Play It as It Lays (Masterplots II: American Fiction Series, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Joan Didion
- First Published: 1970
- Type of Plot: Nihilistic black comedy
- Time of Work: The late 1960’s
- Setting: Southern California and Las Vegas
- Principal Characters: Maria Wyeth, Carter Lang, BZ, Les Goodwin, Ivan Costello, Johnny Waters, Kate, Benny Austin
- Genres: Long fiction
- Subjects: Values
- Locales: Los Angeles, CA
The Novel
The first thing that one notices about Play It as It Lays is its strange physical appearance. Joan Didion has said that her technical intention in the novel was to write “a book in which anything that happened would happen off the page, a white’ book to which the reader would have to bring his or her own bad dreams.” She accomplishes this goal by dividing her 214-page book into eighty-seven short chapters (some as short as a single paragraph). The fast, even violent, pace of the novel and the accumulation of many nearly blank pages instill a sense of...
[The entire page is 2577 words long]
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