Play It As It Lays in Around the Year in 52 Books

Aug 12, 2021 Blaine rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2021, pc-100-essential-read, from-library, favorite-reviews

Update 12/23/21: RIP Joan Didion

Everything goes. I am working very hard at not thinking about how everything goes.
…
Maria had an abrupt conviction that the plants were consuming the oxygen she needed to breathe.
…
It occurred to Maria that whatever arrangements were made, they worked less well for women.
…
Maria did not particularly believe in rewards, only in punishments, swift and personal.
…
My father advised me that life itself was a crap game: it was one of the two lessons I learned as a child. Th

Update 12/23/21: RIP Joan Didion

Everything goes. I am working very hard at not thinking about how everything goes.
…
Maria had an abrupt conviction that the plants were consuming the oxygen she needed to breathe.
…
It occurred to Maria that whatever arrangements were made, they worked less well for women.
…
Maria did not particularly believe in rewards, only in punishments, swift and personal.
…
My father advised me that life itself was a crap game: it was one of the two lessons I learned as a child. The other was that overturning a rock was apt to reveal a rattlesnake. As lessons go those two seem to hold up, but not to apply.

Play It As It Lays is the story of Maria Wyeth, a 31-year-old former actress, recently divorced from a Hollywood director, Carter Lang. At the novel’s opening, Maria is in some kind of institution. The rest of the novel, through an almost stream-of-consciousness series of flashbacks, tells how she got there. And how Maria got there is a special kind of dark. I mean, blindfolded at midnight during an eclipse dark.

Maria is running from bad thoughts and memories, and she spends many of her days just driving all over southern California in her Corvette to lose herself. She is just going through the motions, engaging in meaningless sex, drinking, and drugs to try to dull the pain and stop the nightmares. Maria yearns to spend more time with her 4-year-old daughter, Kate, who’s never shown and is institutionalized with some type of disability, and it’s pretty damn clear that they’re never going to be together in the way she wants. Maria’s been broken by life, by the physical, emotional, and sexual abuse she has suffered at the hands of every single person around her, each of whom is somehow more selfish and awful than the last. The central event of the novel is Maria being pressured into getting a depressingly accurate pre-Roe back room abortion she doesn’t want. Yet, somehow, Maria goes on, which may be even more depressing than if she’d just given up:

One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what “nothing” means, and keep on playing.

Why, BZ would say.

Why not, I say.

Play It As It Lays is one of the most nihilistic books I’ve ever read, on a level with Blood Meridian and The Road. And like those classics, this novel would border on being an intolerable read if it weren’t for one fact: the writing is just brilliant, with quotable lines on almost every page. In that respect, it’s a bit like Lolita, another classic that you can’t look away from even when you should. There’s an acidic anger running through Maria’s narrative that is like the literary equivalent of the song You Oughta Know. So brace yourself, and settle in with this bleakest of depictions of the dark side of the late Sixties in America. Recommended. ...more

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Jan 16, 2022 Wendy rated it it was amazing

Shelves: literary-fiction, 1001-books, twisted-love, american-west, 2022

This was brutal and depressing as hell, and I loved it. I picked it up at the bookstore display table two days ago on a whim ("oh, Joan Didion, I really should read her, been meaning to for years") and it fit right into my recent streak of books about not-so-young-anymore women confronting midlife disasters. Sometimes this kind of thing comes off as needlessly overwrought, even emotionally manipulative, but it felt to me like the author was smart and efficient with her punches, if anything errin ...more

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Dec 12, 2020 Jen K rated it really liked it

Didion's story of Maria (Mar-eye-a) Wyeth is excruciating but hard to put down. The chapters are mostly short and jump around but still draws you in. Maria group up in the Nevada desert and Las Vegas with her father always looking for the next hand to gamble with advice for playing the game. Now she is in a bad marriage with a movie director/ producer, Carter, with implied bad choices in her marriage and outside of her marriage. Her career as a model/ actress was short and mostly over. She is un ...more

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Jun 27, 2023 hannah rated it it was amazing

Can't put into words how much I liked this book. It's dark and reflective and cuts into you at times. Maria is a fascinating character. Instant favorite. ...more

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