PLAY IT AS IT LAYS

A profoundly disturbing novel that ruthlessly dissects American life in the late 1960s from the author of The White Albumand The Year of Magical Thinking. Benny called for a round of Cuba Libres and I gave him some chips to play for me and went to the ladies’ room and never came back.Somewhere out beyond Hollywood hollowed-out actress Maria Wyeth’s life plays out in a numbing routine of perpetual freeway driving. In her early thirties divorced from her husband dislocated from friends anesthetized to pain and please Wheth is a woman who has run out of both desires and motives – the epitome of a generation made ill by too much freedom.