Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

Later, when I was living in New York, I would make the trip back to Sacramento four and five times a year (the more comfortable the flight, the more obscurely miserable I would be, for it weighs heavily upon my kind that we could perhaps not make it by wagon), trying to prove that I had not meant to leave at all, because in at least one respect California--the California we are talking about--resembles Eden: it is assumed that those who absent themselves from its blessings have been banished, exiled by some perversity of the heart. Did not the Donner-Reed Party, after all, eat its own dead to reach Sacramento?

The title essay in Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem precedes itself. About the hippie convergence on the Haight-Asbury neighborhood of San Francisco, it stands in for a popular recognition of the era's failures, and its curdling into something more dissolute and sinister. A step on the road from Woodstock to Altamont. And before reading it I had a general idea that it reflected in some way Didion's own brand of conservatism, which in turn reflected the nation's rightward turn as the ideals of the 60's petered out. But reading it, it must be said that what is most remarkable about it is the way that Didion absents herself from the narrative, declining to pass judgment or evaluation on the hippies with whom she's embedded, as if San Francisco were Fallujah. It is the hippies, instead, who implicate themselves, as with one couple whose faith in psychedelic drugs extends to doping up their toddler. Of course, this is all a kind of feint, a maneuver that reveals just how good a writer Didion really was--a way of hiding her hand. One must admit that, when some of the Haight-Asbury "Diggers" refuse to share information because they fear Didion to be a "media poisoner," that they have something of a point.

One point that Didion makes--or perhaps suggests by assemblage and arrangement, because she often demurs from making points as we typically think of them--is that the hippie movement was a children's movement. A considerable number of the people who converged on Haight-Asbury were literal runaways, and in Didion's telling, it seems to be this that gives the movement is sense of hope and energy, like a children's crusade. But Didion also depicts it as a children's world, bereft of adult pragmatism and sagacity. Even those adults who appear in "Slouching Toward Bethlehem," like the couple that give acid to their toddler, have a kind of childlike innocence, which is to say stupidity. "We were seeing the desperate attempt," Didion writes, "of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum ,no longer pretend that the society's atomization could be reversed." Which is to say, yes, these people are idiot kids, but who let them out of the house?

One way of reading "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" is one vignette in a series of essays about California, along with "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream," about a woman who may or may not have set her husband on fire in San Bernardino, and "Notes From a Native Daughter," an exploration of growing up and leaving Sacramento that is, I think, the collection's best piece. "John Wayne: A Love Song," another of the collection's highlights, is also a California story, though about the California that infiltrates our dreams through the engines of Hollywood. (Like the hippies, Didion gives Wayne and his hangers-on the rope to hang themselves; the image is of an aging star surrounded by sclerotic yes-men.) No doubt Didion writes best about California because it's what she knows best, but I think her best pieces are all about place, including "Letter From Paradise," which explores the way that the burgeoning tourist vision of Hawaii conceals a Hawaii that is deeply entangled with the military and the prospect of war. I also really enjoyed a typically acerbic essay called "Seacoast of Despair," about the grand mansions of Newport, Rhode Island. Didion's sense of place isn't unimpeachable--I thought her essays about the Southern U.S. in North and South were a strange misfire--but it must be said that she has a way of peeling back one understanding of a place to reveal something else underneath, whether it's California, Hawaii, Rhode Island, or Sonora, Mexico.

That said, I am developing an annoying and contrarian take on Didion that I think few will agree with: her fiction is better than her non-fiction.

The Last Thing He Wanted by Joan Didion

There are people who understand this kind of transaction and there are people who do not. Those who understand it are at heart storytellers, weavers of conspiracy just to make the day come alive, and they see it in a flash, comprehend all its turns, get its possibilities. For anyone who could look at a storefront in Honduras or Costa Rica and see an opportunity to tap into the United States Treasury for $25,870, this was a period during which no information could be without interest. Every moment could be seen to connect to every other moment, every act to have logical if obscure consequences, an unbroken narrative of vivid complexity. That Elena McMahon walked into this heightened life and for a brief period lived it is what interests me about her, because she was not one of those who saw in a flash how every moment could connect.

