Play It as It Lays
Don’t you just love a really sad book sometimes? Like a Radiohead song that doesn’t make you feel better, it makes you feel the depth of the sadness? Joan Didion is the Radiohead of literature. I read and reviewed her memoir six months ago. Her ability to capture the nuances of emotion intrigued me and I wanted to see how that skill unfurled in her fiction. First stop: Play It as It Lays.
Play It as It Lays shows the psychological wear and tear of Maria, a fading actress whose experiences of loss grind her into a shell of a person. The novel is not a pleasant pick-me-up. It’s very theatrical and very Hollywood. It also comes across as very Joan Didion. Joan Didion is cool, okay? She exudes a commanding presence that says: Listen to what I have to say; it’s important.
The novel jumps around perspectives in the beginning but quickly settles on the third-person for the remainder of the book. I find it impressive that Didion can nimbly move through points of view, but as the plot progressed, I yearned for more first-person. TIME magazine included Play It as It Lays in their list of 100 Best English-Language Novels from 1923 to 2005, which is pretty extra. The book indulges my darker side but I can’t say it absolutely blows me away. Let’s enjoy it for what it is and leave the lists out of it. Play It as It Lays receives 4 out of 5 flames
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