Rating: 
Summary: A terrifyingly blank slate
Review: "Play It As It Lays" is a work of genius -- short, direct, readable, brilliant. Didion's best writing and a classic of American fiction.
Rating:
Summary: Out there where nothing is
Review: "Play It As It Lays" takes us to the rarified world of Hollywood and La-la Land, where life is fast, flat, and apparently as empty as the souls of some of its inhabitants. At the center of the book is Maria Wyeth, who at 31 is on the far side of the big 3-0 dividing line; orphaned when her parents are killed in a car crash, divorced from her film-director husband, the mother of a handicapped, institutionalized child, a sometime model and actress, who has become desensitized and remote from the pain of others to hide her own interior pain. Maria has truly been "out there where nothing is" but instead of rejecting it, she has come to feel at home in it. The final nail in the coffin of her ability to feel is the abortion her estranged husband forces her to have to get rid of the child of her married lover; if she refuses, he will take custody of their own daughter. From that point, her life spirals downward into a haze of drugs, booze and casual, meaningless sex; communication with others is reduced to an interchange of one-liners; we wonder if this woman can feel anything for anyone any more. When Maria is able to calmly watch the husband of her supposed best friend destroy himself without lifting a finger to try to help him, we wonder is it because she is too lazy to call for help, or too detached to care. Joan Didion's prose is as spare and as stark as the inner life of the character she writes about, and in simple but telling phrases she is able to convey to the reader all the pain and emptiness, and finally the viciousness, that passes for Maria's life. Maria will wallow in her own anomie and to hell with anyone who gets burned by contact with her. Is this payback? Maybe. Joan Didion lets us see Maria and her life in all its revolting nothingness, and makes us want to thank God it isn't ours.
Rating:
Summary: Out there where nothing is
Review: "Play It As It Lays" takes us to the rarified world of Hollywood and La-la Land, where life is fast, flat, and apparently as empty as the souls of some of its inhabitants. At the center of the book is Maria Wyeth, who at 31 is on the far side of the big 3-0 dividing line; orphaned when her parents are killed in a car crash, divorced from her film-director husband, the mother of a handicapped, institutionalized child, a sometime model and actress, who has become desensitized and remote from the pain of others to hide her own interior pain. Maria has truly been "out there where nothing is" but instead of rejecting it, she has come to feel at home in it. The final nail in the coffin of her ability to feel is the abortion her estranged husband forces her to have to get rid of the child of her married lover; if she refuses, he will take custody of their own daughter. From that point, her life spirals downward into a haze of drugs, booze and casual, meaningless sex; communication with others is reduced to an interchange of one-liners; we wonder if this woman can feel anything for anyone any more. When Maria is able to calmly watch the husband of her supposed best friend destroy himself without lifting a finger to try to help him, we wonder is it because she is too lazy to call for help, or too detached to care. Joan Didion's prose is as spare and as stark as the inner life of the character she writes about, and in simple but telling phrases she is able to convey to the reader all the pain and emptiness, and finally the viciousness, that passes for Maria's life. Maria will wallow in her own anomie and to hell with anyone who gets burned by contact with her. Is this payback? Maybe. Joan Didion lets us see Maria and her life in all its revolting nothingness, and makes us want to thank God it isn't ours.
Rating:
Summary: book critique for school
Review: At some time in many people lives, they reach a point where they ask themselves, what's the purpose of life; in Joan Didion's book, "Play It As It Lays", Maria Wyeth, the main character, finds herself asking that very same question. Didion's book follows Maria's journey through this point in her life, examing her feelings, thoughts and actions.
"Play It As It Lays," takes place in Hollywood in the late 1960's. It's written from a struggling actress's point of view. She's reached a crossroads in her life and pushes everything to the side for a while. Focusing on nothing in particular, her friends begin to think she's lost her mind, when all she wants is to make a little sense of her hectic surroundings. "I know what 'nothing' means, and keep on playing."(214) The setting that Joan Didion chose to use really defines the story. Hollywood itself, no matter what time era, has its own personalities, moods and excitement. The late 1960's, was a time of contemporary society, the culture was characterized by emptiness and ennui. As the characters are all part of the entertainment business, their lives revolve around attaining a certain level of social standings, and this in term sometimes leads to mental breakdowns. Their lives set the mood and the atmosphere within the story. Didion's style of characterization does an excellent job of developing the setting, as well as revealing the theme over time.