In 1984, a middle-aged journalist and mother named Elena McMahon walks off a job covering a presidential campaign and disappears. Her father, formerly one of those people in the world of intelligence with spurious credentials and obscured duties, has fallen in the grips of dementia. He mentions to her what he probably shouldn't talk about: an arms deal he's organizing for the federal government to fund the Contras in Central America. Elena, disillusioned with her life and job, walks into the job her father can longer do, and soon she finds herself speeding toward Costa Rica (or maybe not?) on a secret flight. Her father's contacts reassure that the job is simple, but she doesn't know that there is another game being played: her father was actually being set up to take the fall for the assassination of an American embassy official, and now Elena has taken his place.

The nature of these events unfold slowly and in non-chronological pieces as they are unveiled and processed by the nameless author, an obvious Didion stand-in. The events of the book, such as they are, have already happened (though of course narrative demands that the climax of Elena's misadventures in Central America and the Caribbean be withheld until the very end), they only need to be ordered and understood. In that way, the job of the journalist-writer is to employ intuition in drawing the connections that are buried and hidden. It's not so different, perhaps, from the job of someone like Treat Morrison, the agency fixer that identifies Elena on the Caribbean island where she's arrived as a potential security threat. Elena, we're told, is not someone who sees the connections immediately; it's what made her a bad journalist, it seems, and it makes her a bad choice for government espionage, though perhaps it makes her a good mark. But in typical Didion mode, the postmodern journalist asserts at every opportunity her inability to understand what happened in this case, not just because the spyworld players cover their tracks, but because of the fundamental unknowability of human beings. Everything can be ordered and the connections made, but the question at the heart of the event--why did Elena McMahon chuck up her entire life to walk into danger?--is unanswerable.

The Last Thing He Wanted was the final novel that Didion wrote in her life. It shares a lot of DNA with her previous novel, Democracy, written twelve years prior, so much so that The Last Thing He Wanted seems at times like a retread of that novel. The complicated task of the journalist, existing somewhere within and without of the text, is better and more interestingly explored there. The way that the political and personal intersect, too. But The Last Thing He Wanted also finds Didion in a mode that reveals just how powerfully and thoroughly she was influenced by the intrigue novels of Graham Greene. The journalist-narrator is a layer of Didion wrapped around the story, but everything else is pure Greene: the busted play, the layered agendas, the sweaty tropical locale. Ultimately, I found that The Last Thing He Wanted doesn't quite succeed because it plays the story so at arm's length that the reader ends up standing outside the story as much as the journalist does. But it's as pure a distillation of Didion's influences and interests, as far as fiction goes at least, as perhaps we ever got.

South and West by Joan Didion

At the center of this story there is a terrible secret, a kernel of cyanide, and the secret is that the story doesn't matter, doesn't make any difference, doesn't figure. The snow still falls in the Sierra. The Pacific still trembles in its bowl. The great tectonic plates strain against each other while we sleep and wake. Rattlers in the dry grass. Sharks beneath the Golden Gate. In the South they are convinced they have bloodied their place with history. In the West we do not believe that anything we do can bloody the land, or change it, or touch it.

How could it have come to this?

I am trying to place myself in history.

Joan Didion's South and West isn't really a book, or if it is, it's a failed book, the scaffolding to a book. Published in 2017, it was taken from her notes, and mostly about a trip that Didion took throughout the deep South in the 1970s, followed by a brief collection of memories of California occasioned by the abduction of Patty Hearst. Whether Didion meant to contrast the two, I have no idea, but the contrast is there from the beginning of her journey through the South, which she writes attracted her because it seemed to be "for America what people were still saying California was, and what California seemed to me not to be: the future, the secret source of malevolent and benevolent energy, the psychic center." It was also a kind of return for Didion, who spent a few turbid years in Durham, North Carolina. Never mind the vast difference between Durham and Birmingham; the South may be, for Didion, a kind of shadow life not lived.

