I purposefully left this novel in the back pocket of the plane seat in front of me on a flight to New York. Discarding it properly would've required more effort than it was worth. The Sky Delta catalogue would be a more interesting read than Didion's drabble, but someone else might need something, anything, to kill 2-3 hours like I had. I bought it for a grad class that I had to drop and only recently found the time for some leisure reading: a work trip. Had I read this anywhere but on a plane, I would have wanted my time back. Thus, to abandon it on a plane is apropos.

I care nothing for Maria and don't feel Didion wanted me to - with no purpose to that end even if it were her intention. The plot is flat and undeveloped; characters, the same. Impersonal sex, whiskey on the rocks, drugs, a movie set, directors, actors, and the heated pools of Hollywood homes hardly present a compelling setting. To call Play It As It Lays - in its entirety - cliche is to wonder why in the world any professor would choose it for required reading. If she purports its function as a portrayal of disillusionment, 5 notable authors I could name right off the top of my head do a better job. Joan Didion must have done some favors, we'll say, just as her characters do, to get this published.

Hace unos años vi en Filmin el documental biográfico de Joan Didion sin haber leído una sola frase escrita por ella. A diferencia de otros tantos de esos documentales, en el de Didion sí que se aborda parte de su obra, aunque a fin de cuentas pesa más como se centra en la idea de 'persona creativa a la que suceden unas cosas de la vida' que la verdad tampoco fue un verdadero aguijonazo para correr a buscar sus libros.

Si digo la verdad, su nombre ha ido flotando a lo largo de los años por las menciones de Bret Easton Ellis, que la señala como uno de sus referentes literarios y yo la verdad es que no lo comprendía. Me imaginaba una literatura más lírica y melosa, me costaba encajar ese vivo interés por parte del Ellis.

Hace un par de días por fin encaré esa cuenta pendiente, tomé de la biblioteca esta novela y se me cayó otro falso prejuicio y pude comprender esa conexión estética. Imposible no leer estas páginas y no ver en Menos que cero un ahijado deslenguado que busca parecerse a su ídolo. Porque Didion vendría a ser una especie de Fitzgerald con dosis extra de cocaína, ella es tan moderna como Fitzgerald era romántico. Encontramos aquí una visión áspera de la vida de una actriz fracasada, quien ha naufragado en la vida a causa de una infancia muy desestructurada e incierta, luego unas cuantas relaciones equivocadas y finalmente un suceso personal indudablemente doloroso que no desvelaré.

La escritura de Didion se zambulle en el dolor, aunque de una forma oblicua y elíptica. Es de esas escritoras que optan por 'mostrar y antes que contar' de Henry James. A lo largo de 50 episodios, algunos muy breves, se nos esboza diferentes escenas dónde hay desengaños, engaños, mentiras, agresiones, desesperanza y progresivamente se representa un país que es un ocioso callejón sin salida, un lugar de personajes retorcidos, otros desganados, mucha desesperanza y paraísos artificiales que sólo ocultan el desazón de forma temporal.

A nivel dramático es una radiografía inclemente de la depresión, aquí dibujada en asépticos y abúlicos diálogos en los que el lector debe poner de su parte para desentrañar y recomponer las alusiones que los personajes se lanzan con desgana a veces y en otras con malicia en hoteles de poca monta o casas de Los Angeles.

Por lo tanto no es una novela para elevar los corazones, para extasiarse en los fulgores de la existencia, sería difícil 'disfrutar' de unas escenas y una historia de semejante calado, aunque si se entiende que la ficción es un vehículo para explorar las profundidades, este libro de Didion es un submarino que se pasea por la fosa de las Marianas.

Recently my five y/o daughter caught the first minute of the "Thriller" video. I say the first minute because upon seeing Michael look up at the camera with yellow eyes and fangs she threw her hands up, screamed at the top of her lungs, ran from the room, into her room, ran back into the room (still screaming), out of the room, back in and buried her head into the safety of my comforting lap (still screaming).

Now I realize this is most people's reaction to seeing Micheal's post '90s decomposing flesh face but for the little princess it was a little traumatizing. Since the "day o' horror" I have had to create a new "pretty" story every night "to get THAT face" out of her head. I've created my own little fantasy stories, catered to the princess, filled with violet unicorns, fairy wings, rainbows and on one interesting night a humpback whale, mermaid and her own underwater kingdom.

These tales of bubble-gum and rainbows brought me to this book. Sometimes when life is filled with demonic faces that haunt your night you need the pretty stories to even it out. OR in adult-land when life is filled with beige and blah you need this book.

It was achingly empty and dark. The depravity of the characters brought out feelings and emotions within me that I needed to feel. It was rich with the feelings that make you feel alive just by your own juxtaposition to the toxic characters. Reading this was akin to reading an Adrienne Rich poem. I really liked it.

"I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing."

