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Title: The same dream, always in color
Review: This book illustrates the difference between important and merely influential. It virtually invented the vague/portentious prose style that signifies boredom and alienation, and appeared as late as 1996 on the liner notes of Rage Against the Machine's "Evil Empire".But it isn't very good. The dimestore existentialism aged, badly. Didion's spare writing now seems phony and juvenile. The same characters experiencing the same emotions have been rehashed so many times, often in superior forms, that what was innovative in the seventies doesn't really cut it anymore. Not that it was very original in its time, coming as it did after thirty years of Sartre and ten of Antonioni. Not to mention Horace McCoy's terrific 1935 novel "They Shoot Horses Don't They", popularized in a Hollywood film (coincidentally?) only a year before "Play It"'s publication.A minor footnote to a still-evolving trend.
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