Word: joan
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...just Play It As It Lays . Which is the title of Joan Didion's new novel. In which she follows the conscience ( conscience? try consciousness, a better word it seems, though not one she would use) that leads her to rip open, ever so neatly, ever so tellingly, a world whose center no longer holds, America in its southwestern and Californian apocalypse, the source for most of her essays in her brilliant collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and now the setting for the new novel...
Similarly, Joan Didion's prose is as insidiously effective as the painless touch of the anesthetist's needle she herself describes. Her sentences, pared down bone clean, are chilling in their authority. She tells her story so quickly, so mercilessly, there is simply no disputing what she finds. Her prose almost seems a function of the desert of which she writes-every superfluous gesture, as if in deference to the overwhelming heat, the sun and shifting sands, eliminated. And although the novel's action takes place in L. A., and a good deal of the rest in Vegas, there...
Which is out there on the desert looking east with Marion Faye. For BZ is Joan Didion's updated version of Norman Mailer's Marion. Like Marion, BZ is homosexual. Yet he has all the accounrements to make it in the world Maria can no longer handle: he's a film producer; his body is fine and tan; and his mother, Carlotta, twice divorced and $35 million to her name, even sees fit to keep him provided with a present, if rarely loving, wife. But perhaps just because he knows he has made it, just as Maria knows...
...Hollywood entourage. But Marion was cursed with an intensely painful moral sense-he never escaped adolescent dreams of becoming a priest-which ultimately short-circuited his attempts to destroy himself and those around him in great purges of oblivion. BZ is equally disgusted-and so, it would seem, is Joan Didion, who writes of her allegiance with Marion in an essay entitled "On Morality"-but BZ lacks Marion's moral fervor. BZ is simply tired. The fervor has long since burnt away. BZ confronts Maria with the possibility of suicide-then proceeds to show her that in a world where...
...Hollywood entourage. But Marion was cursed with an intensely painful moral sense-he never escaped adolescent dreams of becoming a priest-which ultimately short-circuited his attempts to destroy himself and those around him in great purges of oblivion. BZ is equally disgusted-and so, it would seem, is Joan Didion, who writes of her allegiance with Marion in an essay entitled "On Morality"-but BZ lacks Marion's moral fervor. BZ is simply tired. The fervor has long since burnt away. BZ confronts Maria with the possibility of suicide-then proceeds to show her that in a world where...