Product Description

Leaving the presidential campaign she had been covering for a major newspaper to do a favor for her father, journalist Elena McMahon finds herself trapped on an island in which intrigue, assassination, and arms dealing have superseded tourism as the major industry. Reprint. 60,000 first printing. NYT. "

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #256925 in Books
• Published on: 1997-09-02
• Released on: 1997-09-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Amazon.com Review
Elena McMahon is a reporter for the Washington Post and the unlikely inheritor of her father's complex and secretive life as an arms dealer for the U.S. Government in Central America. The year is 1984, and as she flies to an unnamed island off the coast of Costa Rica, she is oblivious to the spies, American military personnel, and the consequences of her father's errors that await her. She's also unprepared for the advances of Treat Morrison, an American diplomat whose service under six administrations has made him a "crisis junkie." Treat narrates this story, offering a unique perspective on Elena, a woman who abandons one life for another.

From Publishers Weekly
Brilliantly written and flawlessly structured, Didion's first work of fiction since 1984's Democracy employs her trademark barbed-wire prose to tell a highly elliptical tale of political intrigue. Elena McMahon, a middle-aged woman of substantial wealth, is divorced and covering the 1984 presidential campaign for the Washington Post when she abruptly walks off her beat and goes to Florida to visit her ailing father. Soon, she has passively allowed herself to drift into a shady arms deal running between Florida and Central America, an enterprise that her father had set up but is physically incapable of seeing through. Didion takes risks in her choice of a nameless narrator, a writer who has only a peripheral knowledge of the people and events around which the story revolves. Indeed, the narrator is piecing together that story considerably after the fact. As a result, the characters are virtually ciphers: the narrator explicitly refuses to provide traditional motivation for their actions. The book is compulsively readable, however, an intellectual thriller that recalls Graham Greene?except that whereas Greene was concerned with the spirituality of desolation, Didion's characters operate in a spiritual void. The cold, detached tone is more than compensated for by the sharpness of Didion's prose and the artful suspense of her plot. This is a major work by one of the shrewdest observers of America's political and cultural life. 100,000 first printing; Random House Audio book.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Sure, Elena MacMahon is burned out after chasing presidents along the 1984 campaign trail for the Washington Post, and sure, she knows that something odd is in the offing when she visits her kingpin father in Florida, where he mutters about one last spectacular deal. But the prose here is so maddeningly elliptical (a phrase clearly invented for Didion) that it's a little hard to say exactly how she ends up on a Caribbean island, awaiting who knows what (but she knows it will be big), with false identification papers someone has slipped her. Interviews later with Ambassador Treat Morrison, with whom Elena apparently had a romance, don't really clarify the situation, but it does appear that she has been set up as a cover for the Iran-Contra affair. There's a dark, atmosphere-soaked thriller buried somewhere inside Didion's tantalizingly cool, reductive prose, and the tension that results can be unbearable?which is good or bad, depending on your mood. This is another triumph of Didion's unique style and belongs in most collections.
-?Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Momentous Events Writ Small
Joan Didion's The Last Thing He Wanted is a mysterious, gentle little book that ultimately is quite sad. Elena McMahon does a favour for her father and through that favour and through her we see the large unfathomable world of conspiraces and esponiage boiled to very human elements. There is a cold spareness to the writing that left this reader unmoved until after it was over and then the sadness powerfully washed over me. It is an unique and haunting look at the choices people make and the lives and events that one can affect with simple, irrevocable gestures. A beautiful novel.

Slouching Towards Reaganism
I'm a fan of Didion's pitch-perfect deadpan prose, but if you aren't, there are other joys in this novel. It offers a post-Orwellian assessment, in human, personal terms, of 1984, with a particular focus on the Fourth of July on an unnamed Caribbean island. Along with Don DeLillo's "The Names," Didion's novel is a masterpiece of American paranoia. It offers a dark yet plausible scenario of the collapse of American democracy under the weight of expansionist ambitions, mass media, and the stunning sang-froid of the silent majorities. A bit confusing at times, the novel is psychologically (and syntactically) complicated but apparently well researched--it is also very confrontational, relentless in its outrage and hopelessness.

Disappointed
This book has a great story to tell, but through the stalling and back-telling the powerfulness of the message is lost. I found that I had to force myself to finish hoping to be swept away by the ending, but was instead left wondering what I had missed. The narrative is confusing and lacks any passion on the subject at hand. However I believe this could be an intriguing movie.