Joan Didion’s breakout novel
Play It as It Lays(1970) offers a dark, neo-modernist take on the Hollywood of the 1960s. Over nearly ninety short and often disconnected chapters, Didion relates the events leading up to actress Maria Wyeths’s involvement in the suicide of her friend BZ, a closeted gay film producer. A standout entry into the canon of Hollywood novels,
Play It as It Laysmight likewise be considered a paradigmatic
freeway novel. Didion’s text inverts the fantasies of conventional American road narratives, like Jack Kerouac’s
On the Road(1957), in which mostly male travelers set out across the heartland in search of themselves and of male camaraderie and freedom from domestic responsibility.
Play It as It Laysattests to the more complex and coercive reality of…
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Citation: McKenna, Max. "Play It as It Lays". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 26 August 2024 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=2773, accessed 21 November 2024.]
