Play It As It Lays feels shockingly modern for having been written in 1970, nearly 55 years ago. In part this is because californian cultural liberalism and atomization won a resounding victory in america and went nationwide, then truly global as the world center of cultural production and relentless self-promotion of itself. The portrayal of californians as smart, secular, beautiful, wealthy, envied, selfish, nihilistic and disillusioned is not entirely a self-mythology, but it is certainly a minority experience which just so happened to have its grubby little paws on the levers of the most powerful and fast-acting set of tools for cultural transmission in the history of our species.

It would be too much to call this a dissident book, since disillusion with Hollywood and LA is a theme baked into the culture of the place since at least the 1930s. But also, this is a personal book, like practically everything Joan Didion ever wrote. Her skepticism of politics, causes, and even things like giving a shit about other people, upholding the most basic social expectations, or being a good parent, partner, or friend were retrospectively justified.

The nicest thing that can be said about the protagonist (who has more than a little of Joan herself) is that she is too nihilistic and indifferent to be consciously transactional or calculating. Of course, being elegant, witty, fuckable, and already married to and deeply enmeshed in a network of the wealthy and connected puts a floor on how meaningful this kind of ascetic renunciation seems. There's no need for performative leftist chest-beating about how we must never feel empathy for anyone but third-world coal miners, besides, there are many offhanded rich-bitch asides that are captured skillfully in their unconsciousness, all clearly intentional since it's you know, fiction.

I'm going to be watching the movie adaptation next week but I am expecting it to be a much more shallow work with a couple of effective and evocative scenes. So much of the experience hinges upon monologue, asides, sentence construction, juxtaposition, punchy and compact exchanges which capture deeper meaning, and a modern-poetical writing style. The film might be able to nail a few of the exchanges and add some meaningful silences, but the rest is anathema to the literalist and anti-voiceover style that came to dominate american cinema in the 1960s as a reaction to the commonly heavy-handed overframing of the 1930s-1950s.

Read the book first, you pathetic ingrates. This is a book worth reading to develop your taste as a reader who appreciates what the medium of writing can do better. Read it for the writing style as much as the character portraits, the plot is nearly irrelevant, by my lights.

The writing is light, it goes down easy, is compulsively readable, compact, carefully typeset, big spaces, numbered chapters that range between a paragraph and a dozen pages, capturing between a single moment and weeks or months.

It's also often funny, venomous, and contemporary in ways it would be melodramatic to call frightening... but yeah, it captures a human type and experience which is unimaginably bleak to people who by necessity or choice have real friends, real family, real love, and a real sense of meaning. So you know, it probably applies to most of you. Not me though, I'm loved and cherished because my mental illness expresses itself through excessive attachment and interest in the truly irrelevant. Case in point, writing long discursive book reviews in a world of people who just want to namedrop a premade opinion so that someone with either money or looks will think that they're interesting and worthy of notice.

Anyway, if you find yourself inhaling the style of writing and sentence construction, conveyance of meaning through minimalistic precision of the mundane and are looking to branch out, I would strongly recommend reading some books by Amy Hempel or Bohumil Hrabal. You must be unafraid to read for personal reasons, because nobody you'll ever meet in your life will have ever read or be able to recall anything about any of their books.

Play It As It Lays justifiably enjoys some enduring basic-bitch cultural cache as an LA disillusionment book, a feminine depression book, and a Joan Didion book. But it's a crackling read, and I hope you read it even if you read it for inane and status-seeking reasons, it may help you at least aestheticize the alienation of your meager little life.