Book description
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. Joan Didion was born in California and lives in New York.
She is the author of five novels and seven previous books of nonfiction:
among them the great portraits of a decade in essays, 'Sentimental
Journeys', 'The White Album', and 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem'.
