Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion

I am quite sure this is a "book of outstanding literary quality" (from the back cover). I can see that. The writing style is reflective of the content. Skillful use is made of symbols and thematic motifs. It conveys the emotional impact it intends with great power. It was included in the Time's Top 100 list. I will long remember it.

And yet I didn't like it, not at all. I wish I had never read it.

This is the kind of novel that really cool and sophisticated people would like, people who applaud Charles Bukowski and Bret Easton Ellis. (Is it cool to use the term "cool" anymore? Probably not.) This is for people who enjoy reading "a scathing novel, distilling venom in tiny drops, revealing devastation in a sneer and fear in a handful of atomic dust" (also a quote from the back cover).

So if you think you would like to read a well written book filled with "venom" and "devastation" and "fear" and emptiness and aimlessness and despair, then this is the book for you. As for myself, I do not accept that this "captures the mood of an entire generation" (back cover again, writing of the 1960s). This was my generation, and fortunately, I did not know any of these people.

For those who might be interested, this is the story of Maria Wyeth, a sometimes model and sometimes actress, once married to a famous movie director, with an institutionalized child who suffers from some unnamed disorder, who deals with her very real problems by indulging in excesses of alcohol, drugs, indiscriminate sex, and driving very fast on the freeway.

To be clear, I would not have been disturbed by this novel as much if it had been less well done.