TELEVISION, by Lauren Rothery
What a disservice to compare the young writer Lauren Rothery, as some publicity materials have, to Joan Didion. (Besides which, if one more person gets compared to Didion this decade I’m going to zip on a Big Bird suit and run screaming into traffic on the 101.)
Rothery’s first novel, “Television,” is set mostly in Los Angeles, and like “Play It as It Lays” concerns the movie and television business, and chronicles a breakdown of sorts, and the author is a woman. Is that all it takes?
Actually, the two books do share the by now distressingly common misuse of the transitive verb “lay” for “lie” and its conjugations — “I laid down on the sofa”; “she just laid there by the fire”; and “I spread my towel on the sand, took off my top, laid down and slept until 10:33” are all quotes from “Television.”
“I don’t know how long we lay (laid?) there,” one character writes in a letter she’ll never send, sensing but unable to resolve the wrongness.