Books, Arts & Manners: Existence Bites

The Last Thing He Wanted, by Joan Didion (Knopf, 323 pp., $23)

THE existential hero—son of the anti-hero, great-grandson of the Byronic hero—is a guy. Obviously. Meursault wouldn’t work as a woman. Nor Frederick Henry. Nor Childe Harold. They still retain a whiff of that masculine aroma associated with Beowulf and Roland and those far-off days when there were heroes tout court. Yet I, for one, am not entirely sorry to see that old roué, the romantic hero, finally getting a much-needed sex-change operation in the novels of Joan Didion. Her latest, and her first in 12 years, presents us with an unmistakable existential heroine. She is perhaps more passive, less defiant, more the helpless victim of the quasi-cosmic forces she contends with than her male counterpart used to be, but she is recognizably his sister.

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James Bowman

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The Last Thing He Wanted, by Joan Didion (Knopf, 323 pp., $23)

THE existential hero—son of the anti-hero, great-grandson of the Byronic hero—is a guy. Obviously. Meursault wouldn’t work as a woman. Nor Frederick Henry. Nor Childe Harold. They still retain a whiff of that masculine aroma associated with Beowulf and Roland and those far-off days when there were heroes tout court. Yet I, for one, am not entirely sorry to see that old roué, the romantic hero, finally getting a much-needed sex-change operation in the novels of Joan Didion. Her latest, and her first in 12 years, presents us with an unmistakable existential heroine. She is perhaps more passive, less defiant, more the helpless victim of the quasi-cosmic forces she contends with than her male counterpart used to be, but she is recognizably his sister.