Customer Reviews

Play It As It Lays

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What would life be like if it was meaningless, if the people we associated with were plastic? not real? pretentious? What if our life was just a hopeless void with loose morals, drugs, hollow sayings and beliefs? What if we just played the empty game of life as it was laid down for us? That is the main theme in Joan Didion's classic book that takes the reader into the life of Maria Wyeth, actress, mother, daughter, divorced wife, a woman who has grown tired and desensitized to the fakeness and pain caused by the Hollywood and Las Vegas establishment.It is a life filled to the brim with movie premiers, booze, pills, suicide, casual, empty sex, abortions and nothing else. It is a world of plastic surgery and beautiful people, of Let's do lunch and venomous gossip. The sneering, caustic tone of Didion's voice would want to make anybody who lived the lives of the novel's characters put a gun to their head and end it all. The language is stinging, fast-paced, lean, anti-Hollywood. Pure Didion!

There is, wrote Charles Baudelaire, a vice which is uglier, more wicked and filthier than any other, a vice which he called "L'Ennui". This is a stronger term than the mere "boredom" which is its literal meaning, because the word also implies a state of indifference and moral and spiritual deadness. It is a state of mind frequently invoked in Baudelaire's poetry, and one which is also at the centre of Joan Didion's novel.

The central character is Maria Wyeth, a Hollywood actress in her early thirties. Fate has, in many ways, been unkind to her- her mother died in a car crash, her career is in trouble, her marriage to an uncaring husband is also failing and she has a mentally-handicapped daughter. Maria reacts by retreating into the sterile world occupied by most of the novel's other characters, one of casual and promiscuous sex, drink, drugs and "Ennui", both in its literal and its extended Baudelairean senses.

Told in a series of very short vignettes, the novel traces the progress of the disintegration of Maria's life. She is bullied into an abortion by her husband. (It is interesting that a novel by a woman writer treats abortion not as a woman's right but as another weapon of male dominance). Her marriage ends in divorce. In the final scene her moral nihilism means that she deliberately fails to prevent the suicide of a friend.

Much of the book is set in the deserts of southern California and Nevada, and Maria spends much of her time driving on long but aimless car journeys through this landscape. The imagery of the desert is clearly used to suggest the aridity of the spiritual world in which the characters live, and Maria's meaningless journeys are a symbol of her inability to escape this world. It is noteworthy that although the book is set in the late sixties or early seventies, a time of great ferment and social change in America, news of the outside world plays virtually no part in the book; Miss Didion's characters seem able to shut it out completely.

The bleakness of the world inhabited by Maria and her acquaintances means that this is certainly not a feelgood novel. It is, in many ways, not an easy one to like. It is, however, certainly one worth reading.

"Play It As It Lays" takes us to the rarified world of Hollywood and La-la Land, where life is fast, flat, and apparently as empty as the souls of some of its inhabitants. At the center of the book is Maria Wyeth, who at 31 is on the far side of the big 3-0 dividing line; orphaned when her parents are killed in a car crash, divorced from her film-director husband, the mother of a handicapped, institutionalized child, a sometime model and actress, who has become desensitized and remote from the pain of others to hide her own interior pain.

Maria has truly been "out there where nothing is" but instead of rejecting it, she has come to feel at home in it. The final nail in the coffin of her ability to feel is the abortion her estranged husband forces her to have to get rid of the child of her married lover; if she refuses, he will take custody of their own daughter. From that point, her life spirals downward into a haze of drugs, booze and casual, meaningless sex; communication with others is reduced to an interchange of one-liners; we wonder if this woman can feel anything for anyone any more. When Maria is able to calmly watch the husband of her supposed best friend destroy himself without lifting a finger to try to help him, we wonder is it because she is too lazy to call for help, or too detached to care.

Joan Didion's prose is as spare and as stark as the inner life of the character she writes about, and in simple but telling phrases she is able to convey to the reader all the pain and emptiness, and finally the viciousness, that passes for Maria's life. Maria will wallow in her own anomie and to hell with anyone who gets burned by contact with her. Is this payback? Maybe. Joan Didion lets us see Maria and her life in all its revolting nothingness, and makes us want to thank God it isn't ours.

Judy Lind

Didion is a definite "show not tell" author. She presents a series of fragmented snapshots, strings them together, then expects the reader to do much of the interpretation. The result: a grim, relentless, despairing mosiac of a life in the process of falling apart.

I have admired Didion's non-fiction ("White Album," "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," "After Henry") for her adroit use of language: her skill in putting together words that pack in a maximum amount of powerful imagery, the way her phrases implant themselves in my thoughts and remain there.

While "Play It As It Lays" demonstrates some of that same skill with language that is evident in Didion's journalistic work, I doubt that the story of Maria will cling to me like the stories of people from Didion's essays: the abandoned child on the highway, clinging to the cyclone fence, the neglected flower child rocking on a rocking horse.

A day after I read "Play It As It Lays," I wondered if I had dreamed it. Not so for Didion's non-fiction. In that case, I wondered if I had lived it.

Those who dislike this novel do so because it was successful at making them feel acutely the distress, anxiety, alienation, and detachment of the world presented. The writing is brillant: deep, thoughtful, many layered, and integrated. Still, this prose is bathed in acid and the superficial has been burned away: nothing is wasted other than the lives of the protagonists. She is among the most gifted and professional writers in the U.S.