3.5
I liked the rep of self-destructive behaviour and depression in women, quite similar to The Bell Jar. I would've given it a higher rating if there wasn't such blatant, uncalled for homophobia.

Wildly disenchanted 1960s Hollywood.

This is a story about Maria, and to tell more is to ruin the swirl of consciousness. It is stark, the tarnished and penumbral side of glamour. How hard won "glamour" is. The winners, the losers, the rising and the falling; they all portray the tenuous hold each has. So close to the edge.

Honestly, I don't recommend this story to anyone that isn't in a good headspace because it's brutal in a nihilistic manner. That said, it is a fantastic voice, telling of a woman's story. I loved the abortion. I find it hysterically amusing that the more men attempt to control women's bodies the more workarounds there are. If you haven't ever talked to women and discussed abortion through the decades, you should because it is fascinating. It's always been there and always will. The only question remaining is how dangerous.

My body is not state property to legislate. --yeah, this is my personal statement and not related to the book, per se. If you live in a shithole state, there are plenty of workarounds--Follow the internet crumbs.

As if one needs it straight up: this is NOT politically correct.


<<*>> A gift to myself for 2019 Indie Bookstore Day from Pages.

*4.5- the ending is phenomenal.

The master of minimalist drama--nobody writes better dialogue. Everything is subtext.

n  I am not much engaged by the problems of what you might call our day but I am burdened by the particular, the mad person who writes me a letter. It is no longer necessary for them even to write me. I know when someone is thinking of me. I learn to deal with this.n

A portrait of disaffection, disillusion, and dissociation told in masterful prose—fragmented, hallucinatory, confounding, maddening—that mimics the protagonist's malaise and unraveling.

As relevant now as it was when it was published: this is a journey we've all taken; this is the journey of America—whether you live in it, whether you dream of it, whether you despite it, it's all here, wizardly so.

n  3.5 starsn

“What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.”

These are the lines with which Joan Didion opens her astounding novel, Play It As It Lays: It is thus that we first make our introduction with the weariness and nihilism that clings to the protagonist Maria Wyeth throughout this book like an oppressive, cloudy mist; it is through this mist that we see Maria and feel her disaffection with her life and with the moral ambiguity of the world she inhabits.

Maria knows what nothing means: she hails from nowhere—Silver Wells, Nevada, once an opportunity but no longer; not even a ghost town—and first speaks to us from a mental institution, which in the 60s (as well as today) counts as both a nowhere and a nothingness. She is a nobody; a burnt out model and actress with two movies made by her estranged husband to her name; a daughter without parents and a parent without access to her daughter. She is a nothingness, losing herself in the daze of drugs and sex and speeding down the Californian freeways when she wishes to feel in control.
Even so, Maria is not a novel character—the punch in this book comes not from what the story portrays or deals with, but rather from how it is told.

Play It As It Lays begins with a chapter in the voice of Maria, followed by one each narrated by her friend Helene and husband Carter respectively. However, the rest of the novel is narrated in third person, a stylistic depersonalisation which renders the thematic distance all the more resounding.

Both Didion and her protagonist (or supremely alienated anti-heroine, if you will) are sharp observers free of the entanglements of cause-effect, resulting in a narrative that reads like a fever dream, to similar effect as in Clarice Lispector's A Breath of Life, except that there is a certain method and determination to Maria's madness, which supplements the elegiac grace of Didion's prose. The result is uniquely compelling, if also exceptionally depressing:

"By the end of a week she was thinking constantly about where her body stopped and the air began, about the exact point in space and time that was the difference between Maria and other. She had the sense that if she could get that in her mind and hold it for even one micro-second she would have what she had come to get."

Perhaps one of Didion's greatest achievements with this novel is the eerie balance she forges between Maria's sensitivity to her self and her body and the fact that she is entirely divorced from its pain, something that renders even the rare flash of visceral, bodily details in the story feels muted. Given that it is the 60s that this story is set in (and the 70s, when it was published), one is pushed to feel that it must be her experiences of motherhood—as barely and almost—that drives her to entropy. But isn't it everything, and more crucially, nothing?

And then there are the snakes. The particulars of Maria's nihilism are doled out to the reader largely through the imagery of snakes, but the novel's philosophical climax does not take place until the very last pages, which are interwoven, again, with sections in Maria's own voice. There is only one time in the entire novel (aside from when she's talking about her daughter) that Maria truly claims the observation she is making, and while many have critiqued this book for being philosophically weak (and reinforcing the very conservatism that nihilism responds to), Play It As It Lays would still be worth reading for that one moment alone.

The city burning is Los Angeles's deepest image of itself.

