Rating: 
Summary: The Mannerisms Have Taken Over
Review: This is the sort of book that damages a writer's reputation.In general I am an admirer of Joan Didion's work, especially the essays collected in Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album. In these, she observes with a clear eye and her writing is superb. Her novels are rather less convincing: Her fiction always seems to highlight writing style at the expense of everything else, e.g., narrative and character. This is partly understandable because of Ms. Didion's skepticism towards the very idea of narrative as imposed ("We tell ourselves stories in order to live"), unreliable (the penultimate words of A Book of Common Prayer are: "I am told, and so she said. I heard later. According to her passport. It was reported. Apparently."), and arbitrary (what the story is depends entirely upon who's telling it). Nonetheless she has continued writing fiction. And each new novel has increasingly relied upon sheer or mere prose style to fill the pages. In The Last Thing He Wanted, the prose mannerisms have now taken over entirely. Simple sentences and fragments endlessly try to do the work of paragraphs: "Somebody had her lined up, somebody had her jacked in the headlights. Had her in the scope. Had her in the crosshairs." Or this: "A,B,C. One two three. Night follows day. Not rocket science." And so forth. And Ms. Didion's own insistent skepticism, irony, emotional distance, and lack of affect eat away at any sense of her characters as living, breathing people. "Elena McMahon" and "Treat Morrison" here are uninvolving, cardboard figures, even more bloodless and washed-out than "Inez Victor" and "Jack Lovett," their predecessors in Ms. Didion's novel Democracy. As a novel, The Last Thing He Wanted is a ship submerged and utterly encrusted with barnacles. Or perhaps a Faberge egg so overdecorated with bric-a-brac that one can no longer discern the egg; but the intricate, convoluted ornamentation itself -- rather than being sparkling jewels of various lustrous shades -- has been done entirely in grey, or white, or beige. My eyes glaze over.
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