a man reading play it as it lays

I will say that the last thing I’ve ever wanted to do upon completing a novel is write a review about it. And for the most part, the only thing that interests me less than writing a review is reading one. It’s a strange job – a necessary one, no doubt – to generalise one’s opinion on a work of art. No matter how well-studied the opinion, no matter how well-researched, no matter how well-backed, it’s a strange strange job, that of a cultural commentator. This isn’t a protest: I am writing this post a reading of Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays. And in thinking of her many roles in American pop culture – novelist, journalist, cultural commentator – I also find myself wondering what culture even means. What does it mean for a 1970 book to be a quintessential LA novel, a symbol of the city’s culture?

To me, fiction is fiction. No string of epistemologists can convince me to study a society through its novels. To view the entirety of its cultural position in spacetime through the lens of the lives of Maria, BZ, Carter, Helene, and whoever else. As I’ve grown older, I’ve found significantly more value in treating a story as just that – a story. And Play It As It Lays is a good one.