Word: didion
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...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...
...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...
...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...
Very loosely based on the rise of news reader Jessica Savitch, the script by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne sends Sally Atwater (Pfeiffer)--all elbows and naked ambition--into a Miami TV newsroom presided over by Warren Justice (Redford), who ankled the network scene because he was too darned independent. Sally, later called Tally, is raw but cunning and learns quickly; best of all, in the tyranny of telegenics, "she eats the lens." Soon she has the coolest gig in journalism: asking hard questions of politicians by day, having Robert Redford massage her feet at night...
...George Amberg has written of "L'Avventura," Antonioni's characters are "failing without access to the reasons." In the American idiom, Joan Didion wrote in the late '60s of the young hippies of Haight-Ashbury that they were "waiting to be given the words...