48
PARTISAN REVIEW
already familiar in previous Didion novels. Like Didion herself, the "not
quite omniscient author" who now and then seems to present some part of
the story, or to comment on it, or to declare her inability
to
comment on
it, is a woman reporter, and the person fitfully glanced at is another woman
reporter who may double the resemblance to the Didion persona. Elena
McMahon in The
Last Thing He Wanted
is a sister of Maria Wyeth of
Play It
As It Lays
(1970), Charlotte Douglas in
A
Book
of
Common Prayer (1977),
Inez Victor in
Democracy (1984).
All are survivors of the amputation of traditional connections to life -
particularly the relations of family love. All have lost, for example, a daugh–
ter, and their condition might be described as an enactment of the myth
of Ceres, the rupture of female continuity: Maria's daughter is a hostile
patient in a mental hospital, Charlotte's is wanted for a terrorist bombing,
Inez's is a drug addict. But it is only a minor index of Elena's separation
from connectedness of any sort that when she leaves her husband, an L.A.
multimillionaire, her daughter blames her for the evaporation of what she
thinks of as a "real life" - the Jacuzzi, the pool, the tennis court, the three
cars; "You could open the door in Malibu and be at the beach."
It
is real–
ly misleading to think of the separation of Ceres and Persephone when
talking about Joan Didion's characters. They do not expect to achieve
reconnection wi th daughters or anything else. The discontinui ties they
represent are more absolute.
In
Elena's life, ruptures occur with a joyless
spontaneity; it is never entirely clear why she throws over her Malibu life
when she does, why she remakes herself into a journalist, or why this role
is in turn abandoned.
In
the gaps of this narrative we may read Didion's
sense of the arbitrariness of personal histories.
And, indeed, Joan Didion is as far as possible from writing a novel
about womanhood. Quite as much as Annie Proulx, for example, she is the
narrator - in the most compressed and elli ptic of fictional structures - of
general history. The time is the summer of 1984 and Iran-contra is build–
ing up in the secret corridors of government and along the airways to
Central America:
You know the context, you remember the names, Theodore Shackley
Clair George Dewey Clarridge Richard Secord Alan Fiers Felix
Rodriguez aka "Max Gomez" John Hull Southern Air Lake
Resources Stanford Technology Donald Gregg Aguacate Elliott
Abrams Robert Owen aka
"TC"
Ilopango aka "Cincinnati," all
swirnnung together in the glare off the C-123 that fell from the sky
into Nicaragua. Not many women got caught in the glare. There was
one, the blonde, the shredder, the one who transposed the numbers of
