Rating: 4/5, good
This book is horrifically, horrifically depressing.
I usually enjoy dark books, but I didn’t get anything resembling “pleasure” out of this one.
It is SO INCREDIBLY BLEAK.
It doesn’t have the dramatic despair of Darconville’s Cat, the humble nihilism of Too Loud a Solitude, or the morbid curiosity of Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted. You could put it in the same category as The Bell Jar, but Joan Didion’s more oblique and cryptic where Sylvia Plath is very direct. Both of their prose is pretty spare, but Didion’s is lean to the extreme.
Anyway, trigger warning, don’t read this shit if you’re depressed, yada yada yada…
Play It As It Lays is a short novel (213 pages) about a woman named Maria. She’s a movie star married to a director named Carter. She and Carter have a daughter named Kate who is institutionalized for an unspecified developmental disability or mental illness.
Carter made a movie about Maria but it’s basically just a short film of him following her around and making her look pretty. Whenever they go places, people come up and congratulate Carter on the movie but never speak to Maria. Maria’s face is well-known, but nobody really tries to understand her and nobody’s interested in what might be going on behind her pretty face.
Carter tries to keep Maria from seeing Kate because the institution says it will affect her “adjustment”. As a director, he’s on the go all the time and leaves Maria at home to her own devices. Maria falls into drinking and partying and having affairs and eventually gets pregnant with another man’s baby.
Carter gives Maria an ultimatum: she can have an abortion or never see Kate again. Maria tries to avoid having the abortion, but she eventually goes through with it, although the stress of it causes her to become depressed and be institutionalized.
Maria wants love, she wants softness and connection, but everything around her is a hard dry desert (literally and metaphorically). She’s manipulated by her husband, blackmailed by one lover, and her second lover is unavailable because he’s already married. Her daughter is kept away from her and she’s pressured into aborting her second child. Her setting is totally unnatural and impersonal and it reflects the sterile bleakness of modern life.
Play It As It Lays is confusing in the same way The Great Gatsby is, in that it has a lot of characters and a lot that the writer doesn’t tell you about those characters, or tells in a subtle way. Because of that, I think I would have to read this a second time and take notes to really keep track of all of Maria’s different lovers and how her relationships with them are progressing and weaving together (the book jumps around in time a lot, which could be interesting to take a closer look at…), but I don’t really want to study it that closely, because as Marie Kondo would say, this book doesn’t “spark joy” for me.
If I were more interested in reading about Hollywood glamor and drama this would probably appeal to me, but as it is… meh? It does seem a little bit “first world problems” at times… like The Great Gatsby, the characters are not very sympathetic or even self-directed and it makes me a little bit bored with them. Maria’s being controlled and stifled in various ways, but she doesn’t really do anything about her situation except for making quips, acting out, sleeping around, drinking, and driving dangerously on the highway. She just kinda submits and lets her life be decided for her and her efforts at self-definition get sublimated into misbehavior. I guess that’s kind of the point, though…
Anyway, it’s fantastically well-written, but I don’t know if I’d recommend it. Maybe if you’re a woman looking for validation about how subtly oppressive men are and how boring and empty life in America is. Just don’t expect it to make you feel any better about it.
Also of interest:
Here’s an article Barbara Grizzutti Harrison wrote calling Didion out for being all style and no substance in 1980: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/103/didion-per-harrison.html
And if you want to read something in this category with a LOT of substance, I’d recommend Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, which I reviewed here: https://sbhowell.com/2018/02/the-vegetarian-by-han-kang/
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