Play It as It Lays - Softcover

Didion, Joan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007414986 ISBN 13: 9780007414987

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2011

Synopsis

A profoundly disturbing novel that ruthlessly dissects American life in the late 1960s, from the author of The White Album and The Year of Magical Thinking.

Benny called for a round of Cuba Libres and I gave him some chips to play for me and went to the ladies’ room and never came back.

Somewhere out beyond Hollywood, hollowed-out actress Maria Wyeth’s life plays out in a numbing routine of perpetual freeway driving. In her early thirties, divorced from her husband, dislocated from friends, anesthetized to pain and please, Wheth is a woman who has run out of both desires and motives – the epitome of a generation made ill by too much freedom.

About this title

Review:

‘She writes with a razor ... You are both frightened and astonished ... It seems to me just about perfect, so heartbreaking and inescapable’ New York Times

‘Didion’s modant lucidity is like L.A. sunlight, a thing so bright sometimes it hurts’ Time, Top 100 Novels of All Time

‘For a few decades, this was my favourite modern American novel ... revelatory’ Bret Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho

From the Back Cover:

A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, 'Play It As It Lays' captures the mood of an entire generation. Joan Didion chose Hollywood to serve as her microcosm of contemporary society and exposed a culture characterized by emptiness and ennui.

Maria Wyeth is an emotional drifter who has become almost anesthetized against pain and pleasure. She finds herself, in her early thirties, radically divorced from husband, lover, friends, her own past and her own future. Actress, daughter, wife, mother, woman: she has played each role to the sound of one hand clapping.

'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 an arid soul. Two decades after its original publication, it remains a profoundly disturbing novel.

‘’There hasn’t been another American writer of Joan Didion’s quality since Nathanael West...A terrifying book.’’
JOHN LEONARD, 'New York Times'

‘‘Didion is a better writer than Cheever.’’
ANGELA CARTER, 'Guardian'

‘‘A writer of haunting power and global vision who sees a world on the edge of nervous breakdown and is not afraid to deliver the news.’’
SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

‘‘Joan Didion’s acupuncture prose hits cells we didn’t know we had and reinvigorates our entire sensibility. She circles her characters and key events as she might a dangerous snake.’’
JILL NEVILLE, 'Sunday Times'

About this edition

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0007414986
• ISBN 13: 9780007414987
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224