Play It As It Lays

Summary (from the publisher): A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Play It As It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the reader. Set in a place beyond good and evil - literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul - it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis and stunning in the still-startling intensity of its prose.

Review: Play It As It Lays is a disheartening look at the world of an actress in despair in the 1960s. At the opening of the novel, Maria ("that is pronounced Mar-eye-ah, to get it straight from the outset," 2) is institutionalized after the dissolution of her marriage to the movie director Carter and the institutionalization of her mentally challenged daughter Kate.

After leaving the hospital, Maria tries to distract herself from the fact that her life is disintegrating, but her actions are aimless and without purpose. She drives for hours on the freeway, takes endless showers, travels, and distracts herself by taking barbiturates. Maria sleeps with anyone who asks her, leading to a pregnancy, which leads to an abortion at the instruction of her husband, Carter. "No moment more or less important than any other moment, all the same: the pain as the doctor scraped signified nothing beyond itself, no more constituted the pattern of her life than did the movie on television in the living room of this house in Encino" (81).

Didion seems to argue that the only one with any truth is the only character who seems crazy to everyone else, Maria herself. In a meaningless world, nothing is coherent. Just as Maria feels her abortion signifies nothing, she argues that nothing applies. "What does apply, they ask later, as if the word 'nothing' were ambiguous, open to interpretation, a questionable fragment of an Icelandic rune" (2). Despite her friends attempts to assist her, despite the drama occurring around her, Maria seems paralyzed by her own inability to find any meaning in her life. Maria is aimless, without purpose; "She did not decide to stay in Vegas: she only failed to leave. She spoke to no one. She did not gamble. She neither swam nor lay in the sun. She was there on some business but she could not seem to put her finger on what that business was" (168).

Maria seems to conclude that her father's advice to her at age ten was right all along. That in life, as in gambling, "it goes as it lays, don't do it the hard way. My father advised me that life itself was a crap game" (199).

A searing look at contemporary society, and particularly that of acting. Unfortunately, little seems to have changed in the world of Hollywood since Didion's novel was published in 1970.

Stars: 3