It's clear enough to me why the manuscript of the "South" section of South and West, at least, waited years to be published: Didion has no idea what to do with the South. She applies her journalistic eye, her withering eye, everywhere, but what she sees lies only at the surface of things: signs, gravestones, the front porches of houses. The language that Didion uses to describe the South is the language of mystery; the kudzu and tropical greenery seem, at every vantage point, to conceal an essential impenetrability. Uncharacteristically, Didion seems to shrink from the South. She seems to spend much of the trip in hotel swimming pools. She even tells us that she finds these pools, with their familiar interchangeability, comforting.

The greatest insights of the South instead come from the mouths of the few people that Didion interviews--all of whom seem to be known acquaintances from the world of writing and the academy. Like the white southerners of V. S. Naipaul's A Turn in the South, they offer up a fear of change and integration dressed up in the language of moderation. One interviewee laments how he has been forced by integration to send his kids to private school, and somehow manages to make it sound like a tragedy for the Black kids, too. (Didion interviews no Black Southerners, though they linger at the margins of the scrupulously reported scenery.) Is this the dark heart that Didion gestures at? It seems to me that these cultural dynamics, while vile, are not particular difficult to understand, and do not amount to any kind of essential mystery. But Didion has no interest in probing further into this or anything else, and it seems to me that in the place of insight she offers a number of Gothic metaphors, chief among them that of the snake pit. The still brown waters of the Mississippi provides a "sense of water moccasins." An anecdote tells of dripping gasoline down a snake hole to make the snake emerge, "drunk" and easy to kill. Over and over again--in a way she might have toned down, I think, if she'd ever fashioned these notes into something more--she imagines snakes lurking in the greenery. No wonder she doesn't want to touch.

We get Didion's tremendous power of noticing, but no understanding. At a movie theater in Meridian--another fungible place and easy escape from the part of the world she supposedly wanted to discover--she describes the crowd as gazing at the screen "as if the movie were Czech." But how does a Mississippian watch a movie any differently than a Californian? And why should they understand it any less? It seems like a rich comment, to me, from someone so obviously stymied by her own choice of subject. Better to say that Joan Didion looked at the audience as if they were Czech.

The "West" part of South and West is even less polished, more partial. It's slapdash in a way that reveals the true nature of the book as "notes"; "South," by contrast, seems to have gone through at least some process of arrangement and shaping. And yet, it has a richness to it that "South" never manages, especially with regards to the effusive material culture of the Californian upper middle class: the "Lilly Dache and Mr. John hats, the vicuna coats, the hand-milled soap and the &60-an-ounce perfume." In these shop-items Didion gets deeper into the identity and culture of the Californian West than she ever allows herself to do in "South"--or, at least, that's how it seems to me as a Southerner. Maybe a Californian would feel differently. But I don't think so. "West" reads like a quickly abortive attempt by Didion to find her own place in the world, her "place in history," as she writes, and though she quickly hits a wall--it's not easy to write about yourself--it made me go back and think about "South" as an attempt to do the same thing by contrast, to discover the Californian Didion by discovering the Didion-that-was-not in the South. Perhaps it's not the South that Didion was shrinking away from in those hotel pools--maybe it was herself.

Democracy by Joan Didion

She did it with no passport (her passport was in her otherwise empty stash box in the apartment on Central Park west) and a joke press card that somebody from Life had made up for her during the 1972 campaign. The pre card had failed to get Jessie Victor at age fifteen into the backstage area at Nassau Coliseum during a Pink Floyd concert but it got her at age eighteen onto the C-5A to Saigon. This seems astonishing now, but we forget how confused and febrile those few weeks in 1975 actually were, the "reassessments" and the "calculated gamble" and the infusions of supplemental aid giving way even as they were reported to the lurid phantasmagoria of air lifts and marines on the roof and stranded personnel and tarmacs littered with shoes and broken toys. In the immediate glamour of the revealed crisis many things happened that could not have happened a few months earlier or a few weeks later, and what happened to Jessie Victor was one of them. Clearly an American girl who landed at Tan Son Nhut should have been detained there, but Jessie Victor was not. Clearly an American girl who landed at Tan Son Nhut with no passport should not have been stamped through immigration on the basis of a New York driver's license, but Jessie Victor was. Clearly an American girl with no passport, a New York driver's license and a straw tennis visor should not have been able to walk out of the littered makeshift terminal at Tan Son Nhut and, observed by several people who did nothing to stop her, get on a bus to Cholon, but Jessie Victor had done just that. Or so it appeared.

