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Play It As It Lays: A Novel
 
 
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Play It As It Lays: A Novel (Paperback)

by Joan Didion (Author) "WHAT MAKES IAGO EVIL?..." (more)
Key Phrases: white duck pants, New York, Larry Kulik, Silver Wells (more...)
4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (30 customer reviews)

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Editorial Reviews

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
-- Review

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


See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

  • Paperback: 214 pages
  • Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (October 1, 1990)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0374521719
  • ISBN-13: 978-0374521714
  • Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 9.3 ounces
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #255,377 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in this category: (What's this?)

    #12 in  Books > Literature & Fiction > Authors, A-Z > ( D ) > Didion, Joan

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Front Cover | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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Inside This Book (learn more)
First Sentence:
WHAT MAKES IAGO EVIL? Read the first page
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
white duck pants
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
New York, Larry Kulik, Silver Wells, Freddy Chaikin, Les Goodwin, Benny Austin, Susannah Wood, Beverly Hills, Ivan Costello, Los Angeles, Maria Wyeth, Tommy Loew, Francine Wyeth, Harry Wyeth, Morty Landau, Felicia Goodwin, Fountain Avenue, Las Vegas, Angel Beach, Anita Garson, Ceci Delano
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What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

Play It As It Lays: A Novel
86% buy the item featured on this page:
Play It As It Lays: A Novel 4.0 out of 5 stars (30)
We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction (Everyman's Library)
5% buy
We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction (Everyman's Library) 4.5 out of 5 stars (14)
$19.80
Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays (FSG Classics)
3% buy
Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays (FSG Classics) 4.5 out of 5 stars (33)
$10.98
The Year of Magical Thinking
3% buy
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4.0 out of 5 stars (30 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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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)   
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!
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19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Perfectly realized, May 23, 2005
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.
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40 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Out there where nothing is, January 16, 2002
"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.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars You'll never forget this one.
"Neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily," wrote La Rochefoucauld. Joan Didion looks unflinchingly at the Void. Read more
Published 1 month ago by flickfreak

5.0 out of 5 stars New Hollywood Gomorrah
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. Read more
Published 10 months ago by Marsalis Higgs

2.0 out of 5 stars Not Much There, There
I bought this novel since it was listed on Time Magazine's list of the Best 100 Novels written in English since 1923. Read more
Published 14 months ago by David Olson

3.0 out of 5 stars Just sort of "Blah"
I agree with the criticism about the bleakness of "Play it," and that the story and its characters are painfully flat, but at the same time it is important to remember that the... Read more
Published 19 months ago by Tomis Foolery

5.0 out of 5 stars In the Thick of Nothingness [T]
I have now read two books by Didion - this and the Pulitzer Prize winning "The World of Magical Thinking." Each is devilishly depressing. Read more
Published on May 4, 2007 by Miami Bob

5.0 out of 5 stars Memorable Book
Play It As It Lays is a book that stays with you after you read it. It's also a book that you will probably want to read more than once. Read more
Published on January 21, 2007 by Juanita Barazza

3.0 out of 5 stars Compelling, but depressing
If you want something to lift your spirits, this isn't it. And yet, I still found myself turning the pages to see what happens to Maria.
Published on September 29, 2006 by Rusty

5.0 out of 5 stars one of my favorites
I'm really into dry, unemotional writing like Shopgirl, the Graduate, The King is Dead, stuff full of melancholy. And this is the absolute best of that type. Read more
Published on August 16, 2006 by Danielle

5.0 out of 5 stars Why Not
That alternate world we know as "Hollywood" has always fascinated me, so I had no problem getting interested in this book. Read more
Published on May 6, 2006 by Steven Haarala

5.0 out of 5 stars one of the 3 best books about Los Angeles and modern life
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... Read more
Published on April 7, 2006 by Beatrice Izzey

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