Between the Lines: Joan Didion's 'Play It As It Lays'

Few novels can vigorously infest you. Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays is one of them. Its fragmentary narrative centres around the opaque Maria (pronounced "Mar-EYE-uh", as the narrator makes clear), an actress-turned-vacant by abuse, Hollywood, the monotony of daily life and prescription pills.

Chapters are fast and sparse, some only a parapaph long - they serve less as plot advancement, and more as pieces of shrapnel exploding out of a collapsing mind. Emotions are muted, characters drift. Maria spends her days driving around the aimless arteries of California's highways. Didion invokes the lyrics of Joni Mitchell's seminal Coyote - "you're just a prisoner of the white lines on the freeway." Maria's life is directionless, a mess of dead-ends and half-stories, as entangled and complex as the roads she endlessly traverses.

There is no destination.

Didion's prose is sharp and haunting. Important context is implied, sometimes outright contradicted. Maria is initially established by three, brief portraits of her from various characters' perspectives - first, Maria herself, second is Helene (Maria's obedient and dutiful friend, who is also complicit in her abuse), and Carter (Maria's abusive ex-husband). The first few pages of the novel has Maria accused of killing film producer "BZ", Helene's husband - who, we find out, is just as monstrous as Maria's. From here, the novel unravels in a series of episodes, loosely connected by a vague narrative - constantly deepening the characters and simultaneously our engagement with them.

Distilling the plot is pointless, as Play It As It Lays treats plot as secondary. This is by design. What the novel intends, and excels at, is placing the reader within the fractured and tragic soul of its central protagonist. Maria is a rare literary character, in that she bleeds out of the page. Almost literally, at points. There is a rawness, a vulerability, something transcendental about her. This is an extraordinary achievement, given how economic Didion's prose is. Everything in this novel is in what is not said.

Speaking of, Didion's prose is administered with a confidence and control that very few writers can match. Her writing is restrained, yet burning at the same time. Some critics describe Didion as "writing with a razor". I'd say she writes with a scalpel, as she knew exactly where to cut.