"I don’t think for a second that Joan Didion is overlooked by American readers, but I get the feeling her fiction doesn’t garner as much attention as her nonfiction. Maybe I’m wrong about that, but I still think you should read Play It As It Lays.
The blurb on the cover compares Didion to Nathanael West. Play It As It Lays evokes the same sense of doom and a dangerous boredom as Day of the Locust. Maria is a failed actress with a failed marriage trying to find some meaning in the vapid, dried-out wastelands of 1960s Hollywood and Las Vegas.
Sex, drugs, and psychoses."
"This book is like a song that gets stuck in your head.
You'll find yourself immersed in it completely, finished with it all too quickly, and carrying its soft tune with you long after you've put it down.
Joan Didion has always been a master of capturing a certain rhythm in her writing. A quiet rendition of some fragile life force permeates each page of her prose. Her characters are flawed, philandering, but always full–even in states of disillusionment or emptiness. To step into their lives through Didion’s lens is to surrender yourself to an unknown, yet strangely familiar, melody. (Perhaps one you have long known the tune of but forgotten the words to.)
Basically, Play It As It Lays reminds me of humming. Subtle, lovely, achingly articulate in its reflection of some other delicate reality: a perfect composition of melancholy."
Publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication Date 2005-11-15
Section Fiction / All Staff Suggestions / Fiction Suggestions / Archived Staff Suggestions / Alexandra W. / Mike C.
Format Paperback
ISBN 9780374529949
A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the reader. Set in a place beyond good and evil-literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul-it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis and stunning in the still-startling intensity of its prose. Two decades after its original publication, it remains a profoundly disturbing novel.
"There hasn't been another American writer of Joan Didion's quality since Nathanel West . . . A terrifying book."—John Leonard, The New York Times
"Simple, restrained, intelligent, well-structured, witty, irresistibly relentless, forthright in diction, and untainted by the sensational, Play It As It Lays is a book of outstanding literary quality."—Library Journal
"[A] scathing novel, distilling venom in tiny drops, revealing devastation in a sneer and fear in a handful of atomic dust."—J. R. Frakes, Book World
