Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Here’s a line from Play It As It Lays—“Hear that scraping, Maria?” That should be the sound of music to you.”

You might have guessed the scene—an abortion.
An abortion done in a room of a house by a man we can only assume is a doctor. And in exchange for $1,000 cash.
Beyond it being a good line, the scene carries a profound sadness now that there is a pre and a post roe v. wade.
The scene and the book belong to the former, and I–-the reader, to the latter.

Another line.
The scene—a marriage in decline,
“Some nights he said that he was tired, and some nights she said she wanted to read, and other nights no one said anything.”
I won’t spoil such a line with any opine.

One more line.
The scene is one unhappily married man talking to our main character—Maria, an unhappily married woman, though not to one another.
The two are in a motel room in the Las Vegas desert, and from their room they can hear a couple arguing just outside.
A bottle breaks, and from there we get—“Listen to that”, he said. “Try to think about having enough left to break a bottle over it.”
“It would be very pretty,” Maria said.


I go back and forth with Joan Didion. I read The Year of Magical Thinking a few years ago and it left me gutted. That book is an emotional force of nature.
Slouching Towards Bethlehem though— mostly navel gazing. Great writing by an author with nothing much to say.

Play It As It Lays was my first foray into Didion’s fiction. I love the tone of this book more than anything else. She captures ennui, and malaise and ties it to a time and place, and perhaps a generation.
Didion belongs to the class of great writers whose talent seems effortless. She writes with a sense of knowing, and with a charming nihilistic bite. At least it’s charming when it works—but when it does work, it really works.
This one does.



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