Inez Victor is the wife of a Hawaiian senator and former presidential candidate, Harry Victor. She has developed a mien of utter detachment, having lived so long in the public eye, which is attracted to her for her elegance and stature. (Funnily, Inez is the second character, after the powerful First Lady Nicole Thibodeaux in Philip K. Dick's The Simulacra, to be clearly modeled on Jackie Kennedy.) But Inez has her secrets, too, and among them is a lifelong dalliance with a CIA "spook" named Jack Lovett who has had his hand in every bit of American mischief in a tropical country over the past several decades. The long-time affair comes to fruition as the third act in a brisk tragedy for the Victor family: first, Inez's demented father shoots and kills her sister Janet along with a well-known congressman. Then, Inez's daughter Jessie somehow gets on a plane and insinuates herself into Vietnam just as Saigon as falling. When Inez and Jack board a plane together to locate Jessie, the final dissolution of Inez's life as a political spouse is complete.

I brought this book to Florida because I got it in my head somehow that it's a Florida book. But it's a Hawaii book. Though his political ambitions are thwarted, something in Harry Victor's Hawaiian origin does anticipate Barack Obama. For Didion, Hawaii is important as the new margin of America proper. When Harry runs for president, it's been a state for less than twenty years, and it shares many qualities with those tropical places that Jack Lovett does his clandestine work. It's just a skip and a jump from Hawaii to the Marshall Islands where--as described in the book's opening--American atomic bombs were tested: "The light at dawn during those Pacific tests was something to see. Something to behold." It's a skip and a jump, even, to Vietnam, or Malaysia, where Inez Victor spends the remainder of her life after leaving Harry. These pacific islands, absorbed into the gestalt of America, only seem to exhibits the porousness of its borders, and of the idea of America itself. Hawaii is a place where the bleed between America and the world becomes apparent.

What's meant by the title, Democracy? I have a few thoughts about that. Obviously, there's Harry's political career, although you can't exactly say that his presidential campaign is a central part of the book; it's hardly mentioned except as a failure. But win or lose, the act of voting is only one element in democracy's vast operations. Another is the PR spin, the creation and maintenance of Harry and Inez's Camelot marriage. That marriage is threatened on all sides, by unsavory family elements like Jessie and Inez's father Paul, and by Jack Lovett's machinations, which are themselves a part of American democracy, too, like it or not. In a way, Democracy is a book about one part of democracy eating another.

But one of the most glaring and interesting aspects of Democracy is the way that Didion writes herself into it. She presents the (obviously fictional) story as a work of journalism, the kind of long-form essay for which she was well-known. That's Didion, flying to Kuala Lumpur to meet with aging émigré Inez. The novel presents several false starts, histories of Inez's family in the Hawaiian islands, before shuffling them away self-consciously. This kind of pretense is not so unusual, I think, but it's unique coming from Didion, who you really can imagine writing a book like this; the blurring between Didion's fiction and non-fiction is one of the most fascinating qualities of Democracy. And it suggests, perhaps, that what Didion does is part of Democracy as well: the maintenance of official memory, the interpolation of political events whose truth remains outside the public eye by nature. It's no wonder, then, that Inez, having washed her hands of it, treats "Didion" with such aloofness and hesitation in Kuala Lumpur.

Democracy never quite reaches the heights of A Book of Common Prayer, Didion's masterpiece of political fiction, although it's easy to see some overlap between Inez and the character of Charlotte Douglass, a non-political actor who refuses to recognize her own place in politics, or in history. Perhaps they are opposites, actually--Inez sees this maybe too well, which is why she runs from it. Democracy never reaches those heights because it's a little too shaggy; I think plot was not Didion's strong suit. (In the end, what the hell does Janet's murder have to do with anything? It hangs very strangely and limply from an otherwise very streamlined novel.) But she could write; more than anything, that was her superpower, and in that regard Democracy is pure Didion.

