"Play It As It Lays"

When I think of “Play It As It Lays” (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1970), by Joan Didion, as I actually have fairly often over the years since I first read it, I think of her iconic, anomic portrayals of Los Angeles, and in particular of the indelible scenes of the main character Maria’s aimlessly driving the Los Angeles freeways for hours and days at a time. Didion’s characters, connected to or on the fringes of the movie business, seem for the most part to be a sad bunch. Her locales in and around Los Angeles (as well as in Las Vegas) are sad and depressing as well. Having just read (and written about here on 3/21/11) another California book, Alice Adams’ “The Last Lovely City,” I was struck by the contrast. Adams writes of the beauty of San Francisco, and of comfortably affluent, quietly strong, get-on-with-it women; Didion never focuses on the beauty of her Los Angeles surroundings, and writes of lonely, depressed-despite-their-affluence-and-even-near-fame women. Granted, Didion’s book was published in 1970 and Adams’ in 1999, a time period during which women’s lives and opportunities opened up dramatically. But although both books are clearly of their time periods, those time periods are not the main point. Not surprisingly, the almost elemental, depressing scenes of “Play It As It Lays” stay with the reader longer than the more nuanced, more purposely ordinary scenes in ”The Last Lovely City.” And Didion’s characters, the people surrounding Maria, mostly seem to lead empty lives, as well as being highly unlikable. It seems that unhappy always trumps happy in literature, at least in terms of lingering in the reader’s mind.