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The Last Thing He Wanted

joan didion

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This intricate, fast-paced story, whose many scenes and details fit together like so many pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, is Didion's 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."

0 pages, Hardcover

First published November 17,1998
Literary awards
orange prize, 

This edition

Format
0 pages, Hardcover
Published
November 17, 1998 by Random House Value Publishing
ISBN
9780517279083
ASIN
0517279088
Language
English

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About the author

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joan didion

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Joan Didion was an American writer and journalist. She is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism along with Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe.
Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Over the course of her career, Didion wrote essays for many magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Esquire, The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Hollywood lifestyle, and the history and culture of California. Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s often concentrated on the subtext of political rhetoric and the United States's foreign policy in Latin America. In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted. In 2005, Didion won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir of the year following the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. She later adapted the book into a play that premiered on Broadway in 2007. In 2013, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by president Barack Obama. Didion was profiled in the Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, in 2017.

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Rating(4 / 5.0, 100 votes)
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100 reviews All reviews
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ChubbyGoat
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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I really enjoyed this little book. Clearly fiction, but based on ideas from the 1980's CIA/Reagan/ Oliver North and some blonde chic, Faith something. It bugged me, I looked it up, Oliver North's secretary's name was Fawn Hall. She does get a shout out in this novel as the blonde making copies. Perfect. The Iran/Contra affair. That entire political deal went down while I was attending a very small college in the near geographic center of Michigan. We paid more attention to it than most college students for the simple reason that one of the girls living on our floor was the daughter/niece or something of a fairly high ranking official in El Salvador - she was worried constantly about her families safety. So, while the bigger world picture and political implications certainly escaped 18 year old me -- I was aware of the basic incidents. So was Didion, and she's written a great fictional account of how someone can get sucked into the void. I really loved it, especially the ending.
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kolonya22
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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"Maybe they looked at each other and knew that nothing they could do would matter as much as the slightest tremor of the earth, the blind trembling of the Pacific in its bowl, the heavy snows closing the mountain passes, the rattlers in the dry grass, the sharks cruising the deep cold water through the Golden Gate." arguably one of the most perfect lines ever written. this book was so unlike anything i've read by joan but still such amazing writing and her classic style. this was super fun and highly recommend for those wanting to read more of a mystery/thriller style novel. will stress this is a book you need to pay attention to to follow the plot..would not classify as a quick east read.
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_Wolfram
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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What a horrible and boring book. I am usually not so harsh when it comes to rating books, but there was just nothing I enjoyed about reading this. All the the blurbs saying what this book is about are very appealing, but I'm telling you right now, don't waste your time. And I would say just watch the movie based on the book that's on Netflix, but after doing some research (post read) apparently the movie was a disaster too, despite having some incredible actors.

Moral of the store, don't waste your time.
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Galletita
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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The novel is a somewhat confusing political thriller, told in starts and stops, concerning an investigation into the Iran-Contra scandal.

So, I found this book difficult to follow. Of course subjects like this - of conspiracy, lies, and obfuscation - do have ample measures of unclarity. But in reading this novel, I frequently did not know who the narrator was, did not know exactly what time frame it was in, or what country they were in (which to be fair, in one instance, the narrator did mention she wasn’t going to reveal).

I also never could understand why the main character would drop her lifestyle and quickly go on a gun running errand (no less) on the basis of what her semi-senile father told her - which starts the whole story.

However, the book is saved by Didion’s writing. Her wry prose, and her amusement at government double speak very much makes the effort reading it worthwhile. It’s just that the overall result is a bit disappointing.
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mimiouka
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Do not get me wrong, I am nothing if not a Joan Didion Stan… but this one was tough for me to get thru. I tried though!!!
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chibi-tan-chi
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Set in Central America and Miami in the mid-1980s in a world of spies, contractors, dirty money, gunrunners, failed reporters, bland diplomats, and political intrigues that mirror only ghosts of themselves, this is a small, chill novel that deserves far more attention than it's ever received. A fine and cerebral little political thriller.
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NathaneLRiver
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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An espionage and conspiratorial tale similar to Graham Greene yet sharp, taut, illusory and spun with images that render it dreamlike. A very different kind of thriller set in a well defined time and place yet detailed with fragmentary imagery.
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