IN OVER THEIR HEADS

By Paul Gray

Joan Didion's first novel in 12 years offers early on the rather surprising assertion that it is not fictional at all. The second chapter of The Last Thing He Wanted (Knopf; 227 pages; $23) begins, "For the record this is me talking. You know me, or think you do. The not quite omniscient author." This claim that Didion, the journalist and screenwriter, is writing as herself is followed by the news that she had considered giving herself an invented identity and name, to wit "Lilianne Owen," and telling the story under this disguise. That, she adds, didn't work: "As Lilianne Owen I could not have told you half of what I knew. I wanted to come at this straight."

Straight, however, is an uncannily precise word for the way this novel is not told. It jumps back and forth in time. It tries on different narrative methods; in some chapters dialogue is without quotation marks, while in others they appear. The novel's central event--the reason the narrator chose to tell this story in the first place--could be fairly well conveyed on a postcard. It is, in fact, foreshadowed on page 12. The Last Thing He Wanted is as much concerned with its own telling as it is with the story it tells.

It begins more or less in 1984, when a Washington Post reporter named Elena McMahon abruptly quits covering the 1984 presidential campaign for her paper. Earlier, Elena had walked out of her marriage to Wynn Janklow, a Los Angeles megamillionaire, taking their teenage daughter Catherine with her. "She knew how to cut and run," says the narrator, who had met Elena in Los Angeles; both were regular invitees to Oscar-night parties that strongly resemble, as described here, the legendary ones thrown by the late agent Irving ("Swifty") Lazar. Didion's narrator does not dwell on this detail, but it is dropped nonetheless, as if to show that her heroine has renounced a very glitzy circle of friends.

The newly footloose Elena flies to Florida to visit her father Dick, who may or may not have been in the CIA at one point--he tells his daughter he knows someone who "was involved in Dallas"--and who now, at 74, is on the verge of big payday, delivering and selling a planeload of unspecified merchandise somewhere in the Caribbean. It is 1984, after all, and the region is abuzz with preparations for what would later be described as the Iran-contra affair. Unfortunately, her father falls ill, and Elena agrees to accompany the plane on its mission and pick up the million dollars he expects to receive.

This decision speaks well of her as a loyal daughter but very poorly of her as a sentient human being. She has no idea what she is getting into, no premonition that her father had been set up as a fall guy by one of the several rogue factions within the U.S. government operating in the area. She is a babe in the palm trees.

As coincidence would have it, at the same time that the heroine is drifting toward a bad end, Didion's narrator is working on a magazine profile of the one person who might be able to save her: State Department troubleshooter Treat Morrison. "This was a man who could pick up the telephone and affect the Dow, reach the Foreign Minister of any one of a dozen NATO countries, the Oval Office itself." Morrison jets to the unnamed island where Elena is waiting to be paid, and the two of them...fall in love. "This is a romance after all," Didion's narrator confesses. It doesn't last long.

Which is more than can be said for The Last Thing He Wanted. Although at 227 pages it is a short book, it seems an interminable accretion of mannerisms around a small, straightforward series of mishaps. Early on, Didion's narrator remembers what she first thought when she learned what happened to Elena McMahon on that island: "I thought she got caught in the pipeline, swept into the conduits. I thought the water was over her head." And that is all the reader can conclude from the story that follows.

Much of the narrator's time is spent striking different attitudes toward the story. Sometimes these display Didion's characteristic cleverness and bite: "life on the far frontiers of the Monroe Doctrine" deliciously captures the lethal shenanigans of Iran-contra. Of Treat Morrison, she writes: "He could listen attentively in several languages, not excluding his own." But for every one of these palpable hits there are many examples of flatfooted prose: "Until now, Paul Schuster had always done what Bob Weir told him to do. The reason Paul Schuster had always done what Bob Weir told him to do (until now) was that Bob Weir had knowledge of certain minor drug deals in which Paul Schuster had been involved." In the final analysis Elena's story seems to say more about Rodeo Drive angst than it does about illegal foreign policies. Elena is a passive victim, and her story is much ado about not very much.