Rating:
Summary: book critique for school
Review: At some time in many people lives, they reach a point where they ask themselves, what's the purpose of life; in Joan Didion's book, "Play It As It Lays", Maria Wyeth, the main character, finds herself asking that very same question. Didion's book follows Maria's journey through this point in her life, examing her feelings, thoughts and actions.
"Play It As It Lays," takes place in Hollywood in the late 1960's. It's written from a struggling actress's point of view. She's reached a crossroads in her life and pushes everything to the side for a while. Focusing on nothing in particular, her friends begin to think she's lost her mind, when all she wants is to make a little sense of her hectic surroundings. "I know what 'nothing' means, and keep on playing."(214) The setting that Joan Didion chose to use really defines the story. Hollywood itself, no matter what time era, has its own personalities, moods and excitement. The late 1960's, was a time of contemporary society, the culture was characterized by emptiness and ennui. As the characters are all part of the entertainment business, their lives revolve around attaining a certain level of social standings, and this in term sometimes leads to mental breakdowns. Their lives set the mood and the atmosphere within the story. Didion's style of characterization does an excellent job of developing the setting, as well as revealing the theme over time.
Rating:
Summary: A disturbing yarn
Review: Didion applys her journalistic eye to a 1960s California, and the results are profoundly disturbing. The protagonist, Maria Wyneth, is an unstable woman whose favorite pastime is driving at extremely high speed for hours in her convertible on the freeway. Maria's experiences in the desert as well as in a very seedy hotel with an abortion doctor provide a vivid microcosm of the side of society we never knew.
Rating:
Summary: Perfection
Review: Didion in absolute top form. A pleasure to read and ponder, through and through. Filled with unforgettable characters and a palpable sense of foreboding, this book is written in Ms. Didion's signature style -- a style in which what is not said is at least as important as what is. A heartbreaking meditation on the artifice of Hollywood and the perils of disconnectedness.
Rating: 
Summary: Portrait of a life gone wrong
Review: Didion is a definite "show not tell" author. She presents a series of fragmented snapshots, strings them together, then expects the reader to do much of the interpretation. The result: a grim, relentless, despairing mosiac of a life in the process of falling apart. I have admired Didion's non-fiction ("White Album," "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," "After Henry") for her adroit use of language: her skill in putting together words that pack in a maximum amount of powerful imagery, the way her phrases implant themselves in my thoughts and remain there. While "Play It As It Lays" demonstrates some of that same skill with language that is evident in Didion's journalistic work, I doubt that the story of Maria will cling to me like the stories of people from Didion's essays: the abandoned child on the highway, clinging to the cyclone fence, the neglected flower child rocking on a rocking horse. A day after I read "Play It As It Lays," I wondered if I had dreamed it. Not so for Didion's non-fiction. In that case, I wondered if I had lived it.
Rating: 
Summary: Don't Mistake Pop Culture Prose for Genius
Review: First, I would like to examine the character of Maria (pronounced Mar-eye-ah). In my life, I have never read about a character so lacking in dynamism as Maria. This is a woman who is herded through her life as a cow is to slaughter. Starting with a sour marriage, she must deal with (or, at least, experience) the deaths of her parents, a stagnant career, a substance abuse problem, the hypocrisy of her friends, the alienation of her daughter, an insubstantial culture, an abortion, a divorce, prison, and the suicide of a friend. Oh how my heart bleeds for poor Mar-eye-ah. When faced with these tribulations, Maria is completely unresourceful. In fact, she is completely inept as a human-being. The only time in the novel that she asserts herself is in the first chapter when she finds herself locked up in the loony-bin. It is here that she is able to express her philosophy, to wit: "nothing matters." Now, if you can call Nihilism affirmative or assertive, then this is the only indication in the book that Maria is even remotely human. I am not saying that one must be an aggressive maniac to be human, but one must balance the assertiveness with the apathy to provide a realistic character and an interesting story. It may be argued that Maria does attempt to gain control of her life through simulating her conflicts in the microcosm of the California freeway. As Maria careens recklessly through four lanes of traffic while cracking an egg on the steering wheel, Didion would have us believe that this symbolic act is one of pure desperation, the desperation of one who has tried to cope with the multitude of disappointments that each of us must face in life, but has failed miserably. I suppose a sympathetic