This is Didion’s first novel in 12 years. While it’s been brewing, she’s been writing screenplays (“Up Close & Personal”) with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and publishing her signature essays on, roughly, American anomie. Both these preoccupations show up in “The Last Thing He Wanted,” whose elusive heroine is loaded with anomie and whose pace and rhythm are cinematic. In fact, Didion has produced a novel that doesn’t have to be filmed to make you feel you’re watching it, not reading it.
The woman at the center of the story is Elena McMahon, a Washington reporter who used to be married to a wealthy Hollywood dealmaker. Her dying father is also a dealmaker, but his business is illegal weapons. To help him complete what will be his last, most profitable shipment, Elena accompanies crates of arms to Costa Rica, where the plan her father has outlined for her with such certainty suddenly disintegrates. Clues mount up, she learns she is in danger, and she begins to fear for the safety of her ex-husband and her daughter back home. Then she meets Treat Morrison, who has flown in from Washington. He too is a dealmaker, but one who operates strictly with intangibles at the highest levels and never, ever gets his hands dirty. The two can help each other, but that’s not going to happen if it threatens anyone’s stake in any of the deals currently underway. And as Treat knows and Elena learns, just about everyone has a stake.
Didion has a good story to tell, but her writing style is bound to annoy as many readers as it entrances. Abbreviated and relentlessly mannered, it depends for speed and emphasis on single-sentence paragraphs, repeated phrases and a portentous use of italics. Coupled with her fondness for returning to specific images as if they were slides on a screen–Elena at an Awards party, Elena in a Caribbean hotel coffee shop–the result is the triumph of artifice over character or coherence. How exactly does a Hollywood housewife end up as an arms dealer? Didion never bothers to explain, and her style lets her off the hook. Sure, she’s written a real page-turner. But in the end it’s not quite clear whether we’ve devoured a novel or a whole lot of movie popcorn.
