The Last Thing He Wanted by Joan Didion
"The Last Thing He Wanted" by Joan Didion is a complex narrative that intertwines personal and political themes within a backdrop of 1980s American socio-political turmoil. The story follows a journalist who becomes embroiled in a dangerous plot involving her acquaintance, Elena McMahon Janklow, as she navigates a tumultuous life marked by familial obligations and professional challenges. Set against the summer of 1984, the plot explores issues of identity, manipulation, and the impacts of government actions, drawing parallels to significant historical events such as the Iran-Contra affair and American foreign interventions in Latin America.
Elena's journey takes her from the East Coast to a clandestine operation in Costa Rica, where she grapples with the legacy of her father's confused state and the lethal machinations of those around her. As she becomes entangled in a plot that threatens her life and the safety of her daughter, the unfolding drama reveals the darker undercurrents of American political motives. The novel culminates in a violent confrontation, highlighting the intersecting fates of characters who find themselves trapped within a corrupt system. Didion's work invites readers to reflect on the complexities of personal agency in an era defined by geopolitical strife and moral ambiguity.
The Last Thing He Wanted by Joan Didion
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1996
Type of work: Novel
The Work
The Last Thing He Wanted demands its readers’ attention, starting with its ambiguous title and continuing through its complexly zigzagging plot, narrated by someone who does not give her name but reveals enough about herself to suggest she is a fictionalized version of Didion, with an ear for jargon that lets her suggest the truth behind the pretense.
The time of the main events is the summer of 1984, a year that suggests a dystopian society comparable to but not identical with the one in George Orwell’s 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The narrator, a journalist writing a story on the American diplomat Treat Morrison, eventually finds that this story involves her Los Angeles acquaintance Elena McMahon Janklow, whose daughter once attended a private school with the narrator’s daughter. Elena, upon leaving her rich husband and dropping his surname, moves to the East Coast, enrolls Catherine in a private school in Rhode Island, and takes a job reporting for The Washington Post. She is covering the California primary for the newspaper when she walks off her job, flies to Miami, and, finding her seventy-four-year-old father so confused that he cannot remember that Elena’s mother has died, substitutes for him in accompanying a clandestine planeload of land mines from south Florida to an airstrip in Costa Rica. This mission, the one Dick McMahon expects to bring the financial success that has eluded him, turns out to be a trap intended to lure the old man to a West Indian island where he will be tricked into appearing to assassinate the American ambassador stationed there and then be killed. The plot provides a pretext for a massive, open deployment of American forces on the island to deter communism in Caribbean and Latin American nations.
Awaiting the million dollars that never comes and submitting by near necessity to the manipulations of plotters who have stolen her passport and replaced it with one bearing the name “Elise Meyer,” Elena finds herself stranded on the island, where she learns from an old newspaper of her father’s death and, after hearing an offhand remark that a Salvadoran makes at an American embassy party, realizes her father was murdered and she herself is in danger, as even her daughter may be. The plot against her, however, does not work out as it was intended, because she does not go to the island airport as she was supposed to. Instead, she goes to a hotel, where she encounters Morrison, who has just arrived on the island and who is, according to the narrator, “the same person” that she is: “equally remote.” They begin a romance that ends violently, because he is now the American official to be assassinated, while Elena is still the person to be labeled the assassin. In fact, according to the narrator, the island police fatally wound Elena, but Morrison recovers from his gunshot wounds and lives another five years.
Apparently influenced by such events of the 1980’s as the politically motivated murders in El Salvador, the Iran-Contra affair, and the American invasion of Grenada, Didion presents in her novel a picture of a self-deluding man who finds brief happiness with a woman caught among sleazy operatives working for a government that, Didion implies, stoops to low means to reach its ends.
Sources for Further Study
Commentary. CII, October, 1996, p. 70.
Los Angeles Times Book Review. August 25, 1996, p. 2.
The Nation. CCLXIII, September 30, 1996, p. 23.
National Review. XLVIII, November 11, 1996, p. 57.
The New Republic. CCXV, October 14, 1996, p. 44.
New York. XXIX, September 2, 1996, p. 28.
The New York Review of Books. XLIII, October 31, 1996, p. 4.
The New York Times Book Review. CI, September 8, 1996, p. 10.
The New Yorker. LXXII, June 24, 1996, p. 118.
Time. CXLVIII, September 9, 1996, p. 69.
The Wall Street Journal. August 29, 1996, p. A8.