Run River by Joan Didion

She, her mother, Everett, Martha, the whole family gallery: they carried the same blood, come down through twelve generations of circuit riders, county sheriffs, Indian fighters, country lawyers, Bible readers, one obscure United States Senator from a frontier state a long time ago; two hundred years of clearings in Virginia and Kentucky and Tennessee and then the break, the void into which they gave their rosewood chests, their silver brushes; the cutting clean which was to have redeemed them all. They had been a particular kind of people, their particular virtues called up by a particular situation, their particular flaws waiting there through all those years, unperceived, unsuspected, glimpsed only by a wife whose bewildered eyes wanted to look not upon Eldorado but upon her mother's dogwood, by a blue-eyed boy who was at sixteen the best shot in the county and who when there was nothing left to shoot rode out one day and shot his brother, an accident. It had been above all a history of accidents: a moving on and of accidents. What is it you want, she had asked Everett tonight. It was a question she might have asked them all.

Joan Didion's first novel kept her close to home: Run River is about the wealthy families along the Sacramento River who can trace their ancestry back to California's pioneers, who braved a new land, tamed it, and then settled down to work it. The married couple at the heart of the novel are Everett and Lily McClellan, distant cousins who are both descendants of these people. Their attraction toward each other is based on this explicitly; when a young Everett looks at Lily, he knows that she is the kind of woman who he can "bring back to the ranch," who will anchor him and tie him to the place that is his inheritance. But the marriage is a poor one: the two cling desperately to each other and then push each other away. Everett abandons Lily and their young children to join the army when World War II breaks out and Lily, feeling abandoned, has a brief affair with a man she hates. The pregnancy and ensuing abortion sent the marriage hurtling headlong into ruin. When the book opens, an older Everett has just shot and killed Lily's lover, Ryder Channing; the novel then backtracks to fill in the gaps and tell us how they found themselves in such a violent place.

What is Run River's conception of those California pioneers? The blurb for Elaine Castillo's upcoming book of essays (which I'd like to read) encourages us to, among other things, reject the "settler colonialism" of Didion. Certainly, being the sons and daughters of pioneers have done Lily and Everett no good. There's a hollowness at the heart of their inheritance, a sense that they have not deserved what they have received because they don't know how to keep it, though Everett is, at heart, a farmer who knows how to work his hops crops from the ground. The passage I quoted above makes me wonder if Didion is suggesting that the virtues of the pioneers--I don't know, adventurousness, bravery, a longing for new things--curdle into vices when they become bound to one place, and that Lily and Everett might have been better, happier people in another time and place.

It's actually Martha, Everett's sister and Ryder's initial lover, who seems the most wrecked; her desperate attachment to the uncouth man seems like a consequence, sometimes, of having nothing better to do, no other purpose or desire. When he leaves her, she--spoiler alert--goes out to the river in a boat during a flood and drowns, dying in the very place she should have known better (and perhaps she did). Martha's death reverberates with the death of her and Everett's father, drowned in the same river in a car accident that kills him and his lover, another scion of a river family. In a way, California kills them. Ryder himself is a charming lout and grifter from Tennessee always trying to get in on the ground floor of some money-making scheme. Is he a representation of some non-Californian value, a capitalist who runs in on the heels of the people who made California great? Or is he a representation of those pioneers, who came in from the East as well, certain they could make the valley a Paradise for themselves, and then shut the gate?

Run River is just okay as a novel. The most extraordinary thing it does, I think, is make Didion seem sort of human. The qualities that make her later fiction--especially the crackle of dialogue between people who both hate and need each other--are here, but the Sacramento story clearly has a special resonance for Didion herself that doesn't quite make it to the page. In the end, River Run is a familiar kind of mid-century novel, one about rich people doing bad things to each other. (Why are rich people always so sad?)

A Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion

I will be her witness.

That would translate sere su testigo, and will not appear in your travelers' phrasebook because it is not a useful phrase for the prudent traveler.

Here is what happened: she left one man, she left a second man, she traveled again with the first; she let him die alone. She lost one child to "history" and another to "complications" (I offer in each instance the evaluation of others), she imagined herself capable of shedding that baggage and came to Boca Grande, a tourist. Una turista. So she said. In fact she came here less a tourist than a sojourner but she did not make that distinction.

