“What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask”, begins Joan Didion’s classic novel, Play It as It Lays, which both rejects and engages in the exploration of evil. The novel’s anti-heroine is Maria Wyeth, a model and actress separated from her rising star filmmaker husband, Carter, with whom she had her daughter, who is sequestered in the care of others due to serious life-threatening health complications that have rendered her basically non-communicative. The novel begins with Maria, currently residing in a mental institution, and then follows the troubling path that landed her there. Aside from visiting her daughter as frequently as possible, Maria is aimless: spending her days driving on the California freeway, mostly avoiding social interactions with her ex-husband’s shallow Hollywood friends. Maria seems to drift in and out of her own world, engaging in passionless extramarital affairs, one of which results in a forced abortion, attending cocktail parties with people she doesn’t like, and having meaningless arguments with her Carter.
The novel is told in a fascinating mix of first and third person voices. The novel begins in Maria’s voice, but sometimes abruptly switches into a third person narrator. Didion commented on this in a 1978 Paris Review interview,
“Suddenly one night I realized that I had some first person and some third person and that I was going to have to go with both, or just not write a book at all. I was scared. Actually, I don’t mind the way it worked out. The juxtaposition of first and third turned out to be very useful toward the ending, when I wanted to accelerate the whole thing. I don’t think I’d do it again, but it was a solution to that particular set of problems. There’s a point when you go with what you’ve got. Or you don’t go.”
This structure perfectly supplements the anti-heroine’s lack of real decision making, and her all encompassing lack of autonomy, furthering the reader’s impression that Maria (and perhaps the reader themselves) is a passive figure in her own life, constantly at the whim of others. She has no real interests nor seems to express any affinity for anything besides her daughter, whom she desperately clings to as a form of hope in a future family or companion. Maria’s descent into total separation from her selfhood is perceived by others as a process entirely of her own malaise and self-centeredness, represented by the third person voice, but in the first person narration the reader is privy to the struggles with motherhood that have forced Maria to disassociate: the painful separation from her daughter, and the traumatic abortion (abortions were illegal at the time, and thus performed without any guarantee of safety).
The novel’s brilliance is partly in its blunt but achingly true-to life and descriptive details. Didion at once keeps us at a distance from her characters, but at the same time gives us such meaningful and uncomplicated access into Maria’s inner life. Maria is hyperaware of her feelings towards others and the interactions they have, and never shies away from making socially uncomfortable statements and extricating herself from conversations that she is not interested in. In one instance, Maria imagines a future interaction with Carter: “He would say something and she would say something and before either of them knew it they would be playing out a dialogue so familiar that it drained the imagination.” While the phrasing seems free of emotion, its such an inherently true and alive statement, one that every reader will have no trouble imagining because they’ve had these monotonous arguments in their own personal lives.
Didion’s fiction, while less discussed than her essay writing, is a testament to her versatile and masterly talent for prose. Play It as It Lays contains many of the elements so characteristic of Didion’s reportage: clear-eyed cultural critiques, emotional distance, infusion of wit, and incisive media references. But it also contains fascinating character construction, and deeply human introspection from complicated characters. While the novel is certainly unsettling, it is also faithful enough to its characters that it is able to speak to readers so directly, forcing us to confront what is uncomfortable both within the novel and within ourselves. It is the rare novel that seems to so essentially understand human nature, and Didion has the courage to put even the ugliest parts of it on display. A gorgeous and atmospheric novel, Play It as It Lays demands to be considered alongside Didion’s most celebrated pieces of nonfiction.
Further Reading: Didion’s magnificent essay collections, both Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, speak to 1960s and 70s culture and California malaise in similar, although more upbeat, ways. Her memoir A Year of Magical Thinking is another fascinating and moving look at what comes of losing one’s child, a different take on what Maria is going through in this novel.