Survivor's Report

PLAY IT AS IT LAYS by Joan Didion. 214 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $5.95.

If you like Joan Didion, you can count on her. Three pages into her new novel, the heroine says: "I am telling you how it was." That is the true Didion refrain. Whether in novels or essays, she is always trying to tell the way it is, always indicating the current physical and emotional temperature--it is usually over 100DEG outside and the climate of the soul is a parched desert.

For years she has had an enviable underground reputation, which Play it As It Lays will probably bring to the surface. Part of the attraction is consistency --Joan never flinches from repeating herself. Didion addicts feel they know all about her eccentricities: the preoccupation with striped sheets and the Hoover Dam, the way she regards hair brushing as a form of existential prayer.

First in Vogue snippets, then in an early novel, and later in ultrapersonal magazine columns, the Didion girl-woman has taken shape. She is as sensitive as a Geiger counter, articulate in feeling but not in speech, an incurable romantic with vast moral expectations of herself and others--especially men. From her essays, faithful readers know that Joan Didion herself came to New York right after college, when "nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach." Her life was changed by a lengthy romance with a callous fellow who force-fed her on more cynical wisdom of the world. When she told him she never wanted to get to be like him, he replied: "Nobody wants to, but you will." It is a judgment against which Joan is still flailing out, and her anger keeps her on the brink of staring-into-the-void depressions. In her lean, elliptical prose, she always writes about the thunderous passage of emotion through the brain, of battles lost for love or understanding, of desertion and disillusionment--the realm of psychic pain.

All the Aces. Because she comes from and writes about California, one would not at first associate her with the neo-Gothic literature of the South. Yet she has, in fact, brought the Southern mentality west. In a revealing essay about her native Sacramento Valley, she mourns the passing of a comfortable, interlocking gentry that were her ancestry. They built manor houses amidst their vast fields of hops and tomatoes, ignoring post-World War II newcomers who brought real estate developments and aerospace factories--until the parvenus usurped their world. Like Faulkner, Didion has an overwhelming awareness of human corruption and a sense of unfathomable doom.

The new book moves out of the valley to the ideal backdrop for modern despair: the movie colony in Los Angeles. The heroine is Maria Wyeth. an occasional actress married to a young director. The story of Maria's decline from depression to breakdown is told in 84 brief, cinematic takes--84 direct hits on a fragile psyche.

Maria seems to have "all the aces," as a friend tells her, but she wonders: "What was the game?" She is still melancholic over her mother's death. She can scarcely focus on the few roles she gets. Her husband behaves either like a nagging parent or a smart-aleck child. Her friends are a menacing cadre of heartless hedonists--careless to the bone, drinking, turning on, brutalizing each other in word and sexual deed.

Homicidal Eve. Things happen: Maria aborts another man's child, tries to find the vanished Nevada hamlet where she grew up, is a passive accomplice in a friend's suicide. Mostly, though, the book is a fever chart of psychic pain. Maria cries constantly. She drives the freeways maniacally. She alternately ignores friends or calls them in the middle of the night. All of what Robert Lowell called "the kingdom of the mad"--its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye--is here. Maria's private hell is constantly invaded by real-life demons of the show business world, which has perhaps never been so witheringly portrayed.

Amidst the efflorescence of Women's Lib, Joan Didion might easily be confused with the new sisterhood of grievance collectors who blame men for everything. True, she thinks that men fail women. But she also feels that women are careless and callous, and that both sexes spend time and love and integrity as if they were unloading counterfeit money. Obsessed by waste and loss, she is a brooder who sifts her experience over and over again. The last lines of Play It As It Lays appear in a paraphrase throughout her work. They imply questioning--and possibly a survivor's grudging affirmation.

Why? he says.

Why not, I say.

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