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Play It as It Lays: A Novel Kindle Edition
Spare, elegant, and terrifying, Play It as It Lays is the unforgettable story of a woman and a society come undone.
Raised in the ghost town of Silver Wells, Nevada, Maria Wyeth is an ex-model and the star of two films directed by her estranged husband, Carter Lang. But in the spiritual desert of 1960s Los Angeles, Maria has lost the plot of her own life. Her daughter, Kate, was born with an “aberrant chemical in her brain.” Her long-troubled marriage has slipped beyond repair, and her disastrous love affairs and strained friendships provide little comfort. Her only escape is to get in her car and drive the freeway—in the fast lane with the radio turned up high—until it runs out “somewhere no place at all where the flawless burning concrete just stopped.” But every ride to nowhere, every sleepless night numbed by pills and booze and sex, makes it harder for Maria to find the meaning in another day.
Told with profound economy of style and a “vision as bleak and precise as Eliot’s in ‘The Wasteland’,” Play It as It Lays ruthlessly dissects the dark heart of the American dream (The New York Times). It is a searing masterpiece “from one of the very few writers of our time who approaches her terrible subject with absolute seriousness, with fear and humility and awe” (Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times Book Review).
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherOpen Road Media
- Publication dateMay 9, 2017
- File size2481 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“[A] scathing novel, distilling venom in tiny drops, revealing devastation in a sneer and fear in a handful of atomic dust.” —The Washington Post Book World
“Sharply observed . . . Elegantly written . . . There is a high intelligence in [Didion’s] observations and her connections. She uses the language with the ease, control, and virtuosity that comes from natural grace and hard work.” —Lore Segal, The New York Times Book Review
“Didion’s mordant lucidity is like L.A. sunlight, a thing so bright sometimes it hurts.” —Time
“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
Praise for Joan Didion
“[Didion] has created, in her books, one of the most devastating and distinctive portraits of modern America to be found in fiction or nonfiction.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“A slant vision that is arresting and unique . . . Didion might be an observer from another planet—one so edgy and alert that she ends up knowing more about our own world than we know ourselves.” —Anne Tyler
About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : B072HMBLSN
- Publisher : Open Road Media (May 9, 2017)
- Publication date : May 9, 2017
- Language : English
- File size : 2481 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 226 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #26,019 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #183 in Contemporary Literary Fiction
- #248 in Women's Literary Fiction
- #260 in Women's Divorce Fiction
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Joan Didion was born in Sacramento in 1934 and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1956. After graduation, Didion moved to New York and began working for Vogue, which led to her career as a journalist and writer. Didion published her first novel, Run River, in 1963. Didion’s other novels include A Book of Common Prayer (1977), Democracy (1984), and The Last Thing He Wanted (1996).
Didion’s first volume of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, was published in 1968, and her second, The White Album, was published in 1979. Her nonfiction works include Salvador (1983), Miami (1987), After Henry (1992), Political Fictions (2001), Where I Was From (2003), We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order to Live (2006), Blue Nights (2011), South and West (2017) and Let Me Tell You What I Mean (2021). Her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2005.
In 2005, Didion was awarded the American Academy of Arts & Letters Gold Medal in Criticism and Belles Letters. In 2007, she was awarded the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. A portion of National Book Foundation citation read: "An incisive observer of American politics and culture for more than forty-five years, Didion’s distinctive blend of spare, elegant prose and fierce intelligence has earned her books a place in the canon of American literature as well as the admiration of generations of writers and journalists.” In 2013, she was awarded a National Medal of Arts and Humanities by President Barack Obama, and the PEN Center USA’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
Didion said of her writing: "I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” She died in December 2021.
For more information, visit www.joandidion.org
Photo credit: Brigitte Lacombe
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Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
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Maria is disconnected (in current parlance - an attachment disorder perhaps), divorced, from her husband and everyone else around her. In the case of her husband she is both figuratively and soon to be literally divorced. She drifts along on the tide of other people's lives. When she isn't drifting there, she's driving around, trying to escape herself apparently, since she has so little connection to anyone else.
It's a sad story. Maria needs just one person to really care about her. Late in the novel she meets up with someone from the past, and in her fear, doesn't take up his offer. And then he's gone. The address on a note isn't current. No way to find him. And really, he was only a connection to a past long gone, to a life she didn't want to live, so what's the point.
Her only concern outside herself is her daughter, but the times she spends with her, she is unable to connect to Kate who seems to be developmentally disabled? There is also a pregnancy, not her husband's, that is terminated. Another loss that Maria seems unable to come to terms with.
In spite of the rather turgid sorry of the book, it is also rather mesmerizing. The driving, the sun, the heat - it all gives a feeling of being lost in the desert, dying of thirst for a small sip of cool refreshing love and care. But there's none to be found.
Stylistically the text is interesting. The chapters are very short, and we are told the story in a nonlinear fashion, with a lot of gaps. This makes the reader feel disconcerted and disjointed, and Ms. Didion was successful in her attempt to make the book's style reflect its protagonist's state of mind. Ms. Didion's writing also reminds me a lot of Hemmingway. "Play It As It Lays" is not a text for the casual reader, although it is a quick read. A big stumbling block for me is that I just could not shake the nagging feeling that this text is terribly dated. Its content might have been shocking and useful as tools to express the emptiness of one's life in 1970, but the things it depicts (abortion, S&M, drug use, etc.) is now seen daily on HBO. Didion uses the aforementioned items in a powerful and non-gratuitous manner in the text, but it just does not shock the senses as much now as it must have 40 plus years ago.
"Play It As It Lays" does have many things going for it however. The way in which the abortion and its aftermath are portrayed in the text is difficult to read, and the raw intensity of the emotion shown is tautly and clearly rendered. The protagonist's marriage is also horrifically, and wonderfully, written. They say horrid things to each other. They are downright cruel. It is an unexplainable marriage, and it reeks of reality.
I guess the reason why I did not enjoy this text is that I feel it is just a very hopeless book. The novel's closing line sounds hopeful, but it does not feel hopeful at all. Be warned, this is not a pleasant story to consume.
Top reviews from other countries
Maria's story resonates in an exceptional and powerful way. It is not an easy book, it is a complex story that isolates you but at the same time keeps you close and connects with the character in an incredible way.
More than a typical story of the boulevard of broken dreams in Hollywood, it is a story of a woman, written by another woman, questioning life and it is a reading that we should all do, 100% recommended.
Reviewed in India on September 5, 2022