Play It As It Lays (A Bantam Book)

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.

Although beautifully written, this 1970 novels seems dated in two important ways, one positive, one negative.
On the positive side, its portrait of abortion as an Antechamber To Hell has been moderated somewhat by Roe vs. Wade and subsequent developments. Plenty of people still feel that way about "a woman's right to choose" but fewer novel readers probably feel as Didion felt (or at least made her heroine feel) in the 1960s.
On the negative side, it is much less likely today that a young woman from a penniless background who suffered from severe depression and borderline psychosis would end up gazing at hummingbirds in a mental hospital garden as Didion's heroine does. Given Reagan's closing of the "welfare state," she'd be out on the street, and, within a decade or two, after she'd lost her teeth, she'd be living out of a shopping cart-- if she lived.

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!

This novel follows Maria Wyeth and her depressing journey into darker and darker realms of nihilism. "Nothing" is the answer she gives to everything. Her husband Carter is working on a film, and her friend BZ and his wife Helene are going through problems. More about the emptiness of everyday life, especially life in Hollywood, Death Valley and Las Vegas, it presents one woman's withdrawal. Maria has an abortion and then breaks down and cries on the freeway when she realizes that this is the day that the baby would have been born. Her friend BZ is also having problems and commits suicide at the end; Maria's daughter Kate has emotional and chemical problems and the doctors do not like Maria's visits. Maria cannot connect with any of her fellow humans and has trouble maintaining relationships. A serious and depressing journey.

This is one of the most powerful and well-written novels of all time. I think everyone should read it. Didion’s prose is uniquely sharp and impactful, and the story of Maria Wyeth is difficult but important to read.

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 book is meant to be subversive. The dullness is a mode of irony, one that comes through similarly in other writers like John Cheever or Bret Ellis. And like Ellis' "Less Than Zero" (which is like this book in too many ways), it can be difficult to want to keep reading. After a while the story becomes obvious anyway, and even if your intuition about what comes next is wrong it doesn't matter much because nothing really seems to matter. The merit of the book is its indictment of hollywood and celebritism, but, as someone else pointed out in another review, it isn't hard to indict hollywood of emptiness anymore. so it goes.

this book can be easily read in a few hours and is still worth the experiance, at least for the sake of sampling this flavor of American prose.

Didion in absolute top form. A pleasure to read and ponder, through and through. Filled with unforgettable characters and a palpable sense of foreboding, this book is written in Ms. Didion's signature style -- a style in which what is not said is at least as important as what is. A heartbreaking meditation on the artifice of Hollywood and the perils of disconnectedness.

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.

The first 2 lines are: "What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask." Which also reeks of facile gum-snapping cynicism.

But Joan really redeemed herself with the following passage: "She walked back to the car and sat for a long while in the parking lot, idling the engine and watching a woman in a muumuu walk out of the Carolina Pines motel and cross the street to a supermarket. The woman walked in small mincing steps and kept raising her hand to shield her eyes from the vacant sunlight. As if in trance Maria watched the woman, for it seemed to her then that she was watching the dead still center of the world, the quintessential intersection of nothing."

Didion's Play It As It Lays exemplifies the epitome of captivating reads. Most readers will likely whizz through it, captivated by the engaging pace and vivid construction of seemingly mundane details. Didion fantastically imbues wonderful meaning and resonance into her heroine's every action--from opening a drawer to rambling over California freeways. Don't look to the novel for deep life meaning. It serves better as entertainment and a fantastic model for aspiring writers trying better to understand how to cater to audiences.

This book reads like a really long short story, with little character development or plot. It holds up poorly. There is little one would find shocking in it today and in fact Didion seems almost prudish in her references to sex.

Oh, my! What a bleak, depressing novel! I was so relieved when I reached the end. I usually enjoy realism, but there was so little to admire about the characters, and the setting. I suppose it can be said that Didion captured well the emptiness, and decadence of Hollywood in the 60s, but I think it's a stretch to say that her novel reflects " a generation." Hollywood is representative of a small segment of society. While her fictional characters were living their empty, bleak lives, millions of real people in the US were living meaningful, purposeful lives---without drugs and promiscuity...

