Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion

A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Play It As It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the emptiness and ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that both blisters and haunts the reader. Set in a place beyond good and evil--literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert--but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul, it remains, more than three decades after its original publication, a profoundly disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis and stunning in the still-startling intensity of its prose.