I have long meant to read Joan Didion, but didn’t really know what her writing would be like. I knew she wrote about grief in My Year of Magical Thinking, but – despite having read various reviews of her books over the years – hadn’t really pieced together what sort of style her fiction might be. I certainly hadn’t expected anything as hard-boiled as Play It As It Lays (1970).
As the novel opens, we get short chapers from the perspectives of Maria, Helene, and Carter – and the rest of the novel is in short, numbered sections that look at what have led to the opening: which is Maria in a psychiatric institution. Why is she there? Helene explains it to us, briefly, sort of, in the midst of accounting trying to visit Maria in the institutino:
I drove all the way out there, took the entire morning and packed a box for her, all the new books and a chiffon scarf she left at the beach once (she was careless, it must have cost $30, she was always careless) and a pound of caviar, maybe not Beluga but Maria shouldn’t bitch now, plus a letter from Ivan Costello and a long profile somebody did in The New York Times about Carter, you’d think that would at least interest her except Maria has never been able to bear Carter’s success, all that, and Maria wouldn’t see me. “Mrs. Lang is resting,” the nurse said. I could see her resting, I could see her down by the pool in the same bikini she was wearing the summer she killed BZ, lying by that swimming pool with a shade over her eyes as if she hadn’t a care or a responsibility in the world.
Maria has had an unhappy, chaotic childhood – shaped by her father’s reckless gambling, which leads them to losing their home and moving to a town that he won in another game. The town doesn’t even exist in the ‘present day’ of the novel; nor does the motel, that her father installed where he hoped a highway might conveniently put an exit. She is used to instability and disappointment when she moves to the town characterised by it: Hollywood.
Apparently Play It As It Lays helped to shape the way that mid-century Hollywood was understood. It reminded me of A Way of Life, Like Any Other (1977) by Darcy O’Brien and, to a less extent, Prater Violet (1946) by Christopher Isherwood – which both demonstrate the chaotic insincerity of tinsel town. But, stylistically, Didion is very different. A lot of the short chapters are short, sharp dialogue exchanges between Maria and the people she forms unhealthy, dependent relationships with – her erstwhile husband, Carter; her lover Les; the film producer BZ; his wife Helene. For instance…
“I wasn’t just crazy about your asking Helene how much money BZ’s mother gives them to stay married,” Carter said on the way back in from the beach.
The top was down and Carter was driving too fast because he had to meet Freddy Chaikin and a writer from New York at Chasen’s at seven o’clock. “I wasn’t just crazy about that at all.”
“Well, she does.”
“Does what.”
“Carlotta gives them money to stay married.
‘So what.”
“I’m sick of everybody’s sick arrangements.”
‘You’ve got a fantastic vocabulary.”
She looked at him and she spoke very fast and low.
“I’ve got a fantastic vocabulary and I’m having a baby.”
Carter slowed the car down. ‘I missed a transition,’ he said finally.
Maria did not look at him.
There are other characters who play significant roles – such as Ivan Costello, whom Wikipedia describes as a ‘psychopathic blackmailer’, but he didn’t seem much more psychopathic than anybody else in the novel, to me. Because Didion gives everyone the same staccato, apathetic tone of voice, I did find it hard to disintinguish between characters. It seems deliberate – Play It As It Lays is a composite portrait of emotionless despair – but it did mean, to me, that there wasn’t much nuance between people. It scarcely mattered which absence of empathy Maria spent time with.
As well as exposing the heartlessness of Hollywood, and Maria’s limited and misogynistic experience on two movies (one successful and the other an unreleased critical darling), Play It As It Lays is a thorough portrait of dusty, hot California. Towards the middle of the novel, Maria is mostly occupied with driving – long drives along the freeway, aimless but vital to her continuation. It is oppressive and enveloping for the reader:
In the aftermath of the wind the air was dry, burning, so clear that she could see the ploughed furrows of firebreaks on distant mountains. Not even the highest palms moved. The stillness and clarity of the air seemed to rob everything of its perspective, seemed to alter all perception of depth, and Maria drove as carefully as if she were reconnoitering an atmosphere without gravity. Taco Bells jumped out at her. Oil rockers creaked ominously. For miles before she reached the Thriftimart she could see the big red T, a forty-foot cutout letter which seemed peculiarly illuminated against the harsh unclouded light of the afternoon sky.
There are key scenes that stand out in the choppy, sparse narrative – perhaps most significantly, the illegal abortion that Maria undertakes, the confusing ways she has to book and find her appointment, and the disastrous aftermath. Didion writes it with relentless reality, resisting any urge to make it a political point.
As Play It As It Lays closes, we learn the truth about what has led Maria to her institution (even though we don’t learn the specifics of why her and Carter’s young daughter is in a different institution). Rather surprisingly, she seems to receive a lot of visits from characters whose behaviour wouldn’t lead you to believe they’d bother.
And it ends, without any real sense of hope (maybe?). Didion is ruthless in her realism. The title is another way of saying ‘play the cards you are dealt’ – and there is a sense that the characters have done, are doing, will do this – and that the result is a moral and emotional neutral. As I said, I didn’t know what to expect from Didion, and it certainly wasn’t this sort of novel. I’m not sure exactly what to make of it. Play It As It Lays certainly has its fan base (Jacqui calls it ‘blisteringly good‘) and I’m a bit less clear about my view. There is certainly a lot to admire, but I found its sparseness and melancholy a little hard to parse. There is a laudable consistency to the tone, but I ended feeling like I knew surprisingly little about Maria, let alone anybody else in the novel. I think I liked the book nonetheless, but perhaps one to revisit to be sure what I think.