Joan Didion is the best contemporary writer I know. Good books are meant to be reread to reveal something new about the reader. I have reread this book at least 6 or 7 times and each time I "see" something different and insightful about Maria and her sad and tragic life. I'm still trying to figure out what is the attraction to this short novel. It must be the writing style that sucks you into the unfolding of a story of what could have been many women's life both now and then. I wonder too, as someone who was born after the book was writen, how representative it was of the decadence and wildness of the 60's. This book gives new meaning to T.S. Eliot's poem, "Hollow Men", although I think Maria expressed (or tried to in her own strange ways) the inner depths of herself throughout the book. I think there's something universal in that experience of being a thoughtful woman who seeks something real in life, but is really valued for her beauty and fleeting youth (which are all ephemeral). You can see that theme as well in "Valley of the Dolls", another recommended read.

"Neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily," wrote La Rochefoucauld. Joan Didion looks unflinchingly at the Void. "I know what 'nothing' means," says the heroine, "and keep on playing."

On one level this is a "Hollywood novel," and as such its wicked satire is worthy of comparison to Nathanael West's "Day of the Locust." Combine that book with Sartre's "Nausea" and you begin to get an idea of what "Play It As It Lays" accomplishes.

"We could definitely stand a few giggles," says one of the characters. You won't find any in this book. What you will find is a protagonist whose mantra might come from Marlowe's "Dr. Faustus": "Why, this is Hell, nor am I out of it."

Grim stuff, to be sure, but brilliantly done. There is a great deal of white space in this book, because there are scores of short chapters, and because Didion has a rare quality: she doesn't write one word more than necessary. And what she writes will go straight to the core of your being.

Stuck in the Neuropsychiatric unit, 31-year-old has-been actress Maria Wyeth asks us with lip-smacking nihilism, "What makes Iago evil?" and the story is set into motion. This story that is not feel-good, that is not happy endings, that is not cute-and-fluffy, that is not boy-wizards or other pieces of fantastical amazement. This story is filled with wrath, apathy, detachment, anomie, and best of all, realism, such realism that turns those off who encounter it and immediately denounce its meaning to shock. Though shock is what I feel is further than anything when it comes to Maria and the world she encounters. Shock would be too ridiculous and too easy.

The novel is set in late, post-Summer of Love California, in which consumerism has paved the way for the young, shaggy-beard renegade filmmakers whose countercultural films have given them wealth and prominence. Here Maria is reeling the estranged marriage between she and her director husband Carter Lang, whose name and ego have completely overshadowed her once-promising acting career that she has given up. Acting, she realizes, was another role in her life that she assumed such as daughter, wife, or mother, as she is to 4-year-old Kate, who resides in a private hospital for the "soft on her spine." Waking up at dawn, hitting the freeway, and blasting the radio with her bare feet on the petals, Maria finds some form of routine and purpose in her life, a feeling that she knows has left her some time ago. Her only ally in the decadent Hollywood world of crackpot hanger-ons and flaky representation is producer BZ, who has already lost his belief and hope in society, only clinging to the ennui and depravity that has come to be a way of life.

In 84 short but lucidly descriptive chapters, we follow Maria's day-to-day life in southern California as she goes from schmooze fests to blank motel rooms to lazy, warm afternoons by the pool, her life seemingly in the hands of no one and her fate much more tragic. This is not a story that is new and was not even new at the time of its release. In fact, this is a classic story of loneliness and alienation only without that sheer possibility of light at the end of the tunnel. Though what makes this intensely refreshing and brilliant to me is its way of twisting the "turn on, tune in, drop out" culture that was permeating the Hollywood scene after "Easy Rider" became a large hit. This was the world led and conquered a few years later by Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, and Martin Scorsese, though it's hard to read this without thinking of them as the manic, selfish directors and Faye Dunaway and Jane Fonda as their socialite wives and girlfriends. In Play It As It Lays, we are forced to look at this de-glittering world of youth and genius and see the mindless contraptions of modern life that is rarely displayed in a truthful matter involving Americans. Many can talk of "ennui" in the sense of European art house, yet I see nothing in these characters that I see in those. At least in those movies, there was a glint of bittersweetness behind the savagery. Here, we have nothing but sorrow and regret--classic American traits.

Yet the true beauty of this novel is the deadpan, short-sentenced dialogue and narrative that strips down elements of grandeur and romance, creating a material world unmasked. Though you hear of them going to The Bistro or Palm Springs or riding around in Lear jets, it is easy to forget that this is the money-swallowing environment of celebrities that we as millennial society have become so bombarded by. Instead of imagining Maria as the flashy Beverly Hills housewife, wife of young director, cameras shining on her face and smiles in all right areas, we are taken deeper into her knowingly-boring past of trivial modeling shoots and disgusting exes and even further with gambling fathers and neurotic mothers. Over and over again, we witness the "roles" that Maria keeps "playing," those of which seem to never age or disappear and only seem to resonate more and more.

Many reviewers and readers in general are not invigorated by Miss Didion's sweet, dense prose, though I believe it's because they are either overcynical or simply just do not "get it," to put it vapidly. Yes this is not the clearest story and yes this does not tug at your heart's strings, but this is real life and this is the decline of a culture boosted by confidence and self-indulgence, a culture that has only but heightened as the century turned. In this time more than ever, there is a similarly modest decadence of designer clothes and relaxed morality, in which we are still asking ourselves questions and still finding out the most obvious answer of them all: Nothing applies.

Didion just nails it: a fast, exhilirating yet non-trashy read about the trashy world that is Los Angeles (models, actors, badly aging people, everyone here is from somewhere else). I read this book three years ago. But its images of people driving around on the ten lane freeways here continues to haunt me. Still amazingly current and relevant today - means it's a true classic. Not everyone can write both prose and fiction equally well. Didion can!

I was in my last year of high school when I read this book and it remains one of my most treasured books. Didion's precise images in Play It As It Lays compelled me to run out and read each essay and book I could get my hands on. Sometimes I pick it up and read the book from cover to cover, other times just my favorite parts. This book tells a story that - while distressing - you absolutely must devour!