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Play it as it Lays
by Joan Didion

Maria Wyeth knows what nothing feels like. After a major catastrophe— one which she indifferently allows to occur— her response is a simple shrug of, “I know what nothing means.” Maria lives in an empty house in Beverly Hills while her husband is off directing a film shoot somewhere in the Mojave Desert. Her everyday problems are as follows: Who will she torture herself to talk with? Who will she sleep with? Who will refill her barbiturates? Maria spends half her days with her eyes shut, the television on very low, the shades drawn, the Seconal beside her pillow, listening to her friend Helene discussing homosexuality among celebrities. The rest of Maria’s days are spent speed driving, driving nowhere, to the market, back to nowhere, along the empty highway, and even cruising to Las Vegas and then immediately returning. But this is where Didion’s adjective-obsessed pen is most powerful, because her metaphor of nothing— of driving aimlessly— is all a guise for a thirty-one-year-old former B-actress who has to spend that drive deciding which doctor will finally perform her long-awaiting illegal abortion, and trying to decide how to reunite with her toddler daughter who has been committed to the psychiatric ward. Underneath the moroseness, Didion creates a suffering woman with the emotional capacity of a little girl, appearing to the reader from beyond the increasing appeal of each abstract adjective written out, up to the point where Didion’s long, anxiety-filled sentences climax on that final adjective of the sentence in an ultimate orgasm, and there is a catharsis on every page, as the prose exhilarates, and explodes like a gunshot, and our minds are aimed to feel like a growth is pressing against our senses with the deepest malignance. But in actuality there is a benign human being there, deep inside Maria, and through Didion’s masterful weaving and chipping away at its consciousness she is brought onto the page in what first appears to be existentialism, but is merely the playing of life’s game— its dirty trick— which we then see is more than just nihilism, and precisely Didion’s aim. Time magazine named Play it as it Lays one of the top hundred novels of the twentieth century, and it is easily Didion’s best, the greatest to regurgitate the myth of Los Angeles­— with Los Angeles as a character in itself— all while nothing surprising happens, or at least nothing that is not part of the game.

— David Abady