MILLICENT BELL
the account at the Credit Suisse (the account of the Credit Suisse
into whi ch the Sultan of Brunei was to transfer the ten million dol–
lars, in case you have forgotten the minor plays), but she had only a
bit part, day work, a broadly comic but not in the end featured role.
Elena McMahon was different.
Elena McMahon got caught, but not in the glare.
49
Elena has abandoned the Malibu life and is covering the 1984
Presidential campaign for the
Washington Post
when, standing on the tar–
mac at LAX after the rally in South Central, the meet-and-greet at the
Maravilla project, the celebrity fundraiser under the Regal Rents party
tent, she finds that her name had been left off the manifest - and walks off
the beat. As the campaign goes on to San Jose, she flies to Miami to visit
her dying father. He is a small-time wheeler-dealer who may have once
worked for the C.I.A. and is at last about to make a killing by sending a
planeload of fragmentation mines to the Caribbean; the stake is a million
dollars. She takes over for him, escorts the cargo to an island where, unac–
countably, she is just stuck; there is no ride back and she has no valid
passport. So, she lingers amid the palms and the sunshine and the general
atmosphere of seedy conspiracy and finally meets Treat Morrison, a C.I.A.
"crisis junkie" who has served six presidents. He may have wanted to help
her. Didion allows a frail suggestion of love ("This is a romance after all")
to enter into this somber espionage thriller and fits it out that way for fur–
ther life as a movie, though the ending may have to be modified. Elena is
killed by a member of the local police who claims to have intercepted her
attempt to assassinate Morrison , who is, indeed, shot, though by someone
else. It was "the last thing he wanted." Her father has already been report–
ed dead in Miami.
Some of Didion's critics feel that here, as elsewhere, she has already
composed a movie scri pt rather than the sort of novel for which Graham
Green provided a model - the novel that is only superficially an "enter–
tainment" about intrigue in the third world but really, instead, a political
melodrama in which the exotic background and the interaction of char–
acters compose an allegory of colonialism. Didion's art is, in fact, a
postmodern drama about American imperialism. This slight novel's
ellipses, scene shifts, scrambles of comment and direct vision concentrate
the reader's anxious attention upon a terrifYing moral vacuity. Its pages are
crowded with notational images that attain a metaphoric power and pas–
sages that brilliantly parody the pseudo-languages of government, business,
the contemporary wasteland.