"I think I have never known anyone who lead quite so unexamined a life," the narrator of Joan Didion's A Book of Common Prayer, Grace Strasser-Mendana says about Charlotte Douglass, who was "immaculate of history, innocent of politics." The two women met in the Central American nation of Boca Grande, where Grace is the widow of a tinpot dictator--and in control of the copra mines which are the country's only major resource--and Charlotte was a turista, fled to Boca Grande to--to, well, what, exactly? The book is an attempt to find out, and Grace--an anthropologist as well as a copper baron--writes it in order to make sense of Charlotte, whom history and politics both seem to have caught in the end.

The events that lead Charlotte to Boca Grande, as detailed by Grace, are remarkably convoluted. They begin with the discovery that Marin, Charlotte's daughter, has committed an act of international terrorism and disappeared. In the aftermath of Marin's crime, Marin's father, a primo asshole named Warren who may be dying of cancer, turns up to wrench Charlotte away from her current husband, an aloof bureaucrat named Leonard. Charlotte and Warren drift through the United States for a time, alienating every country club buddy Warren ever made, before Charlotte flees to Central America on her own, eventually settling in Boca Grande.

What draws Charlotte to Boca Grande seems not to be a connection of logic--there's no indication, for example, that the terrorists Marin is tied up with are related to the local guerilleros--but of spirit. Charlotte, with her tremendously selective attention, is unable or unwilling to see the way history manifests in her own life, and Boca Grande is a place where history never happens. The beautiful new capital planned in the jungle is never built, the streets planned on the map never materializes, and every year or two a new round of guerilla warfare shuffles control of the country between one or another of Grace's in-laws, all perfectly spoiled banana republicans.

Everything here changes and nothing appears to. There is no perceptible wheeling of the stars in their courses, no seasonal wane in the length of days or the temperature of air or earth or water, only the amniotic stillness in which transformations are constant. As elsewhere, certain phases in these transformations are called by certain names ("Oldsmobile," say, and "rust") but the emotional field of such names tends to weaken as one leaves the temperate zones. At the equator the names are noticeably arbitrary. A banana palm is no more or less "alive" than its rot.

But things tend not to happen right up until the point that they do, and Charlotte, just as she's mugged by history in the case of Marin, is mugged by history in Boca Grande, where the latest revolucion turns out to be a bit more permanent, or at least a bit more violent, than the last. Grace's obsession with understanding Charlotte, who refuses to understand anything, becomes quite explicitly a quest to understand herself, one that yields entirely unsatisfactory results. For me, too, something about the lives of Charlotte and Grace eludes understanding; it's never clear why, for instance, the distraught Charlotte absconds with Warren, or why she leaves him in the end. The war in Boca Grande has no recognizable cause; its aims are false even though the "hardware" is real and the intrigue as complicated as that of a Graham Greene novel. 

"Maybe it is just something that happened," Grace says, speaking about the portion of Charlotte's life she describes, but she might be talking about her own life as well, and history and politics in general. When Grace, finally put face to face with Marin after Charlotte's death, says, "I didn't understand your mother," Marin replies, "Try a class analysis." That's part of it, of course--both Charlotte and Grace are inoculated from history by their money--but it's so insufficient to explaining Charlotte's life it makes Marin, blinkered by the narrowness of her ideological perspective, doubly tragic. Maybe A Book of Common Prayer is a book about the way history and politics intrude even on those of us who don't think about them. Or maybe it's just something that happened.

Play It as It Lays by Joan Didion

She began to feel the pressure of Hoover Dam, there on the desert, began to feel the pressure and pull of the water.  When the pressure got great enough she drove out there.  All that day she felt the power surging through her own body.  All day she was faint with vertigo, sunk in a world where great power grids converged, throbbing lines plunged finally into the shallow canyon below the dam's face, elevators like coffins dropped into the bowels of the earth itself.  With a guide and a handful of children Maria walked through the chambers, stared at the turbines in the vast glittering valley, at the deep still water with the hidden intakes sucking all the while, even as she watched; clung to the railings, leaned out, stood finally on a platform over the pipe that carried the river beneath the dam.  The platform quivered.  Her ears roared.  She wanted to stay in the dam, lie on the great pipe itself, but reticence saved her from asking.

