I know I have mentioned in the past having a fill-in poster for “must see movies” that I am trying to slowly but surely mostly fill in–I have no plans to ever watch The Human Centipede–but I have one for books too. That one is only 100 novels, and when I got it, I was surprised, big reader that I am with a Masters in English Lit, that I had only read about 30 of them. I’ve filled in more than a few since then, even getting past the halfway point last year, but as I was passing through a Barnes & Noble recently, I found a small table with number of copies of a single book, apparently on sale: Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays. I knew nothing about it but remembered the title from my poster.
I have read books with less of a reason to do so than that.
Play it as It Lays is the story of actress Maria (pronounced, she tells us in the first chapter, Mar-eye-ah) Wyeth. Maria is an actress in her early 30s, a Hollywood starlet whose career is on a downward swing. So is her personal life. Her husband Carter is often out and the two are verbally abusive and emotionally distant. Her parents are both dead, her father having lost whatever money they had investing in a worthless patch of desert. She has a daughter, Kate, whom Maria adores, but Carter had the child put away in some sort of hospital for vague reasons that require Maria to stay away, but she visits Kate often anyway. With her life falling apart, is there anything she has to live for?
If anything, the answer is “no,” though that holds true for every character in the book. They all live empty lives where sex and drugs are passed around and no one seems to have anything worth doing. Maria spends multiple chapters arranging for, getting, and then somewhat haunted by an abortion. “Haunted” may or may not be the right word, truth be told. She mostly just seems haunted by how impersonal the whole thing is.
“Impersonal” might be the best way to describe how everyone deals with each other here. Maria spends most of her time going to various places for little or no reason, and even when she out in the desert where Carter is filming his most recent movie, she doesn’t really want to actually deal with the people there. That’s just as well. Carter may say from time to time he wants her to be there, but he doesn’t seem to be slightly interested in actually talking to her, and the feeling is mutual. Heck, she accuses him of sleeping around, names a woman, and he doesn’t even deny it. The marriage is over by then regardless, but the fact is, if there was ever love between these two, it is long gone.
That may be the key to this book. Maria is a desperately sad woman in many ways, but she doesn’t seem to want to admit that, essentially, her life is empty. So is everyone else’s. Maria doesn’t have any real hope in her life. She can maybe get Kate back, but there’s no plan for her there, and she seems to simply be existing. Didion’s style is stark, fitting a novel that isn’t all that long and made up mostly of short, impressionistic chapters that essentially just show how directionless Maria and the people around her are. It’s a comment on a time, place, and people that possibly hasn’t changed all that much.
Grade: A-
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