Play It As It Lays (Hardcover)

by Joan Didion (Author) "WHAT MAKES IAGO EVIL?..." (more)
Key Phrases: white duck pants, New York, Larry Kulik, Silver Wells (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"If you can't deal with the morning, get out of the game." Maria Wyeth can't deal with the mornings or the long, disintegrating nights - she's been married to and divorced by Carter; she has a hopelessly damaged four-year-old and the insistent, regretful memory of an abortion; she's made a film or two; and she drifts from Hollywood to New York to Las Vegas and from bars to motels.In fact she's the kind of girl whom one of her looser contacts will call up and say "Did I catch you in the middle of an overdose" and this is the kind of scene which is "beaucoup fantastic." You may remember Run River (1963) which was about another scuffed spirit like Maria whose dissolution was as complete. But even though you have every reason to suspect that this is an ephemeral form of survival kit-sch under its sophisticated maquillage, you won't be impervious. (Kirkus Reviews)

'There hasn't been another American writer of Joan Didion's quality since Nathanael West. She writes with a razor.' John Leonard, New York Times 'A stunning, hypnotically readable novel.' Van Allen Bradley, Chicago Daily News --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"There hasn't been another American writer of Joan Didion's quality since Nathanel West . . . A terrifying book."--John Leonard, The New York Times

"Simple, restrained, intelligent, well-structured, witty, irresistibly relentless, forthright in diction, and untainted by the sensational, Play It As It Lays is a book of outstanding literary quality."--Library Journal

"[A] scathing novel, distilling venom in tiny drops, revealing devastation in a sneer and fear in a handful of atomic dust."--J. R. Frakes, Book World

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 214 pages
• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux; 1st edition (July 1970)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374234442
• ISBN-13: 978-0374234447
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,161,315 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

48 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fantstic novel about a dark, sepulchral, unsettling life., February 22, 2000

By	Christian Engler (Woburn, Massachusetts) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Play It As It Lays: A Novel (Paperback)

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!

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perfectly realized, May 23, 2005

By	D. Fineman "[e-mail]" (L. A., CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Play It As It Lays: A Novel (Paperback)

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.

40 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Out there where nothing is, January 16, 2002

By	JLind555 - See all my reviews

This review is from: Play It As It Lays: A Novel (Paperback)

"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.