Maria (Ma-RYE-a) Wyeth is a starlet, the kind who never really drops the diminutive to become a "star."  (Kind of like Tuesday Weld, who plays Maria in the film version of Play It as It Lays?)  In a brief first-person narrative that opens the book, she gives us her life story: growing up in tiny Silver Wells, Nevada, a town that doesn't exist anymore, moving to New York where she becomes involved with a manipulative abuser named Ivan, coming to Los Angeles and marrying the producer Carter Lang, who puts her in a couple small pictures, having a daughter, Kate, who is confined to a mental institution.  But most of the book occurs in the third person, as a disembodied observer watching Maria tumble slowly into a nervous breakdown.

The most obvious comparison point for Play It as It Lays is The Bell Jar: both are about young women undergoing protracted mental episodes.  Both Maria and Esther Greenwood cling around the lower rungs of a industry dominated by male figures.  Play It as It Lays is populated with cruel men: the psychopathic Ivan, the dismissive Carter, a womanizing Russian mobster named Larry Kulik.  None of these men understand Maria, nor do they care to; Maria's instability and suffering threaten the kind of freewheeling party atmosphere they laboriously occupy.

But the other comparison point is Nathanael West's L.A. phantasmagoria The Day of the Locust, another book that paints Hollywood as a moral black hole.  Los Angeles may not be to blame for Maria's breakdown, but it is somehow the perfect backdrop for it: shallow, superficial, misogynistic, destructively hedonistic.  Much of the novel is taken up by Maria driving around Greater Los Angeles with no clear destination or purpose, which is most of what I imagine happens on L.A. freeways:

In the aftermath of the wind the air was dry, burning, so clear that she could see the ploughed furrows of firebreaks on distant mountains.  Not even the highest palms moved.  The stillness and clarity of the air seemed to rob everything of its perspective, seemed to alter all perception of depth, and Maria drove as carefully as if she were reconnoitering an atmosphere without gravity.  Taco Bells jumped out at her.  Oil rockers creaked ominously.  For miles before she reached the Thriftimart she could see the big red T, a forty-foot  cutout letter which seemed peculiarly illuminated against the harsh unclouded light of the afternoon sky.

I'm putting that one in my great-sentence scrapbook: "Taco Bells jumped out at her."

The book ends by forcing a moral choice upon Maria (spoiler alert): she does nothing while her friend, BZ, commits suicide by overdose.  This single act redefines the entire novel.  It is the only moment in which Carter and her friends take her mental breakdown seriously, since as we know from the first-person chapter, it's what finally drives her into a mental institution.  But it also repurposes Maria's persistent lack of agency.  BZ asks her to do nothing, and though she is drugged out, her compliance with his wishes transform her lack of agency into a positive moral choice which honors her friend's distress in a way that the other characters in the novel refuse to recognize Maria's.  Is it an act of kindness?  Or, as BZ's wife believes, an act of deep selfishness?

Maria tells us at the novel's beginning that such questions have no value:

What makes Iago evil? some people ask.  I never ask.

Another example, one which springs to mind because Mrs. Burstein saw a pygmy rattler in the artichoke garden this morning and has been intractable since: I never ask about snakes.  Why should Shalimar attract kraits.  Why should a coral snake need two glands of neurotoxic poison to survive while a king snake, so similarly marked, needs none.  Where is the Darwinian logic there.  You might ask that.  I never would not any more.  I recall an incident reported not too long ago in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner: two honeymooners, natives of Detroit, found dead in their scout camper near Boca Raton, a coral snake still coiled in the thermal blanket.  Why?  Unless you are prepared to take the long view, there is no satisfactory "answer" to such questions.

Just so.  I am what I am.  To look for "reasons" is beside the point.

But doesn't this attitude let all the monsters of the novel--Ivan, Carter, Larry Kulik--off the hook?  Is it merely the only way that Maria can cope with the world in which she finds itself, to embrace its cynical amorality in order to keep "playing it as it lays?"  And is it Los Angeles' problem, or all of ours?