reader might be willing to believe that Maria deftly avoids striking the other cars on the freeway as she would like to swiftly and painlessly solve the problems of her pathetic life. Although there might be some merit to this argument, I disagree. I see a woman with such incredibly self-destructive tendencies that I am surprised she did not do herself in years ago. She navigates her Corvette through traffic, not as a symbolic act of courage and resolve, but as a symbolic act of cowardice and suicide. Why did Didion write this novel? I might be able to accept the fact that Maria was a slug if Didion, through the character, sought to impart some universal truth to the reader. While reading the novel, I was compelled to question the author's motives. Why is Maria so lethargic? Why are the other characters so completely amoral? Is the story autobiographical in any way? Why did Didion write this story, thus inadvertently making me suffer through it? After days of struggling with these questions, I discovered the answer, the only logical answer. It is a product of 60's pop culture. Didion's novel has no more artistic value than Andy Warhol's Campbell's soup paintings. The novel is nothing more than a compilation of taboos which would mean that, at the time of publication, it would be really "cool" to read because it would offend the establishment. It seems that Didion's only purpose in writing the novel was to shock as many people as possible by creating a hedonistic world populated by tragic people, thus launching herself into the pop spotlight as an innovator or risk-taker, all the while hoping that the literary community would buy into her farce. Amazingly enough, she succeeded.
Rating:
Summary: Don't Mistake Pop Culture Prose for Genius
Review: First, I would like to examine the character of Maria (pronounced Mar-eye-ah). In my life, I have never read about a character so lacking in dynamism as Maria. This is a woman who is herded through her life as a cow is to slaughter. Starting with a sour marriage, she must deal with (or, at least, experience) the deaths of her parents, a stagnant career, a substance abuse problem, the hypocrisy of her friends, the alienation of her daughter, an insubstantial culture, an abortion, a divorce, prison, and the suicide of a friend. Oh how my heart bleeds for poor Mar-eye-ah. When faced with these tribulations, Maria is completely unresourceful. In fact, she is completely inept as a human-being. The only time in the novel that she asserts herself is in the first chapter when she finds herself locked up in the loony-bin. It is here that she is able to express her philosophy, to wit: "nothing matters." Now, if you can call Nihilism affirmative or assertive, then this is the only indication in the book that Maria is even remotely human. I am not saying that one must be an aggressive maniac to be human, but one must balance the assertiveness with the apathy to provide a realistic character and an interesting story. It may be argued that Maria does attempt to gain control of her life through simulating her conflicts in the microcosm of the California freeway. As Maria careens recklessly through four lanes of traffic while cracking an egg on the steering wheel, Didion would have us believe that this symbolic act is one of pure desperation, the desperation of one who has tried to cope with the multitude of disappointments that each of us must face in life, but has failed miserably. I suppose a sympathetic reader might be willing to believe that Maria deftly avoids striking the other cars on the freeway as she would like to swiftly and painlessly solve the problems of her pathetic life. Although there might be some merit to this argument, I disagree. I see a woman with such incredibly self-destructive tendencies that I am surprised she did not do herself in years ago. She navigates her Corvette through traffic, not as a symbolic act of courage and resolve, but as a symbolic act of cowardice and suicide. Why did Didion write this novel? I might be able to accept the fact that Maria was a slug if Didion, through the character, sought to impart some universal truth to the reader. While reading the novel, I was compelled to question the author's motives. Why is Maria so lethargic? Why are the other characters so completely amoral? Is the story autobiographical in any way? Why did Didion write this story, thus inadvertently making me suffer through it? After days of struggling with these questions, I discovered the answer, the only logical answer. It is a product of 60's pop culture. Didion's novel has no more artistic value than Andy Warhol's Campbell's soup paintings. The novel is nothing more than a compilation of taboos which would mean that, at the time of publication, it would be really "cool" to read because it would offend the establishment. It seems that Didion's only purpose in writing the novel was to shock as many people as possible by creating a hedonistic world populated by tragic people, thus launching herself into the pop spotlight as an innovator or risk-taker, all the while hoping that the literary community would buy into her farce. Amazingly enough, she succeeded.
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