Review: Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion

Want to write flash fiction? Want to write it better, cleaner, harder, stronger? Read this novel. It’s only 200 pages and the font is really big; you have time.

Play It As It Lays chronicles the downward drift of resting actress Maria Wyeth in 1960s Hollywood. Didion’s prose is brick-solid, but every word refracts and reflects so that it seems to say three things at once. Here is Chapter 29:

The bleeding began a few weeks later. “It’s nothing,” the doctor on Wilshire said when she finally went. “Whoever did it did all right. It’s clean, no infection, count your blessings.”

“The pain.”

“You’re just menstruating early, I’ll give you some Edrisal.”

The Edrisal did not work and neither did some Darvon she found in the bathroom and she slept that night with the gin bottle by her bed. She did not think she was menstruating. She wanted to talk to her mother.

That’s it. That’s the whole chapter, and holy shit but it makes for a good flash fiction. Here’s another, Chapter 46, in its entirety:

She had watched them in supermarkets and she knew the signs. At seven o’clock on a Saturday evening they would be standing in the checkout line reading the horoscopes in Harper’s Bazaar and in their carts would be a single lamb chop and maybe two cans of cat food and the Sunday morning paper, the early edition with the comics wrapped outside. They would be very pretty some of the time, their skirts the right length and their sunglasses the right tint and maybe only a little vulnerable tightness around the mouth, but there they were, one lamb chop and some cat food and the morning paper. To avoid giving off the signs, Maria shopped always for a household, gallons of grapefruit juice, quarts of green chile salsa, dried lentils and alphabet noodles, rigatoni and canned yams, twenty-pound boxes of laundry detergent. She knew all the indices to the idle lonely, never bought a small tube of toothpaste, never dropped a magazine in her shopping cart. The house in Beverly Hills overflowed with sugar, corn-muffin mix, frozen roasts and Spanish onions. Maria ate cottage cheese.

Maria’s distress is so beautifully, heartbreakingly understated throughout the novel, and we as the readers never know why she feels this way because Maria herself does not know.

Every single thing the characters say is a conflict; every sentence spoken grates against the next. Not a single word is wasted.

“Listen,” she would say.

“Don’t touch me,” he would say.

There’s no plot in the conventional sense, no suspense because we know from the first few chapters what’s going to happen at the end. The bulk of the book is an observation of Maria’s breakdown, and how the crime we know she committed came to be.

Those are the facts. Now I lie in the sun and play solitaire and listen to the sea—I try not to think of dead things and plumbing. I try not to hear the air conditioner in that bedroom—I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?

Some of the chapters overlap thematically and some of them just repeat the same vapid, bitchy conversations about people that we never meet—which, of course, is part of the point, though not always enjoyable to read. But when they’re good, they’re seriously fucking good. Each chapter is a perfect flash fiction, and the novel’s power lies in the way that these little chunks of story all build together into a screeching, empty vortex that sucks Maria under.

So sure, if you want to write short things then you should read short things. But you should also read this.