Anesthesia Play It As It Lays

214 pp. $5.95.

"AT LEAST some of the time, the world appears to me as a painting by Hieronymous Bosch; were I to follow my conscience then, it would lead me out into the desert with Marion Faye, out to where he stood in The Deer Park looking east to Los Alamos and praying, as if for rain, that it would happen:'... let it come and clear the rot and the stench and the stink, let it come for all of everywhere, just so it comes and the world stands clear in the white dead dawn.'"

wow.

How do you live with that?

But then you don't. And neither do you kill yourself. For the matter is not, as they would have us believe, one of life and death. It is all only the difference between death in death, death in life. In that, there is no difference.

You 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.

Play it as it lays, Harry Wyeth told his daughter. Wyeth, a gambler in the respected, dead-end tradition of the pioneer. Losing their home in Reno, he moved his wife and child to Silver Wells, Nevada, there built a motel "that would have been advantageously situated at a freeway exit had the freeway been built." Maria grows up, in turn loses, in Los Angeles, in Vegas, in Marriage and at motherhood. Ends up in Neuropsychiatric. "I was raised to believe that what came in on the next roll would always be better than what went out on the last. I no longer believe that."

Her father's exhilaration and hope. Her mother's pain. Her own despair. Are all behind Maria. She is so much the anesthetist's victim that her only sense of being alive comes from "the physical flash of walking in and out of places, the temperature shock, the hot wind blowing outside, the heavy frigid air inside."

THERE is simply no other evidence that Maria's world-full of Hollywood-types that "registered on her only as a foreigner or a faggot or a gangster"-is capable of supporting any deeper sense of life. The very superficiality of its pretended pain mocks any postures of feeling it cares to feign.

"'BZ, you've planned this to torment me,'" a homosexual masseur protests. "He stood on the deck, holding a plastic lemon at elaborate arm's length. 'You couldn't possibly buy artificial lemon juice, someone left it here, it's a bad joke.'"

"Leonard's in New York for ten days," Helene complains to Maria. "I don't mind if I'm out of town, but if I'm in town, and Leonard's not, I feel almost... frightened." Leonard is Helene's hairdresser.

But somehow Maria jumps the track, junks the game.

"'You've been brushing it wet,' the hairdresser said, lifting a strand of Maria's hair and letting it drop with distaste.

"'I guess so.' Maria could never keep up her end of the dialogue with hairdressers."

"At a dinner party, a group of friends." Maria's estranged husband, a film director, lets go with a few complaints of his own. "Maria would say that they were not her friends, but Maria has never understood friendship, conversation, the normal amenities of social exchange." And later. The two in bed, he shouts at her, "Well go to sleep, cunt. Go to sleep. Die. Fucking vegetable." Fucking vegetable, he shouts at her in bed, little realizing that in her catatonia Maria is only holding a mirror up to the more frenetic stiffs surrounding her.

Maria understands all right. So much so that you could hardly expect her to find pleasure with such people. And who would ask her to endure the pain-memories of her mother's silent death, the knowledge that her four-year-old daughter is locked away in an asylum where they pump chemicals into her brain, the horror and self-loathing Maria experiences in the course of a routinely blase abortion-alone? To escape, or perhaps just to survive, Maria "fixed her imagination on a needle dripping sodium pentathlon into her arm.... When that failed she imagined herself driving, conceived audacious lane changes, strategic shifts of gear, the Hollywood to the San Bernadino and straight out, past Barstow, past Baker, driving straight on into the hard white empty core of the world." Again, the desert. It all leads back to the nothing that is desert.

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 is no denying their common foundation, the few hundred miles of desert that connect the two mirage-like cities.

"ARE YOU tired?" BZ keeps asking Maria. And when she finally answers yes, he tells her she is "getting there." Getting where? she asks. "Where I am," he answers.

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 accouterments 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 she can never make it, BZ is a kindred spirit, capable of also seeing the nothingness beneath the would-be being.

Marion shared that vision when he fled the duplicitous world of his mother's 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 all life is dead, not even suicide is an alternative.

(If there is any deficiency in the novel it lies in our lack of preparation for BZ's confession of fellowship with Maria. To credit it to the hypocrisy-shattering side-effects of his homosexuality is not enough. Lord knows, in Hollywood, where homosexuality seems just another building block in the whole rotten institution, the posturing that goes into both concealing and flaunting homosexual tastes is just as appalling as all the other pretenses with which the town is infected. But then the novel is Maria's story, and that alone would prevent us from understanding more of BZ.)

BZ dies in Maria's arms, but Maria, who "closed her eyes against the light and her ears against Helene and her mind against what was going to happen in the next few hours," goes on "living," playing it as it lays.

"One thing in my defense, not that it matters," she says. "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."

Maria's logic-her lack of it-combined with the inescapable force of the entire novel, is devastating. (Which is why this piece could hardly qualify as a piece of criticism. How can you coolly discuss the elements of a work that so completely overwhelms you? Why would you even want to?) When you read those last two lines

"Why, BZ would say.

"Why not, I say."

you scarcely want to bother again with all the headaches of playing out the rest of your life.

Which is also why I almost was going to conclude by suggesting that Play It As It Lays -restricted though its view is to one particularly hellish segment of America-should not be read by anyone the least bit unhappy with the worthlessness of life.

But then again, why not.