Play It As It Lays
First edition
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| Author | Joan Didion |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Farrar Straus & Giroux |
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Publication date
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1970 |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 312968389 |
Play It as It Lays is a 1970 novel by the American writer Joan Didion. Time magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. The book was made into a 1972 movie starring Tuesday Weld as Maria and Anthony Perkins as BZ. Didion co-wrote the screenplay with her husband, John Gregory Dunne.
The novel begins with an internal monologue by the 36-year-old Maria (Mar-eye-a) Wyeth, followed by short reminiscences of her friend Helene, and ex-husband, film director Carter Lang. The further narration is conducted from a third-person perspective in eighty-four chapters of terse, controlled and highly visual prose typical of Didion.
Maria story gets told as she is recovering from a mental breakdown in a psychiatric hospital somewhere near or in Los Angeles. A not-quite lurid view of life in Hollywood follows. Didions late 1960s LA is a mix of grimness with glamour. Maria's fall oscillates between dizzying and domestic, as she fails to fit into one of two roles women were cast in Hollywood. Maria's acting career sputters as she advances closer to an age women no longer get roles at, her family breaks apart.
Maria moved to LA from New York, by way of the small town of Silver Wells, Nevada. The daughter of a gambling father and a neurotic mother who bet on a mine and lost, Maria came to New York to become an actress. In the Big Apple, Maria works temporarily as a model and meets Ivan Costello, a psychological blackmailer who does not scruple to use her money and her body.
In New York, Maria receives news of her mother's death, possibly a suicide by car accident. Her father dies soon after, leaving useless mineral rights to his business partner and friend Benny Austin. Maria withdraws from acting and modeling, splits up with Ivan, and eventually meets Carter and moves to Hollywood. Later, we find that she and Carter have a 4-year-old daughter Kate, who is under mental and physical “treatment” for some “aberrant chemical in her brain.” Maria truly loves Kate, as indicated by her tender descriptions, her frequent hospital visits, and her determination “to get her out.”
An inevitable divorce, and the ensuing social chaos bring Maria to indulge in self-destructive behavoir. She plunges into long nights of compulsive driving, wandering LAs freeways, through motels and bars, drinking and chancing sexual encounters with actors and ex-lovers. After a series of disasters for Maria, further infidelity among her friends comes to unravel her life more completely. BZ dies as said in the beginning, and Maria is institutionalized, sending her visitors away and planning for a day she might see her daughter again.
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