The Voice of a Generation

Just finished Joan Didion's Play it as it Lays. Evasive and spare, Didion is a surgeon, cutting into a haunting picture of 1970's America. The plot is submerged, without cause or effect, and whiteness pervades the narrator's consciousness; she seems thirsty for obliteration from the material and corporeal. Didion writes of her intention to write a novel "“a novel so elliptical and fast that it would be over before you noticed it, a novel so fast that it would scarcely exist on the page at all....white space. Empty space...."