I’m a huge Joan Didion fan, but The Last Thing He Wanted was actually my very first foray into her fictional writing—and won’t be my last. Elena McMahon, previously a journalist covering a presidential campaign, helps her ailing father out by doing what she assumes will be a small favor for him—until suddenly she finds herself on an unknown island, caught up in an arms-smuggling ring. The story, exciting and captivating, is told through the eyes of an unnamed first person narrator. Time lines jump around a lot, and the tale is narrated in a fragmentary manner, yet the style works well in delivering an intense plot in random spurts. I found the writing style to be remarkably similar to Didion’s essays and memoirs, so there was something wonderfully familiar about the book.

I badly want to give this novel more than three stars. I badly want it to deserve more than three stars. It has remarkable qualities but is, ultimately, less than the sum of its parts.

Foremost, I am glad to have a novel about how our government sold arms to the Contras in the 80s. Just having something touch on black operations at all is highly welcome. (I suppose there is a decent amount of nonfiction on the matter, but having it fictionalized, and by a well-known name, suggests something left for posterity. Perhaps a false ideal.)

Didion's knowledge of the particulars is strong, no doubt generated by her travels and study of Central America, places like El Salvador, etc. Her credibility on the price of mines, or how one slips in and out of the United States, is high. One feels this is how things must work.

This is joined with a brave narrative ploy. We slip between the account of Elena McMahon's trip into black ops and an unnamed narrator's account of how she came to gain this information. The difference is not clearly marked (on my ebook) and so must be parsed, though is not difficult to. But we are continually fed suggestions about how things wind up for Elena, leading to a recursive, obscure style.

To borrow from the Russian formalists, if the 'fabula' is the raw story (what actually happened) and the 'syuzhet' is how the story is organized (what is actually told to us when), then the fabula portion is rather simple, the syuzhet like a bunch of diverting, snarled curlicues that ultimately are impossible to fully grasp.

That may be how information of this nature appears to a journalist or researcher of Didion's persuasion, but is frustrating as a reader. I wish she either demonstrated fully that this is just how things go - maybe stepped aside and said it full out - or... I don't know. A problem is that Elena is both a cypher and not terribly interesting as a character, so what happens to her throughout is not particularly absorbing.

The end is something of a denouement. I'm reminded of something like No Country for Old Men (the movie; I haven't read the book), where a late event is truncated as a narrative fiat (spoiler: Llewellyn's death), since we have already otherwise been shown how these murders happen. There's real heaviness to that action (in the syuzhet), but because Elena is lightweight and we're wafting along in uncertainty, the narrative ploy doesn't quite work.

All in all, a novel that remains and always must remain intriguing, but disappointing.

Only Didion could make me read a novel like this, what another reviewer described as an airport novel turned on its head and gutted, a '90s take on the Iran-Contra scandal, told elliptically, cryptically, achronologically.

Didion, as she does, spotlights a woman who has walked out of her life, spiraling perhaps but remaining cool as a cucumber, wandering around vacant Central American hotels and islands in the midst of a political storm over which she has no control and into which she will inevitably be drawn.

A sentence written by Didion is worth ten written by another author, something which propelled me through a muddled haze of political figures, dates, intricate logic. Beautiful, artful, what more could I say... The recursive nature of the narrative, in addition to the magic it works over this particular set of events and characters, points to the ongoing corruption and despicable acts of the US state and US agents over the rest of America.

Puede que yo no haya entendido, pero esta novela me ha parecido muy poco interesante, muy fría. Había leído El año del pensamiento mágico, que me había encantado. Esta me ha decepcionado.