Play it as it lays

Yesterday I finished Joan Didion's Play it as it Lays.   After watching her documentary, which I wrote about earlier, I bought her 1970 classic to familiarize myself with her work.  In less than 200 pages, Didion's precision with words is what I found most remarkable.  I loved the pacing of the novel - brief, quick, nuanced.

It was a book about a woman in struggle.  As light on words as Didion is, she is not light with subject matter.  She doesn't try to make her protagonist something that she is not - she is a depressive and the heaviness of her inner struggle is what drives the novel.  The magic, for me, was in her brilliant sentence structure and ability to craft the story that she wanted to tell. 

"One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what “nothing” means, and keep on playing. Why, BZ would say. Why not, I say.”