Play It As It Lays
Didion’s mordant lucidity is like L.A. sunlight, a thing so bright sometimes it hurts. She’s a descendant of the old California, the great- great-granddaughter of pioneers. But she was also schooled at Berkeley and in the literary circles of Paris and New York, so she’s fully versed in the predicaments of a shaky modernity that she does not care for in the least. To drive home her belief that the world, or at least the part around L.A., is coming to a bad end, she gives us Maria Wyeth, a model turned actress turned hollowed-out woman who speaks to us from the mental institution where she has fetched up after a long slide into despair. Passing through a pointless career, a toxic marriage, an abortion, finally holding the hand of a close friend while he commits suicide; when she tells you, “I know what ‘nothing’ means,” you believe her.
A - B
- The Adventures of Augie March
- All the King's Men
- American Pastoral
- An American Tragedy
- Animal Farm
- Appointment in Samarra
- Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
- The Assistant
- At Swim-Two-Birds
- Atonement
- Beloved
- The Berlin Stories
- The Big Sleep
- The Blind Assassin
- Blood Meridian
- Brideshead Revisited
- The Bridge of San Luis Rey
C - D
- Call It Sleep
- Catch-22
- The Catcher in the Rye
- A Clockwork Orange
- The Confessions of Nat Turner
- The Corrections
- The Crying of Lot 49
- A Dance to the Music of Time
- The Day of the Locust
- Death Comes for the Archbishop
- A Death in the Family
- The Death of the Heart
- Deliverance
- Dog Soldiers
F - G
- Falconer
- The French Lieutenant's Woman
- The Golden Notebook
- Go Tell it on the Mountain
- Gone With the Wind
- The Grapes of Wrath
- Gravity's Rainbow
- The Great Gatsby
H - I
- A Handful of Dust
- The Heart is A Lonely Hunter
- The Heart of the Matter
- Herzog
- Housekeeping
- A House for Mr. Biswas
- I, Claudius
- Infinite Jest
- Invisible Man
L - N
O - R
- On the Road
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
- The Painted Bird
- Pale Fire
- A Passage to India
- Play It As It Lays
- Portnoy's Complaint
- Possession
- The Power and the Glory
- The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
- Rabbit, Run
- Ragtime
- The Recognitions
- Red Harvest
- Revolutionary Road
S - T
- The Sheltering Sky
- Slaughterhouse Five
- Snow Crash
- The Sot-Weed Factor
- The Sound and the Fury
- The Sportswriter
- The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
- The Sun Also Rises
- Their Eyes Were Watching God
- Things Fall Apart
- To Kill a Mockingbird
- To the Lighthouse
- Tropic of Cancer
Sections
