The Last Thing He Wanted - Softcover

Didion, Joan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0006547508 ISBN 13: 9780006547501

Publisher: Flamingo, 1997

Synopsis

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".

About this title

Product Description

The first novel in over a decade from perhaps the most admired writer in America.

It is 1984. Journalist Elena McMahon, watching her evasive, gruff father’s life ebbing away before her, clutches at understanding him to grasp little more than air. But harder, keener forces impel her to do his bidding, to go naked into a ‘situation’ in Central America, ‘because things were hotting up again’...

A literary masterpiece.

Review

‘The centrality of The Last Thing He Wanted is not a person, nor even an event, but the tone of the US in 1984. The technique of writing is, as usual, unique, an incantation with repetitions and rhythms to entrance the reader, meant to restore full weight to a language made weightless by misuse... I should perhaps also mention that I read it twice for pure delight before reading it for review.’
Veronica Horwell, Guardian.

‘Fast-paced, witty, inventive... The Last Thing He Wanted is a creation of high seriousness, a thriller composed with all the resources of a unique gift for imaginative literature.’
Elizabeth Hardwick, New York Review of Books

‘An impressive, fast-talking, hard-boiled, wise-cracking, tough-guy of a novel.’
Philip Hensher, Mail on Sunday

About this edition

• Publisher: Flamingo
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0006547508
• ISBN 13: 9780006547501
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 216