Rating: 
Summary: What a downer
Review: I just hope that most Hollywood film makers and actors are not like the ones represented in this book. When they are not on the set filming, they are either getting drunk or popping pills, committing adulterous acts or being beaten up. Maria Wyeth, an actress, is portrayed as the unhappiest of the lot. Besides losing her mother to a car accident when Maria was a young girl, she is currently experiencing the messy break-up of her marriage and then chooses to abort presumably her husband's baby. These events leave Maria traumatized and drained, and she eventually becomes severely unhinged. None of the book's characters is remotely likable or sympathetic, although Ms. Didion seems to think Maria is simply tragic. I believe that she is just too inconsequential to assume that role. If this book has a theme it about the shallowness, emptiness and nothingness of life, that is when it is not overrun with evilness. Ms. Didion's moral seems to be, "don't look under a rock--a poisonous snake may be laying there ready to bite you." Not a pretty picture.
Rating:
Summary: What a downer
Review: I just hope that most Hollywood film makers and actors are not like the ones represented in this book. When they are not on the set filming, they are either getting drunk or popping pills, committing adulterous acts or being beaten up. Maria Wyeth, an actress, is portrayed as the unhappiest of the lot. Besides losing her mother to a car accident when Maria was a young girl, she is currently experiencing the messy break-up of her marriage and then chooses to abort presumably her husband's baby. These events leave Maria traumatized and drained, and she eventually becomes severely unhinged. None of the book's characters is remotely likable or sympathetic, although Ms. Didion seems to think Maria is simply tragic. I believe that she is just too inconsequential to assume that role. If this book has a theme it about the shallowness, emptiness and nothingness of life, that is when it is not overrun with evilness. Ms. Didion's moral seems to be, "don't look under a rock--a poisonous snake may be laying there ready to bite you." Not a pretty picture.
Rating: 
Summary: Obscure and bleak....an unpleasant reading experience
Review: I should have heeded the warning at the back of the book. "Play It As It Lays" didn't sound like something I would enjoy. But I thought, "What the heck.....Joan Didion is a celebrated writer and PIAIL was after all shortlisted for the National Book Award". Having slogged through it and some USD11 poorer, I only regret not having gone with my gut. I was bored to death with Maria Wyeth and her decadent family and friends. They're an unsympathetic lot and deserve everything they get. The message may be biting and stark, but I found Didion's prose, with their "quick cross cuts and rapid dissolves", irritating and obscure. It's like watching a bad Robert Altman movie that's shot with a hand-held camera. It gave me a bad headache. Stay away......unless you're a Didion fan.
Rating: 
Summary: My first glimpse of my favorite author
Review: I was in my last year of high school when I read this book and it remains one of my most treasured books. Didion's precise images in Play It As It Lays compelled me to run out and read each essay and book I could get my hands on. Sometimes I pick it up and read the book from cover to cover, other times just my favorite parts. This book tells a story that - while distressing - you absolutely must devour!
Rating:
Summary: Favorite Author
Review: Joan Didion is the best contemporary writer I know. Good books are meant to be reread to reveal something new about the reader. I have reread this book at least 6 or 7 times and each time I "see" something different and insightful about Maria and her sad and tragic life. I'm still trying to figure out what is the attraction to this short novel. It must be the writing style that sucks you into the unfolding of a story of what could have been many women's life both now and then. I wonder too, as someone who was born after the book was writen, how representative it was of the decadence and wildness of the 60's. This book gives new meaning to T.S. Eliot's poem, "Hollow Men", although I think Maria expressed (or tried to in her own strange ways) the inner depths of herself throughout the book. I think there's something universal in that experience of being a thoughtful woman who seeks something real in life, but is really valued for her beauty and fleeting youth (which are all ephemeral). You can see that theme as well in "Valley of the Dolls", another recommended read.
Rating:
Summary: This one hits you right in the stomach.....
Review: Joan Didion's " Play it as it Lays " is one of the few books I read over and over again . It chilled me to the bone . Much has been said of Ms. Didion's voice as a prose writer - no decoration , her words simply astound . With this novel , however , style takes a backseat to a frightening ability to flesh out character . I must stop myself , for it is difficult to review any novel without citing specific passages or examples . You'll just have to trust me : this novel is Didion's finest work , and the truths she illustrates cannot be denied .