Joan Didion, quoted not from Play It As It Lays, but from Vanessa Place's LA MEDUSA, which I happened to read just before this*. Here, L.A. is not in flames but a void. Nothingness lies at the heart of everything and everyone here, chilling even when constrained by ostensibly ordinary events. I read this in a single day, which seems to be the way to go, in and around train rides, industrial voids, an encounter with the police, and a barbecue. I think the sort of colloquial ordinariness of Joan Didion's book titles has kept me from seeking her out until now, but she's perfect. In fact, the back-handed recommendation that finally lead me here was Angela Carter's comparison between Didion and Jean Rhys, in their characters' lack of agency, but with both, the underlying reasons are not personal failings but broader societal indictment.

There's a place where a film producer questions the unspoken metaphysical/psychological implications of a rape scene. The director shrugs it off: "This is a commercial picture." This book similarly maintains a kind of flat-affect recounting of events. And yet, it's all in the psychological and metaphysical dimensions. Showing so completely that the telling would diminish its force.

*(In between, Maya and I attended a lecture on the urban environment through the lens of crime and surveillance, which included an account of a flight in an LAPD helicopter, a wide top-down perspective of a city, which, that night, deceptively refused any trace of flame or strife, via an LAPD attempting to recover from having once been the worst police force in the world.)

Lifes tough when you're a pill popping actress trying to cope with an abortion. Quick and entertaining enough to pass time on subway rides. I had trouble relating or empathizing with the characters in the book, though i had a hunch i'm not supposed to. Maybe its LA that i dont like? It had a Hurly Burly type feel to it, except its not funny. This book probably would have been more effective if i read it when i was 15, when wallowing in depression seemed glamourous. Honestly i had a hard time absorbing much of the story so this review is irrelavent. i'll read it again when i decide to draw a warm bath, light some candles and pray i don't get a yeast infection from spending too much time in the tub. no really i'll read it again.

Play It As It Lays is joan didion's successful attempt to personify nausea >:(
｡･:*˚:✧｡｡･:*˚:✧｡｡･:*˚:✧｡｡･:*˚:✧｡

imagine: you're hanging out with a stranger you thought was interesting. she's decked out in stylish, but outdated clothing and she's smoking a cigarette. then she offers for you to take a drag. you accept. but actually, the cigarette tastes disgusting and it stays in your lungs too long and you can't release the smoke and it sucks and five minutes later, you're still trying to breathe it out but you CAN’T until she finishes waffling and refusing to use question marks. this cigarette drag took two hours from your life. (aka how long it took to read this)

that was what this book felt like.

disclaimer: im just some girl with access to a keyboard. im not an intellectual, and maybe ive missed the point of the story entirely - i don’t know. all i do know is i suffered reading this. xx

╰┈➤ joan didion presents a dusty, ex-glamorous, and feverishly lukewarm setting of southern california. i think her portrayal of this scene was maybe one of the highlights of the book for me, as you can clearly see the expertise and inside knowledge of the time and area that didion transcribes within these pages.

: ̗̀➛ n  the plotn *ੈ✩‧₊˚
play it as it lays follows maria wyeth as she spirals and loses control of her life, surrounded by assholes (including herself) and an unwillingness to try and resolve her problems. as a whole, the plot was layered and it felt like wading through a muddy river trying to keep track of it. the book uses a series of vignettes without much context to convey a storyline, but it was again, just difficult to keep track of and i def felt annoyed whilst reading it. it feels like so much but so little happened, each chapter becoming more and more claustrophobic and painful than the last.

: ̗̀➛ n  the charactersn *ੈ✩‧₊˚
╰┈➤ i hated all of them. literally . all of the women were written as shallow, and all the men were abusive shites. but they all had one thing in common: they were all aggravating, selfish, and i couldn’t root for any of them- worse, i barely cared about what happened to them.

maria was, of course, self-centred and shallow and so apathetic i wanted to shake her. girl wake up!!! im sure the point of the story was literally that. that nihilism; that apathy. but i didn’t enjoy it, and i don’t think it was done well. i had some sympathy for her, especially due to the novel’s short-term, frantic meditation on motherhood in two ways. that was maybe my other highlight of the book, because it actually made me feel her grief and her helplessness and i felt so bad for her in a way that the novel never managed to do otherwise.

carter is a twat. i hate him. he should die. same for BZ and helene.

: ̗̀➛ n  the writingn *ੈ✩‧₊˚
╰┈➤ the book read like cardboard flavoured urban poetry. and by that i mean it was like what you’d expect to find written on the walls of a public bathroom: vague, meant to be deep but really just dumb and unintelligable, and absolutely LACKING in substance or personality (unless if you consider no personality to be one in itself).

the dialogue especially was dead and meaningless; i found myself literally rolling my eyes at some of the dumb shit they said, and how everyone was essentially the same (horrible) person. it was also extremely boring and painful to read, which i shall illustrate with a quote:

n  

“That was edifying,” Carter said. “Why’d you do it.”
“I just did it.”
“I want you to give that gun back to Farris.”
“I already did.”
“I don’t want any guns around here.”
Maria looked at him. “Neither do I,” she said.

n

WHAT