The Last Thing He Wanted. - book reviews

National Review, Nov 11, 1996 by James Bowman

THE existential hero -- son of the anti-hero, great-grandson of the Byronic hero -- is a guy. Obviously. Meursault wouldn't work as a woman. Nor Frederick Henry. Nor Childe Harold. They still retain a whiff of that masculine aroma associated with Beowulf and Roland and those far-off days when there were heroes tout court. Yet I, for one, am not entirely sorry to see that old roue, the romantic hero, finally getting a much-needed sex-change operation in the novels of Joan Didion. Her latest, and her first in 12 years, presents us with an unmistakable existential heroine. She is perhaps more passive, less defiant, more the helpless victim of the quasi-cosmic forces she contends with than her male counterpart used to be, but she is recognizably his sister.

Her name is Elena McMahon. She is the daughter of Dick McMahon, a semi-retired gun-runner with shadowy connections to most of the covert operations being run by the U.S. Government and its agents in Central America and the Caribbean during the 1980s. It is June 1984, and Dick McMahon has finally slipped into terminal senility -- just as, riding on the boom of Iran - Contra, he has put together a million-dollar deal to supply anti-personnel mines to the Contras. Since her father is unable to make the delivery and receive the payment, Elena goes in his place. Why she should have agreed to do this is never made clear. We are told by "the not quite omniscient author" that it wasn't for the money. We are told by the same author, in a long, defensive passage, that such questions of motivation and other footling writerly details do not interest her.

Fair enough. We don't know why Meursault killed the Arab either. But there are too many other things we don't know. The existential heroine, always at the end of her tether, walks out on a marriage and a job, also for no apparent reason. And the disconnectedness in her life is reflected in the trademark Didion style, suggestive of barely suppressed hysteria.

Short sentences.

Short paragraphs.

Repeated lines from telephone messages or casual remarks or overheard conversations.

This mantra-like repetition of the tag ends of dialogue --repetition that is meant to seem significant but whose significance remains obscure -- is part of the general atmosphere of paranoia. She knows there is a hidden, ironic meaning in these innocent-sounding phrases, she's just not yet sure what it is.

And we're not yet sure if "she" is Elena or Joan Didion.

Elena receives two telephone-answering-machine messages, from her daughter and her father, on the same day, which become a kind of leitmotif of the book.

"We had a real life and now we don't and just because I'm your daughter I'm supposed to like it and I don't."

"Pardon my using your time but I've been trying to call your mother and that a -- -- she lives with refuses to put her on the line."

That Elena's mother is dead lends a certain piquancy to the latter, besides tipping her off that the old man is ga-ga. And a teenager's talking about "a real life" suggests rich ironies which are not quite explored. But whatever significance both these run-on sentences may originally have had is squeezed out of them rather than accentuated by their frequent repetition. The resonance they gather by being repeated suggests something quite other, something vast and unknown.

As the shrinks say, just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean your enemies are not conspiring against you. You have to make assumptions in life, and the assumption that sinister forces threaten you is, paradoxically, one of the safer ones to make. It means that they won't surprise you, at any rate. Miss Didion's strength, if you can call it that, is that she knows how many assumptions there are in her view of the world. She rather glories in the absence of hard information. Especially of information coming out of the government:

There are the published transcripts of the hearings before the select committee, ten volumes, two-thousand-five-hundred-and-seven pages, sixty-three days of testimony arresting not only for its reliance on hydraulic imagery (there were the conduits, there was the pipeline, there was of course the diversion) but for its collateral glimpses of life on the far frontiers of the Monroe Doctrine. There was for example the airline that operated out of St. Lucia . . . and either was or was not (conflicting testimony on this) 99 per cent owned by a former Sky West flight attendant who either did or did not live on St. Lucia. There was for example the team of unidentified men . . . who either did or did not (more conflicting testimony) arrive on the northern Costa Rican border to burn the bodies of the crew of the unmarked DC-3 that at the time it crashed appeared to be registered to the airline that was or was not 99 per cent owned by the former Air West [sic] flight attendant who did or did not live on St. Lucia.

Needless to say, this is the last we hear of the airline and the flight attendant and the ill-fated DC-3. To the paranoiac, the fact that you don't know things is itself evidence that the things you don't know are threatening.