Similarly, Joan Didion's prose is as insidiously effective as the painless touch of the anesthetist's needle she herself describes. Her sentences, pared down bone clean, are chilling in their authority. She tells her story so quickly, so mercilessly, there is simply no disputing what she finds. Her prose almost seems a function of the desert of which she writes-every superfluous gesture, as if in deference to the overwhelming heat, the sun and shifting sands, eliminated. And although the novel's action takes place in L. A., and a good deal of the rest in Vegas, there is no denying their common foundation, the few hundred miles of desert that connect the two mirage-like cities.
"ARE YOU tired?" BZ keeps asking Maria. And when she finally answers yes, he tells her she is "getting there." Getting where? she asks. "Where I am," he answers.
Which is out there on the desert looking east with Marion Faye. For BZ is Joan Didion's updated version of Norman Mailer's Marion. Like Marion, BZ is homosexual. Yet he has all the accounrements to make it in the world Maria can no longer handle: he's a film producer; his body is fine and tan; and his mother, Carlotta, twice divorced and $35 million to her name, even sees fit to keep him provided with a present, if rarely loving, wife. But perhaps just because he knows he has made it, just as Maria knows she can never make it, BZ is a kindred spirit, capable of also seeing the nothingness beneath the would be being.
Marion shared that vision when he fled the duplicitous world of his mother's Hollywood entourage. But Marion was cursed with an intensely painful moral sense-he never escaped adolescent dreams of becoming a priest-which ultimately short-circuited his attempts to destroy himself and those around him in great purges of oblivion. BZ is equally disgusted-and so, it would seem, is Joan Didion, who writes of her allegiance with Marion in an essay entitled "On Morality"-but BZ lacks Marion's moral fervor. BZ is simply tired. The fervor has long since burnt away. BZ confronts Maria with the possibility of suicide-then proceeds to show her that in a world where all life is dead, not even suicide is an alternative.
(If there is any deficiency in the novel it lies in our lack of preparation for BZ's confession of fellowship with Maria. To credit it to the hypocrisy-shattering side-effects of his homosexuality is not enough. Lord knows, in Hollywood, where homosexuality seems just another building block in the whole rotten institution, the posturing that goes into both concealing and flaunting homosexual tastes is just as appalling as all the other pretenses with which the town is infected. But then the novel is Maria's story, and that alone would prevent us from understanding more of BZ.)
BZ dies in Maria's arms, but Maria, who "closed her eyes against the light and her ears against Helence and her mind against what was going to happen in the next few hours," goes on "living," playing it as it lays.
"One thing in my defense, not that it matters," she says. "I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing.
"Why, BZ would say."
"Why not, I say."
Maria's logic-her lack of it-combined with the inescapable force of the entire novel, is devastating. (Which is why this piece could hardly qualify as a piece of criticism. How can you coolly discuss the elements of a work that so completely overwhelms you? Why would you even want to?) When you read those last two lines
"Why, BZ would say.
"Why not, I say."
you scarcely want to bother again with all the headaches of playing out the rest of your life.
Which is also why I almost was going to conclude by suggesting that Play It As It Lays -restricted though its view is to one particularly hellish segment of America-should not be read by anyone the least bit unhappy with the worthlessness of life.
But then again, why not.