The Last Thing He Wanted (Vintage International) - Softcover

Didion, Joan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679752854 ISBN 13: 9780679752851

Publisher: Vintage, 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

Review

"Gripping...Didion at her finest." --USA Today"Simultaneously lucid and surreal . . . the result is entrancing." --The New Yorker"Remarkable. . . . Didion has created a menacing world where the reader is held hostage." --Los Angeles Times"Dark detail, understatement and intelligence work their astonishing magic." --The New York Times Book Review

From the Back Cover

"It is 1984, a period, in Joan Didion's sweeping formulation of luridness, of counterfeit machismo, of 'striking and maintaining a certain kind of sentimental pose'. More specifically, it was a time when large quantities of lethal weaponry reached the Nicaraguan Contras with the connivance, but without the official sanction, of the American government...It is typical of Didion's approach to her theme that Elena McMahon, the out of work reporter who agrees to escort a shipment of anti personnel mines to a Caribbean island arrives on the remote jungle airstrip wearing a black silk shift. This novel, like its heroine's choice of travel wear, proclaims its classiness at once...Didion's language is as high toned as it is hip, an amalgam of journalistic and political jargons with pared down prose full of finely sprung rhythms, suggestive pauses and patterns of repetition and variation as artful and shapely as song...impractical as it may be, there really is nothing as becoming as black silk."
LUCY HUGHES HALLETT, 'Sunday Times'

"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'

"Joan Didion's first novel for more than a decade, 'The Last Thing He Wanted' is by far her most secular and disenchanted. It is also close to her best."
BRIAN MORTON, 'TES'

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0679752854
• ISBN 13: 9780679752851
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240