Play your game
Spiel dein Spiel (Original title: Play It as It Lays ) is a 1970 novel by the American writer and journalist Joan Didion . As in her essay volumes Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979) Didion thematize in this novel the rootless, consumer-oriented lifestyle that California helped promote. The novel is now considered a classic in American literature . The American magazine Time chose the novel in its selection of the best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005 . The British newspaper The Guardian named him in the list of 1000 novels everyone must read.
action
The novel begins with an inner monologue by 30-year-old Maria (pronounced Mar-eye-a) Wyeth, followed by brief recollections of her friend Helene and her former husband, director Carter Lang. The further action is narrated from the narrative perspective of an omniscient narrator.
Maria Wyeth is a largely unsuccessful actress who is recovering from a mental breakdown in an exclusive neuropsychiatric clinic in California . It is implied that the collapse is related to the suicide of a befriended film producer named "BZ" in the novel. The abbreviation BZ also stands for benzodiazepine , a tranquilizer with a high potential for dependence .
Gradually, the life story of Maria Wyeth crystallizes. She grew up in the small town of Silver Wells, Nevada, where her father was a ruthless gambler and her mother was neurotic. After Wyeth graduated from high school, her parents encouraged her to go to New York to pursue an acting career. There she found temporary employment as a model and became Ivan Costello's lover. Costello turns out to be someone who ruthlessly uses the money and bodies of his loved ones to advance his own career.
While Wyeth is still living in New York, she receives news that her mother is dead. She is the victim of a car accident that she probably deliberately provoked. Shortly afterwards, her father also dies, leaving worthless mining rights to his business partner and friend Benny Austin. Influenced by the shock of her mother's death, Wyeth gives up acting and her career as a model, separates from Ivan Costello, and goes to Hollywood with Carter Lang, whom she has just met . They and Carter have a daughter named Kate. At the time of Wyeth's hospital stay, Kate is four years old and is in a clinic where she is being treated for abnormal chemistry in her brain. From the words Wyeth uses to describe her daughter and her regular visits to this clinic, one can infer an intense bond between Wyeth and her disabled daughter. She dreams of a life in which she will be able to get Kate out of this clinic.
Wyeth has affairs with other men, including Les Goodwin, one of her husband's Hollywood business friends. She becomes pregnant and Les Goodwin is presumably the father of the child. Carter forces Wyeth to abort the child. The traumatic experience at an illegal abortion clinic leaves Wyeth distraught. At night she dreams of dying children, during the day she drives aimlessly along the streets of southern California. She starts going to motels and bars, has casual sexual encounters with second-rate actors and former lovers. She spent one night in prison for stealing cars and possession of drugs. Gradually, a complicated love affair develops between her, her husband BZ and his wife, which ends with BZ taking a Seconal overdose in Maria's hotel room and then dying. The novel ends with Maria, who is currently withdrawn, starting a new life with Kate.
title
Play it as it lays is a (not often used) expression in English that a person has no alternative but to play with the cards they have been dealt. The German title Spiel dein Spiel does not fully capture this meaning.
filming
The novel was the basis for a US movie directed by Frank Perry . The script was written by Joan Didion and her husband John Gregory Dunne . Anthony Perkins played the BZ and Tuesday Weld Maria Wyeth in this film .
expenditure
- Play your game , German by Margarete Eberhardt; Droemer Knaur, Munich, Zurich 1980, ISBN 3-426-00666-9 .
Single receipts
- ↑ 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read: The Definitive List , accessed July 27, 2014.