Kind of fascinating to see that concise, tip-of-the-iceberg prose of Didion's essays applied to a piece of fiction. The heroine, who seems to share the author's withering intelligence, can't enjoy the decadence that her friends have resigned themselves to, but she isn't much good with the wholesome life either, so she carves out a mostly solitary existence made up of sleeping next to her swimming pool, compulsively hitting the highway (she puts less thought into zipping over to Vegas [distance: 250 miles] than I do into going up a single flight of stairs), and, in the novel's best-known sequence, passing through several levels of shady security for an abortion in Encino. She gets out of the house, she even works some, but little of it seems to register with her: people come and go like spirits. The subject is dreary, and I can see how Didion's refusal to give us more than passing glances at key events and characters could frustrate some readers, but she is writing it the only way she can; you just have to trust her.

Underneath the elliptically relayed events and ghostly (though spot-on) dialogue, there is a clinical layer informing the story. Didion, who went through a breakdown herself (and famously reprinted one of her diagnoses in The White Album), is depicting an unstable ego: the heroine's personality is deteriorating before our eyes. This isn't ennui, the Hotel California, or Rebel without a Cause-styled alienation; this is full-blown mental illness. Some people who get impatient with the book--or complain that they couldn't "like" the character--probably haven't caught onto this.

“Creio até que a escrita da autora ganhou aqui um certo desprendimento, que pôde ser mais original e ainda mais sardónica porque não estava a falar de si própria, mas de personagens inventadas. Claro que, à boa maneira de Joan Didion, até a ficção é uma crítica à realidade e Play It As It Lays é essencialmente uma crítica à sociedade norte-americana dos anos 1960, sobretudo à falsa ilusão de fama e felicidade que Hollywood promete.”

Review completa em: https://ritadanova.blogs.sapo.pt/play....

Dzieje się dużo i szybko, Didion sypie postaciami i nazwami własnymi jak z rękawa, a przy tym jest bardzo oszczędna w formie. Spora cześć książki to wyłącznie puste dialogi, bez żadnych dodatkowych opisów, co dodatkowo utrudnia ogarnięcie upływu czasu i powiązań między zdarzeniami. Trafna jako opis depresji i stagnacji, ale jednocześnie ma w sobie wszystko to, czego nie lubiłem w esejach autorki. Liczyłem na znacznie więcej.