Didion's latest too self-important

Joan Didion has always carried a mystique--maybe it's the wrap-around sunglasses, the afternoon Bloody Marys, the container of coffee from Chock Full O' Nuts that got her through her job at Vogue on two hours of sleep. But recently, she's been attracting the kind of press normally reserved for film stars and the society women she once sent up in her essays. In the same circles where the unveiling of an antique Gucci bag can elicit kudos, the release of The Last Thing He Wanted has been greeted with a flurry of publicity. It started with a full-page photograph in The New Yorker in July, followed by profiles in Interview, New York, and finally, in the 700-page September issue of Vogue--Didion's publishing alma mater--a full-page picture, profile, and book excerpt.

At the root of this attention--as anyone who has taken an expository writing class knows--are those essays. "On Keeping a Notebook," "Why I Write," and "Goodbye to All That" form a holy triumvirate in the cult of Joan. Though Didion has shed the intensely personal in her reportage, she can't live down passages in which she confessed: "I had a low-grade afternoon hangover and ran over a black snake on the way to the supermarket and was flooded with inexplicable fear...I would like to believe that my dread then was for the human condition, but of course it was for me." Didion is popular because she intuited that her fears mirrored those of an entire culture. She was right. Some writers make us want to meet the writer. Not so with Didion: Joan, for better or for worse, we think we already know.

Which is exactly what she wants to avoid in The Last Thing He Wanted: the assumption of immediate knowledge from the novel's outset. This time, Didion wants to keep her reader guessing--so much so that she virtually discards all narrative, description, and character. (She told an interviewer, "If I start describing something, I put myself to sleep at the typewriter. In this book, even the characters are sketchy, which is kind of a risk.") Didion doesn't so much tell her story as circle it, slowly spiralling down to ground zero. "Some real things have happened lately," Didion starts her novel. It takes her 227 pages to sift through the misinformation--the deceits and the counterplots--to tell the reader what that event even is.

The story, in Didion's case, hits close to home. Elena McMahon is a journalist caught in the middle of a Nicaraguan arms exchange. When her father unexpectedly falls ill, Elena realizes that he was a dealer, and she must complete his last exchange. Elena is transformed from unwitting dealer to unwilling victim to simply unknowing: "The first thing Elena McMahon did not understand was that Paul Schuster already knew who she was," Didion writes. But this she writes on page 196, following two dozen "first" revelations. Didion strings the reader along.

The Last Thing He Wanted is a self-consciously important novel. Filled with short, one-line paragraphs and sentences repeated like mantras, the book has a portentous diction that, at times, can grate: "For the record this is me talking.// You know me, or think you do.// The not quite omniscient author.// No longer moving fast.// No longer traveling light."

Though Didion's narrator is intrusive, as Last Thing progresses, the reason for this intrusion grows clearer. Like Elena, and of course like Didion herself, the novel's narrator is a journalist, researching the story, unsure of how to present it. Because the book deals with a time period when truth was stranger than fiction, and because Didion herself was a reporter of one of the period's most interesting stories (see Didion's book Salvador), the novel grows more uncanny as we read. There is some of Didion in both the narrator and Elena; the interesting part is figuring out how much and how.

Almost to the very last page, the novel leaves the reader in the dark because the narrator herself is in the dark. Late in the book, Didion writes, "The rhythm common to plots dictates a lull, a period of suspension, a time of laying in wait, a certain number of hours or days or weeks so commonplace so as to suggest that the thing might not play out, the ball might not drop." The narrator is referring to Elena's wait on a certain unnamed Caribbean island, but she could be talking about the novel. Which is the point. Fact and fiction are interchangeable--as, sometimes, are art and life.

Didion's novel is a short, fast read; the story, though gripping, is spare. Yet in the smallest of details--falsified passports, a first-rate gay bathhouse in Port-au-Prince, a meal consisting of a chocolate parfait and bacon--Didion manages to characterize the national feeling of dislocation and disaffection. It's no coincidence that at the novel's end, Elena McMahon buys a book in a second-hand bookstore called General Medicine and Infectious Diseases: Didion has given our culture a once-over, and the prognosis is not good.