Didion shows an attempt to escape the unstable ground of Los Angeles in Play it as it Lays with Maria, a largely autobiographical main character. She feels the sense of dread that living on such faulty ground brings, along with the limiting freedom that the city provides as ‘a place that ha[s] a placelessness about it’.[1] They are confined within a maze of a city, a commercialised architectural fantasy (further explored in ‘The Fantastical Commercialisation of Space’) and the city makes no attempt to hide this fact.
This leads to the attempt to escape by driving. As Fine mentions, ‘movement by car can, of course, mean movement without goal, a kind of ritual cruising, what Joan Didion has described as “secular communion”’.[2] Maria believes ‘that she [must] be on the freeway by ten o’clock. Not somewhere on Hollywood Boulevard, not on her way to the freeway, but actually on the freeway. If she was not she lost the day’s rhythm’.[3] This is the ‘ritual cruising’ that Fine discusses, a ‘secular communion’ for Maria due to a lack of faith in Los Angeles. This faith is instead channelled in the promise of ‘the open road and the adventure along the highway that has no end’,[4] something which offers everything her home does not. Maria feels betrayed by the ‘promise of West Coast freedom’[5] and its instability. Driving allows an escape from these betrayals, as by moving fast enough this fact can be forgotten about, Maria believing a permanent escape to be a possibility. But the instability and the forever looming threat of disaster never leaves, and she always returns to the city despite its claustrophobic nature.
This is how Didion opens the first chapter of the novel, where it is revealed just before that Maria is dealing with a breakup from her film producer boyfriend Carter Lang. The mention of Hollywood Boulevard is therefore intentional. Carter is a symbol of Hollywood and the film industry, and if she is on Hollywood Boulevard at ten o’clock, she has failed to escape her past. This is further supported by the fact she has featured in a few of Carter’s projects, and the way their relationship is described. ‘The summer she left Carter (the summer Carter left her)’[6] is a purposely conflicting statement, one which recognises Maria’s struggle with her past, unable to truly escape it as she still lives in Los Angeles and drives through Hollywood every day. The concerning reality of the city which she wishes to escape is pushed to the back of her mind on the open road, as ‘she never thought about that on the freeway’.[7] Her foot is pushed firmly on the pedal, sometimes kicking off her sandals to feel ‘the touch of the accelerator’,[8] to make sure it will not betray and lie to her like ‘the false faces that Los Angeles’[9] wears have. The faces which promised paradise, while the reality is a placeless metropolis built on faulty ground.
A video presenting the secular communion of driving which Maria would attend to like clockwork.
[1] David Fine, ‘John Fante and the Los Angeles Novel in the 1930s’ Dust’ in John Fante: A Critical Gathering (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press: New Jersey, 1999), 122-130 (p.125) <https://moodle.brookes.ac.uk/pluginfile.php/2955138/mod_folder/content/0/David_Fine_John_Fante_and_Los_Angeles_Novel_in_1930s.pdf> [accessed 4th December 2021]
[2] David Fine, ‘Running out of Space: Vanishing Landscapes in California Novels’, Western American Literature, 26.3 (1991), 209-218 (p.211) <https://www.jstor.org/stable/43020780> [accessed 5th December 2021]
[3] Joan Didion, Play it as it Lays (4th Estate: London, 2017), p.15
[4] Running out of Space, p.209
[5] David Fine, ‘Starting Points’ in Imagining Los Angeles: A City in Fiction (University of Nevada Press: Nevada, 2004), 1-25 (p.24) <https://moodle.brookes.ac.uk/pluginfile.php/2955138/mod_folder/content/0/David_Fine_Chapter_1_Starting_Points_in_Imagining_Los_Angeles.pdf> [accessed 4th December 2021]
[6] Play it as it Lays, p.15
[7] ibid., p.15
[8] ibid., p.15
[9] Stephen Cooper, ‘Fante’s Eternal City’ in Los Angeles in Fiction (University of New Mexico Press: Albuquerque, 1995), 83-99 (p.83) <https://moodle.brookes.ac.uk/pluginfile.php/2955138/mod_folder/content/0/Stephen_Cooper_John_Fantes_Eternal_City.pdf> [accessed 4th December 2021]