The essays collected in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) made Joan Didion important, and The White Album (1979) made her an icon. But it was the 1970 novel Play It As It Lays that made her indispensable.
Didion's second work of fiction is very short (one of the special reasons I love it), unfolding in 84 snippets that range from a paragraph to a few pages. As you read it, the discrete parts seem to accumulate, evolve, and connect themselves into a narrative that didn't exist before you started reading--and will be gone after you finish.
Somehow Play It manages to be simultaneously transparent and opaque, rather like the shimmering heat that recurs in Didion's desert evocations. So to say (as people usually do) that the novel follows the deteriorating life of fringe starlet Maria Wyeth as she goes through abortion, divorce, and nervous breakdown, is to see only one dimension. To say (as people usually do) that it is a scathing expose of Hollywood hedonism and SoCal shallowness, is to see only another dimension.
To view the novel in 3-D, you have to know (or suspect) what Maria knows--and decide what she decides.
If Play It As It Lays is already a Perfect Book for you, you'll know exactly what I mean. If you haven't read it yet, you'll find out on the very last page whether what I say makes sense or not.
