51 pages • 1 hour read
Joan DidionPlay It As It Lays
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1970A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Maria, Helene, CarterChapter Summaries & Analyses
Maria Summary
Maria asks rhetorical questions on the nature of evil and points out that such questions often lack logical answers. When doctors present Maria with inkblot tests and question her beliefs about sex, love, and religion, she refuses to give them answers, and instead decides to establish “certain facts” about her life leading up to BZ’s suicide. Maria provides her biographical details, including how to pronounce her name (Mar-eye-ah), her age (31), and the fact that she is divorced and has a four-year-old daughter named Kate.
Maria is from a small town called Silver Wells, Nevada, and she left home at 18 to become an actress. She describes her father, Harry Wyeth, and his business partner, Benny Austin, both of whom are gamblers. Maria relates her experiences in New York, dating a man named Ivan Costello, hearing of her mother’s death, starring in Carter’s films, and marrying Carter. She now avoids socializing and tries not to think about the past.
Helene Summary
Helene relates her attempt to visit Maria in the Neuropsychiatric ward. Describing her visit, she says:
I drove all the way out there, took the entire morning and packed a box for her, all the new books and a chiffon scarf she left at the beach once (she was careless, it must have cost $30, she was always careless) and a pound of caviar, maybe not Beluga but Maria shouldn’t bitch now (11).
Helene resents that Maria gets to rest in the sun and lie by the pool when Helene believes that she is the one who suffered most after BZ’s death.
Carter Summary
Carter Lang talks about his history with Maria. He describes an awkward breakfast with friends where Maria makes an out-of-place comment and begins to cry, and a time Maria walked away abruptly while she was playing with Kate. Reflecting on these scenes after BZ’s death, Carter “began to see the improbability of rapprochement with Maria” (14).
Maria, Helene, Carter Analysis
The book, which is just over 200 pages long, is divided into over 80 short chapters, some of which only contain a few lines. Didion’s writing style is energetic: She uses run-on sentences with little punctuation, and much of the narrative is told through dialogue from the first-person perspective in present tense. The episodic, impressionistic structure creates a fast-paced narrative that reads almost like a film, emphasizing the novel’s Hollywood setting.
The three opening sections establish the voices of the three main characters and set up the flashback framework for the novel. The characters reveal as much from what they say as from what they leave out of their narratives. For instance, Maria is the only one who does not mention BZ’s suicide, which we later learn is the climactic event of the novel and the catalyst for Maria’s institutionalization.
Beginning the novel with three different voices, including the antagonist’s, sets up the question of whose point of view—if any—is reliable. Maria is not interested in psychoanalyzing herself and does judge her actions as good or bad. It is significant that she doesn’t mention her friend’s suicide, perhaps because she feels guilty.
From Helene’s perspective, Maria is selfish and careless, and she refers to the bikini Maria is wearing at the institute as the one she wore “the summer she killed BZ” (11). Helene harbors deep pain, but like many of the novel’s characters she covers it with superficiality. Helene fails to mention that she was having an affair with Carter at the time of BZ’s death and does not understand why Maria does not want to see her.
Carter portrays himself as a cool, blameless observer of events. Didion uses the language in this line to emphasize Carter’s grandiose sense of himself and his belief that he is reasonable whereas Maria is not. When Maria plays with Kate as a baby, he quotes himself as saying, “Watch out she doesn't get chilled” (13), painting himself as a responsible, caring parent. Carter does not mention that Maria divorced him for physical and emotional abuse and that he is the one who institutionalized Kate.
Related Titles
By Joan Didion
