The Last Thing He Wanted

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Summary: A way with words...
Review: I bought this novel from a bargain bin (because of the cover design), put it on a shelf, and didn't open it for over a month. When I finally picked it up, I read only twelve pages before I grabbed my highlighter... The writing style is deceptively simple and highly structured--breathtaking, actually. And the story is fantastic (and well told). Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: The Last Thing He Wanted
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointed
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointed
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: The Last Thing He Wanted
Review: This book was absolutely not good! It never made any sense and skipped around that by the time it got back to a certain person, you had already forgotten who they were and why they were significant! I just read a review and they said it was a romeo and juliet book, i had no idea the main character was even in love, much less there was a second main character! If you have nothing to do for days, and time to write down every character and their significance, read this book, otherwise, really don't waste your time!

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.