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February 20, 2005
The Last Thing He Wanted
Every once in a while I sit down to write a blog entry and what comes out is an English-senior-thesis-style mini term paper and there's not much I can do about it. All those years of bullshitting about modern fiction have made me into a MONSTER. Sorry.
Just finished Joan Didion's The Last Thing He Wanted. It's about a journalist investigating an old story about illegal arms dealings, but the plot serves as a method for Didion to explore the relationship of the reader and writer to the story and to each other.
The beginning of the novel reads like a writer's rambling exploration of a theme before a plot and style are settled on. It's a fascinating approach -- the reader is aware that there is story and that the narrator hasn't figured out how to tell it, so the reader starts to piece it together independently based on the information available. The narrator has a similar dilemma: She is not satisfied with the events as they were recorded by other authors, and is struggling to present the story "straight" -- an impossible thing to do. The plot -- an investigation of a historical event -- becomes a metaphor for the reader's effort to piece together the story from the disjointed narrative. Both efforts are inherently flawed, but Didion uses them to explore her readers' and characters' selective memories and vulnerability.
This line could refer to either struggle: "There were hints all along, clues we should have registered, processed, sifted for their application to the general condition." Details are mentioned early on, but only in reference to writing and investigative difficulties. The reader can start to speculate about the story in general ways. For instance, Didion writes, "Let me give you a paragraph from my notes. Not interview notes, not raw notes, but early draft notes," and then includes several slightly different versions of a standard introductory paragraph about one of the characters. These are "notes worked up in an attempt to get something on paper that might open a way to a lead". This approach puts the reader in limbo -- we experience the narrative with uncertainty and are forced to piece together the story ourselves instead of relying on the author to do it for us.
Eventually the story becomes more clear and we learn that the main character, Elena McMahon, faces a similar struggle in an unfamiliar environment. Elena is a victim -- constantly rejected by more informed figures that seem to be part of a story she doesn't fully comprehend. She struggles to fit in as a Beverly Hills mother and then as a journalist, but she can't find her place. When she ends up playing a part in her father's shady arms-dealing business, the coping mechanisms she has developed are useless. Didion uses repeated phrases, in italics, to reintroduce plot points at different moments, and we see how Elena remembers each detail and starts to piece together the story herself. As readers we feel the same lack of control that she does in each of these situations, but we're trying to figure out the "puzzle" Didion presents.
It reminds me of Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 69 -- the style is very different but the effect on the reader -- helplessness, suspicion of conspiracy, plot invention -- is similar. This seems to sum it up: "For the record this is me talking. You know me, or think you do. The not quite omniscient author."
Posted by csageday at February 20, 2005 11:58 AM