Book Review: Play It As It Lays

I forewarned you that I’d be reading a lot of Joan Didion for a paper I’m writing.  (Don’t worry, I’m counteracting her amazing prose and super-depressing topics with less serious books).

Didion’s second novel, Play It As It Lays, is the story of a troubled woman, Maria Wyeth (pronounced, we’re told early on, Mar-eye-ah).  The book is full of beautiful sentences that portray a woman coming apart at the seams. Case in point:

Because she had an uneasy sense that sleeping outside on a rattan chaise could be construed as the first step toward something unnameable (she did not know what it was she feared, but it had to do with empty sardine cans in the sink, vermouth bottles in the wastebaskets, slovenliness past the point of return) she told herself that she was sleeping outside just until it was too cold to sleep beneath beach towels, just until the heat broke, just until the fires stopped burning in the mountains, sleeping outside only because the bedrooms in the house were hot, airless, only because the palms scraped against the screens and there was no one to wake her in the mornings.

Maria’s marriage to a film director is failing, and she wanders their empty house in Beverly Hills and drives on the freeway aimlessly, just for the speed, while he shoots a movie in the desert near Vegas.  He screws other women; she screws other men.  Their daughter Kate is in an institution for an unnamed reason.  Maria has an illegal abortion.  She struggles with depression and substance abuse.

In the first chapter she tells us nothing matters–”nothing applies”–but the entire book that follows is about the things that do apply.

The book is brutal, unflinching, and definitely not a pick-me-up.

So why read it?

Quite simply, every sentence is a work of art.