Item: Play It as It Lays
Rating: 1.00
Author: whitney

by Joan Didion

A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, from the author of The Last Thing He Wanted and A Book of Common Prayer.

Somewhere out beyond Hollywood, resting actress Maria Wyeth drifts along the freeway in perpetual motion, anaesthetized to pain and pleasure, seemingly untainted by her personal history. She finds herself, in her early thirties, radically divorced from husband, lovers, friends, her own past and her own future.

Play It As It Lays is set in a place beyond good and evil, literally in Los Angeles and Las Vegas and the barren wastes of the Mojave, but figuratively in the landscape of the arid soul. Capturing the mood of an entire generation, Didion chose Hollywood to serve as her microcosm of contemporary society and exposed a culture characterized by emptiness and ennui.

Two decades after its original publication, it remains a profoundly disturbing novel, an immaculately wrought portrait of a world (California on the cusp of the 70s) where too much freedom made a lot of people ill.

I try to find at least one positive thing to say when writing a negative review, but this time I am coming up blank. The characters were all so unlikable and shallow with images of the Kardashians coming to mind. Due to the lack of caring for anyone in the novel and therefore difficult to read. The novel was very well written and the chapters were short, that and the fact that it was a book club selection were the only things that kept me reading. Play it as it Lays does take place in the 1960s, many years before I was even a thought so, I wondered if maybe if I could have related to the time period it may have been more tolerable, but I honestly doubt it.

Play It as It Lays (FSG Classics)

by Joan Didion

Reviewed by Whitney @ First Impressions Reviews on Mar 24, 2016

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