Lynne King's Reviews > Play It As It Lays

So that she would not have to stop for food she kept a hard-boiled egg on the passenger seat of the Corvette. She could shell and eat a hard-boiled egg at seventy miles an hour (crack it on the steering wheel, never mind salt, salt bloats, no matter what happened she remembered her body).

Which author could possibly begin a novel with the words:

What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.

Well surprisingly enough Joan Didion. And these words set in motion the inevitable direction that this book is going to take.

When Didion wrote this book, she was thirty-five and had moved a few years before with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, to Los Angeles where they were to spend twenty years working in the film industry;

The review on the back cover portrays quite succinctly the atmosphere of the setting of this book:

A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, “Play It as It Lays” captures the mood of an entire generation, the emptiness and ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that both blisters and haunts the reader.

This was the period when the pill for contraceptive purposes had been in place for nearly a decade. This was meant to emancipate women and stop the worry of unnecessary pregnancies, however, as with many “modern” occurrences in life, problems did occur.

Maria (“that is pronounced Mar-eye-ah, to get it straight at the outset” – I love this attention to detail!) Wyeth is a thirty-one year old, somewhat failed actress, married to, and then divorced from Carter, a film director. She is indeed cool at times in trying to keep her emotions in check but nevertheless she fails miserably.

When the book begins, she is in some kind of psychiatric hospital and prior to this her friends had been so concerned for her safety, that when an intolerable situation occurred she inevitably turned up there. I found her entire lifestyle terrifying. Speed on the freeway was of major importance to her – she drove to places like someone demented, like a bat out of hell; it seemed that she had to keep the adrenaline flowing. Then her mood could unaccountably turn to another extreme with the realisation that life was futile and meant nothing. She cried a lot and on one occasion bled a lot. That was a mesmerising part of this book. Sex came and went and was all rather meaningless. The relationship with her husband Carter ended in divorce and I’m unsure who left whom but their situation was dire. Constant attempts at reconciliation failed as there was such hatred it was impossible to overcome.

There’s a rather strange relationship between Maria, Carter and BZ (bisexual movie producer, BZ -an abbreviation for benzodiazepines, sedative drugs) and his wife Helena. I was unsure what was really going on there.

Maria’s childhood was rather unusual. Her father had been a gambler, winning a town – Silver Wells - that began with twenty-eight individuals but was soon zero. As he had gambled away his Reno house, he recalled that he owned a town and so they lived there.

Kate, Maria’s four year old daughter is in a clinic with an imprecise disorder. Carter was responsible for her being there and Maria is trying to get her out. She plays only for Kate.

My feelings towards Maria and BZ changed dramatically from confusion and coldness to a sudden sense of place in regard to admiration for their identical views on existence on this earth. It could be seen that they had this kind of symbiotic relationship:

“I never expected you to fall back on style as an argument.”

“I’m not arguing.”

“I know that. You think I’d be here if I didn’t know that?”

She took his hand and held it? “Why are you here?”

“Because you and I, we know something. Because we’ve been out there where nothing is. Because I wanted – you know why.”

This novel is very symbolic with references to rattle snacks and also in the biblical sense; dreams, music and speed.

The prose throughout the novel is not only riveting reading but so stark in its intensity that it disturbed me no end. Nevertheless this has certainly put me on track to read more of Didion’s works, both fiction and non-fiction. She has such a style about her, which can indeed flow from one extreme to the other but with so much depth.