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Play It As It Lays and the Meaning of Nothing

Joan Didion’s 1970s novel is overturning cards, rocks, and pages to find snakes

Mallika Vasak
Pomegranates
2 min readJan 14, 2022

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Image from The Guardian

I think this is the only book I’ve ever read where I didn’t have a single clue what was going on at all times and yet it still pops back into my consciousness to disturb me. As David Thomson puts it in his introduction, I don’t mean that it was a hard read, but “hard-hearted.”

The story begins with snakes, and gambling, and a town with a population of 28, now 0, and Maria asking “what makes Iago evil,” but of course, she doesn’t ask. As a reader, I’ve always found myself looking for meaning and this is the first book that’s given me nothing. This is a book about terrible people doing terrible things that chews you into the great labyrinth of existential peril and then spits you out feeling hollow. But it also sticks with me, not only because I now think playing it as it lays is probably the best way to live — I often find myself trying to guess the cards before they’re dealt — but because since I’ve finished it I’ve spent my time digesting the fact that I thought I would be looking at a baby in the playpen but it turned out to be a snake.

I must have read this book at the perfect time — it’s the first of Didion’s canon I’ve read, coincidentally at the time of her passing — but mostly…

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