Joan Didion's novels are different from and the same as her non-fiction. They are the same in the sense that they are written with exquisite style. Not a word is wasted and every word is the right word. The novels and the non-fiction share the same penetrating insight into human nature, mostly its darker side. The one haunted by fear, polluted by greed, and made sad by neurosis or worse. But her novels are different in that the writing has not only style but is highly stylized. She writes like the last of the modernists. Her characters do little more than talk and move from place to place. It is what they are thinking about that is fascinating.

In The Last Thing He Wanted Elena McMahon walks in and out of lives that three other people could have lived. She is the daughter of an arms dealer who becomes a reporter, marries a Hollywood mogul, goes back to being a reporter, and then does a favor for her father, which plunges her into his world. Didion makes a case for the possibility that Elena is not at home in any of these lives and that in all cases she is playing a role that amounts to a masquerade. I am not a reader of thrillers, but I get the feeling that she has set a literary novel amid the landscape of a spy thriller. The effect is disquieting, as if you really had to care about everyone as they face all kinds of danger.

This short, tense novel takes place in 1984 during the arms supply scheme that became known as the Iran/Contra affair. Elena is an innocent woman who gets caught up in events that are beyond her ken. Didion builds and sustains tension through repetition. She uses the same phrases and sentences over and over, deconstructs them and then uses the pieces. Her paragraphs very in length. One really long one will be followed by several that are one or two sentences long. Or one word long. It creates the sensation of being on a moving floor; you are off balance whether you walk with or against the movement and fill ill at ease if you try to stand still.

The narrator is a journalist very much like Didion herself. The conceit of the narration is that she is reconstructing the story she is telling from documents, interviews, and her own recollections of Elena, whom she knew very slightly. But as Didion did herself in her own non-fiction writing, the narrator gets inside the heads of Elena and at least one other character, Treat Morrison, and lets us know what they were thinking at a given moment in the past. This is, of course, impossible and would completely destroy the conceit if the writer was anyone other than Didion (or a few other New Journalists capable of this sort of art).

However, the violation of the conceit is distracting and perhaps unnecessary. It is probably the only flaw in novel, which is, however, admittedly also difficult to follow because of the way Didion leaps forward and back in time and from place to place. For this reason the novel should be read quickly, as close to in one sitting as you can manage. Then the momentum carries you along and everything that happens seems awful and inevitable and a sound metaphor for what likely happens when you are in the middle of a dirty, covert war and just doing a favor for someone you love.

Murder happens on the first page.

The story spins and spins. Looks left. Looks right.

Exposition is in lucky draws. You get a bit of info here.

Then there.

And everything starts to make sense.

Watch the money move. See the people go.

Look carefully.

And it all comes together in the end.

It works in this way. And though there is a film adaptation, it was messily made judged by letterboxd reviews. It's in the prose does Didion succeed in laying out a political thriller. And we all know that Didion is a master when it comes to prose.

A curious political thriller, fragmented, like a rough draft of something you have to piece together. An imagined investigation into the Iran-Contra scandal, a take that doesn't directly involve the players who normally come to mind.

I really really loved the way this was written. Plot was very gripping but for most of the book i felt I was a few IQ points short of understanding it.

meh...stopped reading about 20% into it kindle library loaner can't figure out what the hell is going on i suspect that is the point not for me

The first two chapters are incredibly written and set the tone for the whole book.
Coincidentally, the last book I read was Absalom, Absalom (re-read actually) and reading Didion after Faulkner is like jumping out of the hot tub and into the pool - so cool and clear.
But there's a relation too - water - just like Faulkner tells the whole story in the first chapter, Didion gives away much of what happens up front too. Then she doesn't just go back once and tell what led up to it, but like Quentin Compson she keeps going around finding new tangents and angles, struggling with two things - what happened and how to tell what happened.
This book is about a sleazy arms deal in the Reagan years gone wrong and touches on a lot of the diplomatic hi-jinx the US was involved in the cold war years. The State department lingo and style is a perfect vehicle for Didion's shockingly clear, elegant prose.

“The persona of "the writer" does not attract me.
As a way of being it has its flat sides. Nor am I comfortable around the literary life: its traditional dramatic line (the romance of solitude, of interior struggle, of the lone seeker after truth) came to seem early on a trying conceit.”


“Not dishonest in that he lied, .. but dishonest in the more radical sense, dishonest in that he remained incapable of seeing the thing straight.”


“How I feel is excluded, banished, deprived of the beam
Alcestis, back from the tunnel and half in love with death”

“The rhythm common to plot dictates a lull, a time of suspension, a time of lying in wait, a certain number of hours or days or weeks so commonplace as to suggest that the thing might not play out, the ball might not drop.”

“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.
The seal's wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.”

My first Didion. Not sure what I expected, but a literary, dreamlike, Le Carré-like story about the Iran-Contra affair wasn’t it. And yet it blew me away. This has DeLillo Libra echoes. It’s brilliant and beautiful and poignant. A tremendous novel.

I read this specifically because of the Netflix movie. The movie looked interesting in the trailer, so I wanted to read the book first. Even having read the book, I'm not totally sure what happened in the movie. I love Didion's nonfiction, this was the first novel I've read by her. The plot is both more complicated and more simple than the book makes it seem. The arms dealing is fairly easy to grasp if you are aware of the history the book is based on, but the weirdness of the main character having to stay in Central America is like.... what. I don't know, I can't figure out if I'm putting too much thought into it or if I am missing something. Didion's technical writing is always good to read though.

This is the first Joan Didion book I've read and definitely the last. The best thing about this book is the spare writing style. At first, I really liked how she would select certain phrases uttered by various characters and repeat them to give them greater impact. But after awhile, it got, well repetitious. I also felt I gained some insight into the US intervention into Central American crises and how the CIA and other agencies are used surreptitiously to affect change desired by the US govt. There is a great story here but it is hidden underneath the words and you have to dig to find and understand it. Even after finishing the book, I'm not really sure what the motives of the "bad guys" were. The worst part about this book is the back and forth narrative and the narrator herself. Who is this narrator? She is so distant. It's as if she doesn't really care about the story, even though she's spent 10 years researching it, and in the end, the reader doesn't really care either. The back and forth narrative is so confusing. You really have to pay attention, which is fine, but when you end up flipping back pages to figure out what exactly happened or who someone is, it's annoying. The narrative is also annoying when you consider that the narrator is supposedly some sort of journalist; the story is certainly not told in a journalistic-style. The book is a thriller but the only suspense is of the "something bad happened but we're not going to tell you what it is until the end" sort. Very annoying. The characters (when you remember who they are) are so flat that they are basically cardboard cutouts of real people. This is a romance. Really? There is only one paragraph in the entire book to even make you think these two people had some sort of connection. In the end, I would only recommend this book to Joan Didion fans, or those interested in trying out an off-the-beaten path type of writing style.

Fascinating writing - but so hard to follow that I was lost almost all the time. It is one of those books that I think I should read all over again to see what the heck was going on - except I don't want to.

I was disappointed with this one.