a shelf, and didn't open it for over a month. When I finally picked it up, I read only twelve pages before I grabbed my highlighter... The writing style is deceptively simple and highly structured--breathtaking, actually. And the story is fantastic (and well told). Highly recommended.

Joan Didion, author of Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays (FSG Classics), and several others, is one of America's most incisive contemporary novelists. She wrote this novel in the late `90's; the setting is in the previous decade, and concerns the actions of a few individuals working in conformance with America's unofficial policies of maintaining pliable power elites in the countries of "mare nostrum," the Caribbean. When "the cover" was blown on some of the most egregious of these actions, in the `80's, the media adopted the label "Iran-Contra" for them. That label covered the selling of arms to Iran, America's purported enemy of the time (and still?), and channeling the proceeds to fund the "Contras," call them rebels, terrorists or freedom-fighters, take you pick based on your political persuasion, who were trying to overthrow the government of Nicaragua, run by Daniel Ortega and the "Sandinistas." Ortega was "unfriendly" to the interest of America's power elites, which all too often means giving a fair shake to the non-power elites in his own country.

Didion's novel is a depiction of that dark underbelly of American foreign policy (for sure, carping about "human rights" plays no part) "necessary" to maintaining "friendly" governments. There are the machinations of the CIA; there are the "free-market" hustlers that are the arms dealers, still hoping to draw that card so high and wild they'll never have to deal another. There are the surreal conversations about the market falling on the price of anti-personnel mines (`69's) from three dollars to two, each. There is the complicity of our embassy personnel in all these activities, the clock and dagger actions that take place in transit lounges, the crosses and double-crosses. There is Treat Morrison, drawn to the action for the adrenalin rush, with a chip on his shoulder for the "Harvard guys who never listen." There is the pony-tailed guy "on his way home from Angola" who was once in the 25th Infantry Division, "Tropic Lightning." And there is the principal character, Elena McMahon, who as a journalist walked away from covering the '84 campaign, and got sucked into helping dad close his "million dollar deal." Overall, a real "witch's brew."

And the author demonstrates such deft mastery in handling this "witch's brew." Her prose is lean. She "backs and fills" her story, a foreshadow here, a reminder there where the pieces of her tale are. She has an uncanny ear for dialogue, capturing the essentials to reveal character. She maintains dramatic tension throughout, of a "thriller" variety, but with far more insights. I'm amazed that she has drawn some 1-star reviews, which only proves she is not for everyone. She has famously embraced much of what is referred to as a "southern California lifestyle," yet is a critical observer not only of that "scene," but ones seemingly far removed, including the inner working of government, whose "players" value opacity, and speak in the conditional mood, or, as she says: "...entire layers of bureaucracy dedicated to the principle that self-perpetuation depended on the ability not to elucidate but to obscure."

Comparisons with Graham Greene are more than appropriate, particularly the character Alden Pyle in The Quiet American (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition). Consider: "Not dishonest in the sense that he `lied,' or deliberately misrepresented events as he himself construed them...but dishonest in the more radical sense, dishonest in that he remained incapable of seeing the thing straight." On the other hand, a jab at fixating on the wrong historical analogy: "After that you move past it. You know who the unreported casualties of Vietnam were? Reporters and policy guys who didn't move past it." And, apocryphal, or no, loved her jabs at the Rand Corporation, with their "the Del," that is, the Delphi Method, for predicting future events, and even the study group on "Ap Tech--Uses and Misuses" (i.e., no technological transfers to the Third World since they wouldn't understand them!)

It is another great work from Ms. Didion. A great "thriller," yes, but far more so, probably more "truth" about Iran-Contra, one more aspect of America's "bad faith" dealing with Latin America, than we will ever get from 10 Congressional investigating committees. It was a wonderful re-read; 5-stars plus.

This is a great read. I wasn't sure if I was interested in the subject (not a big fan of conspiracy theories or the mid-80's), but I wanted to read a Joan Didion novel and this is the one that was on the shelf. I loved it. Reading this novel is like being Elena McMahon/Elise Meyer for 227 pages; her dreams and memories, the catch-phrases. A definite must-read.

If there was a church devoted to Joan Didion, I would worship there every Sunday. I think she's probably the greatest living nonfiction writer, and her fiction, too, is usually masterful and devilishly witty. I adored "Democracy" and "A Book of Common Prayer."