Rating: 
Summary: bleak
Review: Modernity has promised Man many things, the most important of which is that with God dead, we are free to jettison the archaic Judeo-Christian morality which has held us in thrall lo these many years and can now do, essentially, whatever we wish. This basic promise was finally and fully embraced during the 1960's with Women's Liberation, the Sexual Revolution, the rise of the Drug Culture, the rejection of the nuclear family, etc., etc., etc.. All of these different waves of social experimentation had a one thing in common, each was premised on the idea that individual freedom is the paramount value, more important than any responsibility owed to our fellow men. Together they elevate the self above neighborhood, community, society and family. They place the individual at the of his own universe, whole and sufficient unto himself, beholden to no one, dependent on no one. Joan Didion's novel, Play It As It Lays, though written in 1970, already recognized the horrific consequences of this monstrous ideology of selfishness. The main character in the novel, Maria Wyeth, is a thirty-one year old model turned actress. Her days are filled with casual sex, drugs, alcohol, aimless wanderings, and meaningless conversations with people she doesn't much like. Her marriage is falling apart. Her four year old daughter has been institutionalized, because of some form of chemical imbalance. Pregnant again, she gets an abortion, an illegal one performed in a safe house in Encino. This accelerates her slide into an emotional instability so severe that she ends up confined to a mental hospital. Though she mentions an inchoate longing to return to her childhood several times, in her final monologues in the book she seems to have settled into complete nihilism : I used to ask questions, and I got the answer: nothing. The answer is 'nothing.' And her behavior--the sex with friends, acquaintances and strangers, the barbiturates and alcohol, the almost complete absence of emotion with which she accepts a friend's decision to commit suicide--certainly suggests that nothing matters. However, there is one moment in the book which betrays a hidden truth; after an assignation with a married lover, the following conversation ensues : 'Don't cry,' he said. 'There's no point.' 'No point in what.' 'No point in our doing any of those things.' He looked at her for a long while. 'Later,' he said then. 'I'm sorry.' 'It's all right.' On the drive back they told each other that it had been the wrong time, the wrong place, that it was
bad because he had lied to arrange it, that it would be all right another time, idyllic later. He
mentioned the strain he had been under, he mentioned the preview had gone badly. She mentioned
that she was getting the curse. They mentioned Kate, Carter, Felicia, the weather, Oxnard, his
dislike of motel rooms, her fear of subterfuge. They mentioned everything but one thing: that she
had left the point in a bedroom in Encino. Significantly, this comes in a portion of the book that is not told in Maria's first person voice. It would seem to be the author's judgment upon Maria and her cohorts. The freedom they have bought into has brought them entirely empty and miserable lives, while leaving them incapable of understanding that certain things in life actually do mean something. Maria's life had a point, the life that she was carrying and towards which she had a responsibility. It was the abdication of this burden, the failure to accept responsibility for another being, which has rendered her life finally meaningless. This is a bleak and devastating look at a culture where people have become completely atomized, heedless of anyone beyond themselves and, therefore, so soulless that there's not much to like about themselves. In fact, none of the characters are likable and, other than that brief authorial comment, there's not much of a redeeming vision to be found. I kind of admired the book's very savagery, but it was ultimately just so dark and hopeless that it was hard to enjoy. GRADE : B
Rating:
Summary: Not particularly memorable
Review: The story is as hollow and forgettable as the character the book is about. It's an easy read, and not exactly bad writing, but it didn't grab me and it's not going in my permanent library. If you like reading about vapid people scrapping it out in the film industry, you might like this book. If you like reading about people quite lost in their own lives, you might like this book. Otherwise, find something else.
Rating:
Summary: Not particularly memorable
Review: The story is as hollow and forgettable as the character the book is about. It's an easy read, and not exactly bad writing, but it didn't grab me and it's not going in my permanent library. If you like reading about vapid people scrapping it out in the film industry, you might like this book. If you like reading about people quite lost in their own lives, you might like this book. Otherwise, find something else.
Rating:
Summary: The Deserts of Ennui
Review: There is, wrote Charles Baudelaire, a vice which is uglier, more wicked and filthier than any other, a vice which he called "L'Ennui". This is a stronger term than the mere "boredom" which is its literal meaning, because the word also implies a state of indifference and moral and spiritual deadness. It is a state of mind frequently invoked in Baudelaire's poetry, and one which is also at the centre of Joan Didion's novel. The central character is Maria Wyeth, a Hollywood actress in her early thirties. Fate has, in many ways, been unkind to her- her mother died in a car crash, her career is in trouble, her marriage to an uncaring husband is also failing and she has a mentally-handicapped daughter. Maria reacts by retreating into the sterile world occupied by most of the novel's other characters, one of casual and promiscuous sex, drink, drugs and "Ennui", both in its literal and its extended Baudelairean senses. Told in a series of very short vignettes, the novel traces the progress of the disintegration of Maria's life. She is bullied into an abortion by her husband. (It is interesting that a novel by a woman writer treats abortion not as a woman's right but as another weapon of male dominance). Her marriage ends in divorce. In the final scene her moral nihilism means that she deliberately fails to prevent the suicide of a friend. Much of the book is set in the deserts of southern California and Nevada, and Maria spends much of her time driving on long but aimless car journeys through this landscape. The imagery of the desert is clearly used to suggest the aridity of the spiritual world in which the characters live, and Maria's meaningless journeys are a symbol of her inability to escape this world. It is noteworthy that although the book is set in the late sixties or early seventies, a time of great ferment and social change in America, news of the outside world plays virtually no part in the book; Miss Didion's characters seem able to shut it out completely. The bleakness of the world inhabited by Maria and her acquaintances means that this is certainly not a feelgood novel. It is, in many ways, not an easy one to like. It is, however, certainly one worth reading.
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