|
That is the view in Joan Didion's The Last Thing He Wanted, her first novel in 12 years. As in her previous fiction, journalism and screenplays, this politically engaged writer portrays the world as manipulated somewhere near the intersection of Hollywood, Wall Street, and the CIA -- and not with the common good uppermost in mind.
Perhaps alone among serious American novelists, in other words, Didion seeks to create a mature expression of 1960s anti-establishment distrust, while at the same time showing off, sometimes with a wink and a nod, her own hard-won familiarity with selected corridors and luncheon tables of power. Her anonymous narrator knows where the right things are bought and why the wrong people can afford them.
But The Last Thing He Wanted is fiction, not political analysis. Didion's narrator attempts to uncover the truth about Elena, a rather feckless journalist, unhappy in her marriage to a West Coast Big Enchilada, who finds herself swept up in dangerous intrigue in 1984 when she agrees to help her dying father by illegally running guns to Central America.
Not a smart move, you might say. Indeed, Elena soon finds herself without a legitimate passport or travelers' checks on an obscure Caribbean island. Worse, she is estranged from her daughter and husband, plagued by unnerving "coincidences," and tailed by decidedly questionable characters. Worse still, she falls in love.
The suspense here is not high-pitched, since the ending and Didion's thematic aims are pretty much given away early. But this novelist is first and last a miniaturist of mood who can imply a universe of corruption. Elena, depressed by her loveless marriage and aimless bourgeois existence, becomes fodder for dishonest politicians and CIA operatives who recognize her as an isolate cast out from the herd. Her one true love affair, involving a decent man who was also damaged in emotional and moral ways, cannot save her, though it will likely move many readers.
Characteristically, Didion writes in spare, often tactile prose. Her dialogue can subtly evoke worlds unspoken. A fair amount of America's recent involvement with Central American troubles is deftly interpolated. At times, unfortunately, the stylized writing can become self-conscious and mannered, especially in repetitions meant to be crafty. This is not a writer to let an irony tiptoe in on little cat's feet.
Still, The Last Thing He Wanted is the tough-minded achievement of a writer whose sense of purpose, authority, and moral outrage propel a novel past its political theme to a passionately felt conclusion. The unlikely aspects of her story are made credible within the bleak, minimalist fiction she chisels in wary language at the outskirts of historical reality.
Charles Flowers is currently writing a book based on the upcoming PBS-TV series, "Century of Discovery."
©1996, ProMotion, inc.
Support your