The Last Thing We Expected
Joan Didion the journalist
is a great believer in stories. Joan Didion the novelist has a habit of
distrusting them. In her essays, she has confidently found narrative
everywhere--in the worship of John Wayne, in the empty governor's mansion in
California, in the Central Park jogger's fate. But in her fiction, Didion gets
the jitters at the mere thought of spinning out a tale. The anxious narrators
of her disjointedly elliptical novels are always interrupting, challenging,
undercutting themselves. By fits and starts: that is how they write, a stylized
stuttering that has become Didion's trademark delivery. That is also how her
characters live. The Didion protagonist is a woman adrift in history, her own
and America's.
Her new novel, The Last
Thing He Wanted , is about--what else?--a woman adrift in history, her own
and America's. Elena McMahon, given to "fast walks and clean starts," fits the
mold of her predecessors, sensitive yet impassive females proficient at
forgetting and at never looking far ahead. She has learned how to evade her
past, like Maria Wyeth in Play It As It Lays (1970) and Charlotte
Douglas in A Book of Common Prayer (1977), who cope with crisis by
living only "in the now," never risking "the backward glance." Elena, a course
of radiation treatments for breast cancer behind her, has distanced herself
from her dying mother, her rich ex-husband, her resentful daughter. Now
crisscrossing the country covering the 1984 presidential campaign for the
Washington
Post , she feels "a fatigue near vertigo" at the daily
round of spin, counterspin, rumors, denials. Like Inez Victor, the wife of a
vacuous politician in Democracy (1985), she is quickly mastering a
"capacity for passive detachment." In fact, on the day when the action of the
novel begins, she walks off the campaign, without a clue as to what she plans
to do next.
The
Last Thing He Wanted also features a self-consciously intrusive
narrator--nothing new here, either. This time, the uneasy voice is that of a
nameless California journalist who has written about administration policy in
Central America during the 1980s (she could, in other words, be Joan Didion
herself). The novel unfolds in the cinematic style that Didion has made her
own: flashbacks, flash-forwards, crosscuts, staccato bursts of dialogue, now
and then "a montage, music over." The quest to assemble the shards of
experience, too, is by now familiar. One woman, the narrator, cross-examines
the inscrutable life of another woman, Elena McMahon, hoping but not really
expecting to find meaning in it.
In short, The Last Thing He Wanted looks like proof
of what you may have suspected for some time: that for all its restlessness
about form, Joan Didion's fiction is formulaic--even contrived. The
exhilarating surprise of her new novel is that in it, she masters one of the
most contrived forms of all, the thriller. Followers of Didion's studiously
anticlimactic, fragmented fiction will find it hard to believe, but her fifth
novel has perfect pitch and pace, and is hauntingly hard to put down.
The truth
is that suspense and plot, though never before part of the technique of
Didion's fiction, have always been its subject. Novels are where she frets
about narrative, its possibilities and deceptions. Her protagonists are
enigmas--to themselves, the reader, the narrator, and, not least, the
mysterious men who hover at the edge of their lives, in love with them. These
male figures are plotters in a dimly lit world where the CIA, corporate powers,
criminals, and small-time schemers do deals, stage coups, order up murders. To
what end they maneuver has never been clear, and the women, who in their remote
way are drawn to them, can't bring themselves to care. The point has been that
the suspense is endless, that there is finally no meaningful plot. Didion's
parables about anomie in post-Kennedy-era America have implied that once
history is forgotten, identity dissolves and conspiracy--and the suspicion of
it--is the only guide.
In The Last Thing He Wanted , Didion gets
to the bottom of the mystery for once, and a parable that had long since begun
to seem world-weary becomes unexpectedly gripping. Cut loose from the scripted
charade of the campaign beat, Elena McMahon gets caught up in the machinations
of one of those male dealers in dangerous merchandise, her father, Dick
McMahon. In fact, completely against type, she acquires an active role in the
operation.
Another
"clean start" for Elena, this one is launched in a customary Didion daze. Elena
barely knows what she is doing when she buys a ticket to see her father in
Miami, though then it dawns on her that she wants to persuade him of something
that he, like Elena herself, seems to be having trouble absorbing: that her
mother--his ex-wife--is now dead. When the old man gets sick soon after her
arrival, the daughter who missed her mother's funeral has a chance to make
amends for a lifelong habit of aloofness. (Finally, a narrator who makes a
motive clear!) Filling in for her father on his latest deal, she accompanies a
shipment of arms in a Lockheed L-100 from Miami to somewhere in Costa Rica,
where she has been told she will receive payment of $1 million. "The
million-dollar score, the million-dollar pop, the million-dollar payday," is
the way Dick McMahon puts it to her in a febrile panic. This is the "major
deal" he has been awaiting all his life.
Of course, that is only the beginning of the story--and by
the time you've pieced this much together, the plot has deepened to involve
Treat Morrison, United States ambassador-at-large, and American policy toward
the Nicaraguan contras. Elena McMahon has been propelled into a demimonde
where, as the narrator puts it in a knowing pastiche of official jargon, those
"trying to create a context for democracy" are "maybe getting [their] hands a
little dirty in the process or just opting out, letting the other guy call it."
This is the realm where history--such as it is, Didion believes--gets made,
"exclusively and at random by people like Dick McMahon" and his much more
ruthless higher-ups.
Scrutinized from the ground, which is where the narrator and Elena McMahon are,
this history is not as random as it might seem. It's an eerie blend of careful
planning and pure chance, impromptu schemes and long-running designs. As she
plays out the process of converting "humanitarian resupply" into "lethal
resupply," Didion seems to allude (as she did in her book Miami ) to the
theory that CIA-trained anti-Castro Cubans have been at work in more than a few
dubious American exploits. While the ambassador on an island near Nicaragua
prepares to bring in the Special Forces in case of a "full-scale effort,"
shadier men with terrorist friends and lots of experience in international
subterfuge are busy plotting with "the other guy" to make such an "effort"
occur. So is a slick congressional foreign-policy aide, college buddy to the
sons of Cuban exiles and Central American ambassadors. The plot happens to be
an assassination, in which Elena McMahon soon figures.
Didion, in other words, has written a
fast-paced story, not just her usual series of fractured "stories." As the
narrator explains: "Every moment could be seen to connect to every other
moment, every act to have logical if obscure consequences, an unbroken
narrative of vivid complexity." It is not overarching moral or political
meaning that Didion has suddenly discovered. No historically significant
struggle of good against evil has dawned in her America, where a frontier ethos
has long since declined into corruption and cynicism. It is emotional meaning
that she registers, with a vivid simplicity and in the unlikeliest of places.
Didion has always been an expert on coolness, numbness, in hot climates. This
time, at the heart of a carefully constructed thriller is a romance, which is
no less tragic--in fact, is more tragic--for being oblique. It is born of
another of those fated yet fortuitous connections in Didion's disorienting
world, this one between two people (Elena McMahon and Treat Morrison) who "were
equally remote."
As she
tries to decipher the convoluted course of her Central American adventure,
Elena McMahon, "not one of those who saw in a flash how every moment could
connect," discovers memory and imagination--faculties that Didion's previous
heroines did their best to deny. She has exchanged a hollow life for a
"heightened life," and has tried to "comprehend all its turns, get its
possibilities." People who do that, the narrator observes, "are at heart
storytellers." Didion should know, after three decades of weaving her intricate
essays. In The Last Thing He Wanted , Didion the novelist finally gives
in to the narrative urge.
