
A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s from the author of The Last Thing He Wanted & A Book of Common Prayer Somewhere out beyond Hollywood resting actress Maria Wyeth drifts along the freeway in perpetual motion anaesthetized to pain & pleasure seemingly untainted by her personal history She finds herself in her early thirties radically divorced from husband lovers friends her own past & her own future Play It As It Lays is set in a place beyond good & evil literally in Los Angeles & Las Vegas & the barren wastes of the Mojave but figuratively in the landscape of the arid soul Capturing the mood of an entire generation Didion chose Hollywood to serve as her microcosm of contemporary society & exposed a culture characterized by emptiness & ennui Two decades after its original publication it remains a profoundly disturbing novel an immaculately wrought portrait of a world (California on the cusp of the 70s) where too much freedom made a lot of people ill