I agree wholeheartedly with Kenneth Ryan's review. This book was "recommended" reading in one of my English classes at UCLA several years ago, and I bought it, but just now picked it up for a read. The problem is that the main character is so vapid that I simply did not CARE what happened to her. It has always been my firm belief that one must identify with, care about, or even despise a main character to care enough to keep reading. This novel was painful to finish; who cares what happens to these people? I agree that whatever "splash" the book made in its day came from the shock value it would have had because of the amorality of its characters. It's hard to shock us these days, and the book is now just plain uninteresting.

This book illustrates the difference between important and merely influential. It virtually invented the vague/portentious prose style that signifies boredom and alienation, and appeared as late as 1996 on the liner notes of Rage Against the Machine's "Evil Empire".

But it isn't very good. The dimestore existentialism aged, badly. Didion's spare writing now seems phony and juvenile. The same characters experiencing the same emotions have been rehashed so many times, often in superior forms, that what was innovative in the seventies doesn't really cut it anymore. Not that it was very original in its time, coming as it did after thirty years of Sartre and ten of Antonioni. Not to mention Horace McCoy's terrific 1935 novel "They Shoot Horses Don't They", popularized in a Hollywood film (coincidentally?) only a year before "Play It"'s publication.

A minor footnote to a still-evolving trend.

First, I would like to examine the character of Maria (pronounced Mar-eye-ah). In my life, I have never read about a character so lacking in dynamism as Maria. This is a woman who is herded through her life as a cow is to slaughter. Starting with a sour marriage, she must deal with (or, at least, experience) the deaths of her parents, a stagnant career, a substance abuse problem, the hypocrisy of her friends, the alienation of her daughter, an insubstantial culture, an abortion, a divorce, prison, and the suicide of a friend. Oh how my heart bleeds for poor Mar-eye-ah.
When faced with these tribulations, Maria is completely unresourceful. In fact, she is completely inept as a human-being. The only time in the novel that she asserts herself is in the first chapter when she finds herself locked up in the loony-bin. It is here that she is able to express her philosophy, to wit: "nothing matters." Now, if you can call Nihilism affirmative or assertive, then this is the only indication in the book that Maria is even remotely human. I am not saying that one must be an aggressive maniac to be human, but one must balance the assertiveness with the apathy to provide a realistic character and an interesting story.
It may be argued that Maria does attempt to gain control of her life through simulating her conflicts in the microcosm of the California freeway. As Maria careens recklessly through four lanes of traffic while cracking an egg on the steering wheel, Didion would have us believe that this symbolic act is one of pure desperation, the desperation of one who has tried to cope with the multitude of disappointments that each of us must face in life, but has failed miserably. I suppose a sympathetic reader might be willing to believe that Maria deftly avoids striking the other cars on the freeway as she would like to swiftly and painlessly solve the problems of her pathetic life. Although there might be some merit to this argument, I disagree. I see a woman with such incredibly self-destructive tendencies that I am surprised she did not do herself in years ago. She navigates her Corvette through traffic, not as a symbolic act of courage and resolve, but as a symbolic act of cowardice and suicide.
Why did Didion write this novel? I might be able to accept the fact that Maria was a slug if Didion, through the character, sought to impart some universal truth to the reader. While reading the novel, I was compelled to question the author's motives. Why is Maria so lethargic? Why are the other characters so completely amoral? Is the story autobiographical in any way? Why did Didion write this story, thus inadvertently making me suffer through it? After days of struggling with these questions, I discovered the answer, the only logical answer. It is a product of 60's pop culture. Didion's novel has no more artistic value than Andy Warhol's Campbell's soup paintings. The novel is nothing more than a compilation of taboos which would mean that, at the time of publication, it would be really "cool" to read because it would offend the establishment. It seems that Didion's only purpose in writing the novel was to shock as many people as possible by creating a hedonistic world populated by tragic people, thus launching herself into the pop spotlight as an innovator or risk-taker, all the while hoping that the literary community would buy into her farce. Amazingly enough, she succeeded.

Apparently this was a riveting novel in its time , but I found it painful and boring to read in the 21st-century. Joan Didion is an interesting writer with straight-to-the-point prose, but the book and characters left me unmoved.

This was my first experience with Joan Didion. I know her non-fiction is said to be bar none, but I find myself craving fiction. This novel did not disappoint. I plan to take a deep dive and read everything she has written.