From Disinterested to Depressed: Play It As It Lays

Okay, for those of you who read who much I couldn't relate to Things Fall Apart, get ready for another negative review. (I almost said lukewarm review, but I really am more than cool about this one.)

Perhaps I should have paid more attention to the introduction where David Thomson writes: "Over the years I have recommended Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays to people, and I have learned to be cautious or terse ... And sometimes people come back with a hurt look: the book is very ... sordid, isn't it? And tough - by which they they mean not a tough read but hard-hearted. Sometimes people flat out say the story is bleak and unpleasant ... So I say, "Read the book," but I add as little as possible about it in advance."

On the other hand, Thomson has wonderful things to say about the opening line: "What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask ... " ponders Maria the central character of this tale of drugs, adultery, and movie-making in the 60s.

Ironic Maria begins with Iago. In Shakespeare, evil is personified. Motives are clear and corruption punished. In Maria's world, not only is she a passive, zonked out victim, but her misfortunes are as random as a roulette wheel. Somehow, despite their being written a decade and continents apart, PIAIL and TFA, both have perspectives that place the protagonist in surroundings that destroy them, "tragedies" wherein neither Maria nor Okonkwo gain insight into their creating their own ill fortune.

This view of times and place controlling the protagonist is, for me, a thin story line. I want a character meeting his fate full frontal. The singing of the tale is not in the victory but in the struggle and growth. Okonkwo is dead and Maria's soul is lost at the conclusion of both books and the reader leaves the last page in both novels equally stunned, equally uninspired. A reader does not meet an admirable hero, does not garner hope for the human condition. No wonder deconstructionism emerged with genres like this.

Second thoughts: At least this book is provocative in that I lay in bed last night trying to figure out why it disturbed me so. Eventually, I decided it is more Kafka-esque than Beat. If Maria were to inventory her life and emotions, she'd be left with a list something like this:

Husband = philanderer
Child = institutionalized
Parents = mother a probable suicide; father a losing gambler
Female friends = surgically enhanced aging swingers
Male friends = guiltless womanizers
Career = exploited by above men
Interests = drugs and driving, often simultaneously
Life's pleasures = nonexistant
Life's purpose = no free will as everything is pointless, random and unpreventable

So how can Didion convey all that information and atmosphere in just over 200 pages, a very quick read? Why do I impose this bleak world and critical story events onto her as necessarily autobiographical? Would I ever do the same with Kafka?

Essentially, no. What Didion is is hyper-alert and blessedly distant from the malaise of the West Coast in the 60s. She is a keen observer of life in the fast lane living and she creates Maria not as a voice of reason, but as a voice silenced in the desert: "Maria faltered. She realized that she expected to die, as surely as she expected that planes would crash if she boarded them in bad spirit, as unquestionably as she believed that loveless marriages ended in cancer of the cervix and equivocal adultery in fatal accidents to children. Maria did not particularly believe in rewards, only in punishments, swift and personal." This philosophy was imprinted on her by her parents and her harsh, destitute surroundings; it was confirmed by her husband's affairs and her daughter's mental illness.

Other reviewers have noted the symbolism of snakes, eggs and cold rooms that recur in the book as further metaphors for the sexual dysfunction pervasive in the story. I rather noted Maria's fantasies about food. So she doesn't look like a lonely single woman in the grocery store, she buys super-sized packages of items she never can use. When she thinks about how her life could be different, she sees herself canning preserves, fruits in beautiful jewel colors lined up in jars in her kitchen. She wants to be a classic housewife, making a larder rich, feeding her children, somewhere warm and quiet. Didion can write about longing and the soul-wrenching vacancy of contrived bustle.