Review by Booklist Review
Burned-out journalist Elena McMahon is covering the 1984 presidential campaign but has to walk off the job when her father, a shady type involved in arms trading, becomes ill. Elena heads to Miami, where she's entangled in the swirl of deals and counterdeals, lies and subterfuge that surround the contra war in Nicaragua. An edgy, cryptic, suspenseful tale.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Brilliantly written and flawlessly structured, Didion's first work of fiction since 1984's Democracy employs her trademark barbed-wire prose to tell a highly elliptical tale of political intrigue. Elena McMahon, a middle-aged woman of substantial wealth, is divorced and covering the 1984 presidential campaign for the Washington Post when she abruptly walks off her beat and goes to Florida to visit her ailing father. Soon, she has passively allowed herself to drift into a shady arms deal running between Florida and Central America, an enterprise that her father had set up but is physically incapable of seeing through. Didion takes risks in her choice of a nameless narrator, a writer who has only a peripheral knowledge of the people and events around which the story revolves. Indeed, the narrator is piecing together that story considerably after the fact. As a result, the characters are virtually ciphers: the narrator explicitly refuses to provide traditional motivation for their actions. The book is compulsively readable, however, an intellectual thriller that recalls Graham Greeneexcept that whereas Greene was concerned with the spirituality of desolation, Didion's characters operate in a spiritual void. The cold, detached tone is more than compensated for by the sharpness of Didion's prose and the artful suspense of her plot. This is a major work by one of the shrewdest observers of America's political and cultural life. 100,000 first printing; Random House Audio book. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In Didion's first novel in 12 years, there's plenty of hard travelin'from California to Central America, the Caribbean, Washington, and Floridaas the heroine connects Cuba, Iran contra, and JFK's assassination. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Didion's fifth novel (Democracy, 1984, etc.) is further proof that she's a better journalist than novelist. This fragmentary, reflexive exercise in fiction is full of annoying narrative gestures--repetitions, self-criticisms--that distract from a plot worthy of a conspiracy-obsessed age. Elena McMahon, the sleepwalking heroine, wanders into international intrigue in the last days of the Cold War. Constantly reinventing herself, she's been a dutiful mother, a supportive wife to a Los Angeles oil mogul, and a Washington Post reporter. Now estranged from her husband, and fed up with the Hollywood social life, she's wrangled a job covering the '84 presidential campaign, but she simply walks away from it when she hears of her mother's death. With her spoiled daughter's complaints ringing in her ears, Elena reluctantly visits her father, an amoral hustler and deal- maker planning his last big score. When his failing health prevents him from running arms to Costa Rica to help resupply the contras, the clueless Elena goes in his stead, not knowing that her father was being set up by a sleazy senator's aide to be the patsy in an assassination plot that would justify further US involvement in Nicaragua. When Elena begins to put together some of the pieces-- the belated news of her father's death, the reappearance of a mysterious Salvadoran colonel--she ``goes feral,'' hiding out on an island where she discovers further evidence of American espionage. She eventually escapes, using a fake passport, but on returning home becomes the subject of an investigation by State Department ``crisis junkie'' Treat Morrison. What neither Morrison nor Elena realizes is that the game set in motion by shadowy elements of the American government is still very much alive. A pinched narrative sacrifices the pleasures of conventional character development, with Didion opting instead for a convoluted and over-the-top exploration of political skullduggery. (First printing of 100,000)
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