Volume 43, Number 17 · October 31, 1996
In the Wasteland
By Elizabeth Hardwick
The Last Thing He Wanted
by Joan Didion
Knopf, 227 pp., $23.00
Joan Didion's novels are a carefully designed frieze of the fracture and splinter in her characters' comprehension of the world. To design a structure for the fadings and erasures of experience is an aesthetic challenge she tries to meet in a quite striking manner; the placement of sentences on the page, abrupt closures rather like hanging up the phone without notice, and an ear for the rhythms and tags of current speech that is altogether remarkable. Perhaps it is prudent that the central characters, women, are not seeking clarity since the world described herein, the America of the last thirty years or so, is blurred by a creeping inexactitude about many things, among them bureaucratic and official language, the jargon of the press, the incoherence of politics, the disastrous surprises in the mother, father, child tableau.
Review, 3718 words
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