Month: August 2012

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Gone GirlGone Girl by Gillian Flynn

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The first half of Gone Girl pivots on an essential question: What happened to Amy Dunne on the morning of her fifth wedding anniversary? The point of view shifts from her diary entries dating back several years and her husband’s first person narrative in the present tense. He’s clearly not telling the whole truth and his impressions of her stand in contrast to her version of events in her diary entries.

Then, at the halfway point of the novel, the essential question is turned on its head. I hate to say anything about the second half of the book except it takes a dramatic turn. In fact it’s hard to talk about this book at all without spoiling the plot.

But, while the plot was fun—dark, twisted, psychotic fun—it was the way in which our societal roles dictate our behavior that was very cleverly exploited and of great interest to me. I’m not going to go into any specific spoilers but it’s kind of hard to talk about this book at all without it being a spoiler so:

——MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD——-

Nick is a jerk. He’s narcissistic and the kind of guy who will tell you anything to avoid honest communication, particularly if it will lead to him feeling uncomfortable in anyway. He’s an avoider. Amy is brilliant but crazy. However, they both adopt disguises in life and marriage to pass among the “normal” people, unnoticed for how twisted they really are.

Thematically, the book takes the feminist theory idea that femininity is a disguise—a construct women adopt to pass in a patriarchal society–to its darkest conclusion: that femininity is a kind of sociopathy (and also that patriarchal entitlement is a kind of endless narcissism). In this way, Flynn neatly unpacks lots of tropes about male and female behavior but wraps it up in a plot that is darkly comedic and very often just dark but never boring.

It’s well-plotted, darkly funny, and, over the several days that I read it, I found myself thinking about it in the middle of the day and wondering how it could all be resolved. I wasn’t disappointed.

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Still Not Feeling Bret Easton Ellis

I have long disliked Bret Easton Ellis. I remember reading Less Than Zero as a teen in 1989 and throwing the book across the room during a scene where (as I faintly recall) a girl is tied to a bed and repeatedly raped in exchange for drugs. One of the main characters breezes through the scene and rolls on, not even entirely alarmed by the spectacle.

I remember thinking: What kind of life is this person living that wrote this? I suppose this was a challenge to my young adult view of the world. But it felt more like an attack on anybody who would be “uncool” enough to call the cops. Looking back I likely overreacted.

But it would be one thing if Ellis had something to say about the emptiness and horror of the drug culture and lifestyle. However, it seemed to me that he was simply cataloging modern atrocities to surprise and titillate. I felt exactly the same way while reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo just a couple of years ago. Life is awful, indeed. Let’s pour over the details as salaciously as possible! 

Often books with horrific content–for me that generally includes rape and murder (among many others)–are preachy and silly. The vast majority of us understand that these horrors are wrong. I don’t need the perpetrators to be punished in order to walk away from a book and feel satisfied with it. I don’t always enjoy neatly drawn stories that wrap all the problems up in a bow. But there’s something about the ability to describe horror after horror and pretend it’s not an atrocity that I find just as tedious as the preachy books on the opposite end of the spectrum.

Generally, I have avoided Ellis’s work because of my dislike of Less Than Zero. I was a teen then and, so, a few years ago I figured I’d give his work another try. I knew American Psycho was not for me–seemed gratuitous and heavy-handed, even in excerpted form. So I tried the Rules of Attraction. As I recall, it opens with a female character waking up to being raped after getting drunk at a college party. It is her first sexual encounter. And it’s told from her point of view with all of detachment from humanity that seemed to pervade Less Than Zero. So he’s renowned for his depictions of tedious, amoral people in urban (and sometimes collegiate) settings. It’s not for me is what I learned.

Today, I saw that Ellis has been  tweeting prolifically about 50 Shades of Grey. I haven’t read that–though I have the original PDF manuscript of when it was still Twilight fanfiction that a friend sent me. He’s consumed with who will play the lead character (apparently Rob Pattinson is busy?) of Christian Grey. He argued that fan favorite Matt Bomer can NOT play Christian because Bomer is gay–and it would be unbelievable that he might want to make passionate, dominating sexy times with a lady.

