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.
Chapters 71-84Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 71 Summary
Maria tries to connect with a local boy in the small desert town by telling him she is from a town nearby, but he is more interested in the film. Maria has a tense exchange with Susannah in Susannah’s hotel room. When Maria tells BZ that she is tired of Susannah, BZ asks, “What else are you tired of?” (191). Maria replies that she doesn’t know, and BZ takes her statement to mean she is as weary as he is.
Chapter 72 Summary
After three weeks of filming, the lead actor, Harrison Porter, physically assaults Susannah. Carter continues to shoot, trying to avoid the bruises on Susannah’s face. When Maria asks if Susannah is okay, Carter replies, “Susannah doesn’t take things quite as hard as you do” (193). Later, Maria asks BZ about Carter’s affair with Susannah, and BZ rebuffs her: “If you thought things like that mattered you’d be gone already” (194).
Chapter 73 Summary
The coffee shop owner sees that Maria is distressed and invites Maria to her home in the desert. She asks Maria, “You ever made a decision?” (198). Maria responds that no, she has not.
Chapter 74 Summary
Maria thinks about the lessons her father taught her. One lesson is that life is a craps game; the other is that “turning over a rock was apt to reveal a rattlesnake” (200).
Chapter 75 Summary
Chapter 76 Summary
Maria recalls the immediate aftermath of BZ’s death. Helene accused Maria of negligence for not stopping BZ, and at first, Maria tried to explain to Helene that she was wrong, but Helene refused to listen. Afterward, Maria decided it did not matter what Carter and Helene believed. In cutting herself off from them in the Neuropsychiatric ward, Maria calls herself “a radical surgeon of my own life. […] In that way I resemble the only man in Los Angeles County who does clean work” (203).
Chapter 77 Summary
Carter offers Maria one last chance to accept his help, and again, Maria refuses.
Chapter 78 Summary
Maria says that the only person she misses in Neuropsychiatric is Kate.
Chapter 79 Summary
Chapter 80 Summary
Maria discusses the irony of others’ perception of what she has lost: either her sense of humor or her mind.
Chapter 81 Summary
Chapter 82 Summary
Maria discusses her desire to live a quiet life with Kate after she gets out of the Neuropsychiatric.
Chapter 83 Summary
Chapter 84 Summary
Maria describes how peaceful her life is in Neuropsychiatric; she lies by the pool, watches a hummingbird, and does not take Carter’s calls. She thinks about the different conclusions she and BZ came to while facing the same despair, and for the first time addresses the reader directly, saying: “I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you” (218).
Chapter 71-84 Analysis
Chapters 71-84 detail the final phase of the novel’s narrative arc as it moves through BZ’s death. The novel’s structure changes in this section, with Maria’s first-person, present-tense narration interrupting the third-person past-tense narrative. Maria’s ire toward Carter and the superficiality of her friendships become increasingly apparent, as does the deterioration of her physical and mental state. Carter tries to help Maria either out of his own sense of guilt or to make himself look good because everyone still sees Maria as “Carter’s wife.”
Throughout the novel, even though most of the narrative follows Maria’s interior life, Maria spends much of her energy avoiding information that is crucial to the understanding of events. She took her father’s lessons to heart: Life is a craps shoot, and turning over rocks will only reveal things best left unseen. Later, when Maria says that she is a radical surgeon of her own life, she shows a profound change of heart. By finally cutting her ties with the abusive people in her life, she is akin to the doctor who performed her abortion; she attempts to terminate the dead-end life she’s been gestating in favor of a better way of existing. She's also combating her own nihilism.
Didion intentionally keeps the reader at arm’s length by withholding information in the storytelling, so it is significant when Maria turns to directly address the reader as “you” in the final chapter. By invoking the second person, Didion involves the reader in Maria’s story, either as a spectator or a figure who, like the doctors, wants to psychoanalyze Maria without her consent. In this way, Didion forces the reader to confront the ethics of reading—and film viewing by extension—as spectatorship. The reader watches the same way Maria’s friends watched as her and BZ’s lives fell apart.
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By Joan Didion
