Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays

Maria, yes or no: I see a cock in this inkblot. Maria, yes or no: A large number of people are guilty of bad sexual conduct, I believe my sins are unpardonable, I have been disappointed in love. How could I answer? How could it apply? NOTHING APPLIES, I print with the magnetized IBM pencil. What does apply, they ask later, as if the word "nothing" were ambiguous, open to interpretation, a questionable fragment of an Icelandic rune.

--Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

The focus is on Maria, who gets the first chapter to introduce herself. It is pronounced Mar-eye-ah, she tells us: "Age, thirty-one. Married. Divorced. One daughter, age four," who is in the hospital with "an aberrant chemical in her brain." And now Maria is in a mental hospital. The next two chapters are narrated by Helene, a friend of Maria's (insofar as she has any), and then Carter, her ex-husband. Helene says that Maria killed BZ, her husband--Carter only refers to "BZ's death."

The remaining chapters--most of them--are third person and the action occurs chronologically before the characters speak in the first three chapters. This narration feels stagnant. Only the bare bones of any situation are given, sometimes the barest I could imagine: Maria writes three letters and tears them up, but what they say or who they're for is left out; Maria tells her lover, Les, that he makes her happy but we never see them together. This skeletal way of storytelling means there's almost nothing to cloud or complicate the primary feelings--Maria's grief over her separation from her daughter, Kate, and over the abortion Carter urged her to have when she became pregnant.

The dialogue is terse and often empty. Something Helene says:

If it's not funny, don't say it, Maria.

Problems are never discussed directly, actions never taken in the open, issues dealt with quickly and discreetly by agents over the telephone. Maria's numbness was my numbness as I read. The sense Maria has of her own lack of agency--I felt it with her. Carter begs Maria to show feeling, to take action, to do something, failing to see that he has stood in the way in the past, as have all of "them," the men who have been in Maria's life.

But Maria is somehow not destroyed by the attempts to take over her life. For most of the book, it seems as though she will be. She allows herself to haunt her apartment all day, smoking pot and taking sedatives and eating nothing, occasionally pulled out by BZ to parties full of people she doesn't care for. But slowly, she reawakens. About two-thirds of the way through the book, something peeks through the third-person narrative in italics and I wondered, was that Maria? Twenty-seven chapters later, sure enough, Maria gets the whole chapter, her voice in italics. Then again in six more chapters, and then every other chapter for the rest of the book. The last words are hers:

One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never know, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing.

Why, BZ would say.

Why not, I say.

It's impossible, for me at least, to understand what revitalizes her. She is not BZ, who swallows a bottle of sedatives and dies next to Maria. It's true that she has a motivation BZ does not--in the first chapter, discussing the stupid questions they ask her at the mental hospital, she anticipates her readers' reaction: "Why bother, you might ask. I bother for Kate. What I play for here is Kate. Carter put Kate in there and I am going to get her out." Maria pushes through the nothing looking for something, playing to win Kate back. What drags her from the stupor in which she spends most of the book doesn't matter; she gets out and goes.

I don't know if I can tag this one "optimism," though.

Fuck it, I said to Helene. Fuck it, I said to them all, a radical surgeon of my own life. Never discuss. Cut. In that way I resemble the only man in Los Angeles County who does clean work.