The argument made me laugh out loud because there is a long history of gay men being movie stars (though they were traditionally closeted) and the point of acting is to pretend you are feelings things you don’t really feel. So he missed the point of acting entirely it would seem. Or revealed his own inability to separate art from artist–something I’m going to assume he’d like the rest of us to do when considering his art. I’m going to go ahead and assume he’s not a total sociopath divorced from emotion, someone who would easily step over a dead body in an alley as he has one character do.

But something about Ellis eats at me all the same. There’s something about the treatment of women in his books that seems even more disturbing than how women are treated in media across the board on any given day. So I had to look and see who he follows on Twitter. It’s a hobby of mine to see who people follow on Twitter and I couldn’t help but notice he follows only one woman among 42 people. Her name is Crystal Angel. No idea who she is or what she does.

I must admit that I judge men on Twitter who don’t follow a few women. It says something to me about them that perhaps it shouldn’t. It’s my issue, certainly, but I can’t help but think that a man who doesn’t want to hear the thoughts of at least some women? Is missing out on something important, on a whole world filled with points of views that are, perhaps, unlike his own.  Listening to people outside your immediate sphere? Especially if they are leading different lives than you are? Is the kind of lesson that can benefit your fiction and your life, in my experience.

I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron

I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a WomanI Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman by Nora Ephron

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In this series of essays, Nora Ephron explores what it means to be a woman of a certain age. She’s funny and smart and feels likes someone you’d like to get to know.

I found myself longing for her to be my eccentric aunt or my mom’s friend so that I could go to lunch with her and listen to her pontificate on fighting wrinkles, struggling to find the right purse, fall in love with books and apartments, and maybe explain to me the bittersweet truth of life: No matter what? It ends.

As someone who is starting to feel bad about her neck all of Nora’s feelings about aging rang very true for me. Her final essay is about losing her best friend and considering her own mortality (and even that is written in a wry way that lets you know that despite her loss she’s still got a sense of humor).

In one essay she admits that when she really loved a book she’d often write the author and tell them–including lots of personal feelings that were probably inappropriate to share. At the end of this book? I wished I could have dropped her a line. Knowing that she died just a few months ago made several of the essays–particularly the one dealing with her love of books and the one about grappling with her own mortality–particularly bittersweet for me. But I’m glad I got to meet her, even if only through her work.

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Narcissism and The Dark Knight Rises

Overlong and utterly pretentious, The Dark Knight Rises is a story that seemingly could exist almost entirely in Bruce Wayne’s head.

When we meet up with Wayne, he’s ensconced at Wayne Manor, limping about alone for the last eight years with only his faithful servant Alfred as a companion. Poor Alfred, stuck with a dour, self-absorbed billionaire!

He’s lured out of retirement because of the alluring cat burglar who steals his mother’s pearls. She’s working with the bad guys — they are out to get Wayne’s business until the really bad guys turn on them and we realize they are out to destroy Gotham, Wayne’s beloved city.

You see, everything exists to revolve around Bruce Wayne. Alfred, as any good British servant, has no personal life beyond his love of Bruce Wayne. Lucius Fox, head honcho at Wayne Enterprises, exists solely to create clever war toys for Batman. Selina Kyle? Her entire story revolves around the idea that she wants a clean slate–from what beyond her life of crime we have no idea. But she’s really just a mirror for what Batman himself wants.

And the villain? I don’t want to give it away but that, too, revolves around Batman and his actions.

For a large chunk of the movie, Bruce Wayne is imprisoned and must find the strength–both physical and psychological–to escape. It’s a metaphor the film trumpets endlessly. And I found myself wishing that, in the end, the entire final quarter was simply the fantasies of a dying Bruce Wayne. It would have made more thematic sense to me.