Play It as It Lays

Play It as It Lays is a 1970 novel by the American writer Joan Didion. Time magazine included it in its list of the hundred best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005. The novel has been credited with helping define modern American fiction and has been described as an instant classic.

The setting is Hollywood, Las Vegas and the Mojave Desert. Maria Wyeth's acting career is slowing and her marriage and friendships are coming apart at the same time, so the novel's material is a woman watching her own arrangements fail without a plot that offers her a way to repair them.

Didion's prose is the reason the book is remembered, and its fragmentation is deliberate: the story arrives in short scenes that accumulate rather than in a continuous narrative. It was adapted into a 1972 film with Tuesday Weld as Maria and Anthony Perkins as BZ, from a screenplay Didion wrote with her husband John Gregory Dunne, which is an unusual case of an author translating her own formal choices into another medium. Its reputation rests on the flatness of the narration, which reports what Maria does without explaining it, and on the refusal to convert her situation into a lesson.