I hate to sound politically correct, but one thing bothered me about "The Last Thing He Wanted": the lisping, blowsy, faggot hotel proprietor on the deserted island where Elena McMahon ends up before she's killed. This guy minces around talking about all the bathhouses where he's had sex with foreign men, listening to opera (what was it, Madame Butterfly?), and screeching show tunes. I don't understand why Didion would throw such a low stereotype into her story--surely she could have imagined a more complex, multidimensional gay man. For me, this diminished the credibility of the whole book. In a way, it's suggestive of the way Didion treats all her fictional characters when she's not at her best: as pop-up illustrations of the point she's trying to make. It's not quite human, and not quite satisfying.

I have read several of Didion's non-fiction essay collections and this was the second of the writer's novels for me, after "Play It As It Lays." Reading "The Last Thing" made me feel stupid, and thus I was relieved to see that it averaged only three stars and that I was not the only one who found the prose somewhat irritating and the non-linear narrative quite confusing (for me, this was compounded by the fact that after putting it down I was generally not in a hurry to pick it up again). While I cared about the heroine, Elena, I gave up caring when it was revealed that so-and-so was really someone else, chiefly because these revelations were usually delivered much after the fact and in a way that seemed airless. Similar to "Play It As It Lays" (which is told in a generally linear fashion), Didion is masterful at instilling a sense of profound dread in the reader as the main character's world unravels and foreshadows her ultimate fate. However, Didion's usual bag of tricks, such as beginning a series of sentences with the same clause, repeating a quote/thought almost obsessively ("We used to have a real life and just because I'm your daughter I'm supposed to like it and I don't"), and cryptic sentences didn't seem to work here. One wants her to just get to the point. If you have never read Didion fiction I would recommend you start with the classic "Play It As It Lays." If you read "Last Thing" first you may never read another Didion anything, and that would be a damn shame.

This is the first Joan Didion book I've read; my impression is that she is a master stylist.

This is the story of Elena Kagan, reporter, wife of a powerful oilman, daughter of a small-time arms dealer, an ambitious, effective woman but not quite effective enough; this is the story of an "incident" in the Caribbean, of the unofficial doings of the U.S. State Department, of human behavior at the intersection of power and fear. The experience of living under the shadow of family secrets that you don't dare uncover. It's also about journalism, truth, memory, history, the inevitable failure to get the facts down honestly and whatever drives us to try nonetheless -- and therefore also about writing itself.

It's a strange and perfect little book, highly recommended.

In general I am an admirer of Joan Didion's work, especially the essay collections Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album (and more recently her memoirs Where I Was From and The Year of Magical Thinking). In these, she observes with a clear eye and her writing is exactly to the point. Her novels are consistently rather less convincing: Her fiction always seems to willfully highlight writing style at the expense of everything else, e.g., narrative and character delineation.

This is partly understandable because of Ms. Didion's skepticism towards the very idea of narrative as imposed ("We tell ourselves stories in order to live") and ultimately arbitrary (what the story is depends entirely upon who's telling it). In her late essay "Pacific Distances" (in the collection titled After Henry) she announced that she has come to view narrative as "sentimental."

Yet (for reasons unclear to this reader) she has continued to write novels. And each successive work has increasingly relied upon sheer or mere prose style to sustain its interest.

In The Last Thing He Wanted, the prose mannerisms have taken over entirely. Simple sentences and fragments, arranged like decorative lacework, endlessly try to take the place of a simple story thread: "Somebody had her lined up, somebody had her jacked in the headlights. Had her in the scope. Had her in the crosshairs." Or this: "A,B,C. One two three. Night follows day. Not rocket science." And so forth.

And Ms. Didion's own insistent skepticism, irony, emotional distance, and lack of affect eat away at any sense of her characters as living, breathing people. "Elena McMahon" and "Treat Morrison" here are uninvolving cardboard figures, even more bloodless and washed-out than "Inez Victor" and "Jack Lovett," their predecessors in Ms. Didion's novel Democracy.

As a novel, The Last Thing He Wanted is a sunken ship, embedded on the ocean floor and encrusted with barnacles. The ship doesn't float, let alone sail anywhere. You can explore it like an artifact, if you wish, but there is zero narrative drive, no sense of "What happens next?" as one turns the pages. My eyes glazed over.

In my view, Didion is as close to perfect as any living writer, and this book represents the top of her form. It is a quiet book, its excellence pervasive but never showy.

The fact that this book has averaged three stars here says something about amazon but little about the book. Perhaps I shouldn't criticize - the level of discourse is higher than, say, youtube.