I mean, it was good. Pretty good. I'd forgotten that Ben Affleck is a tolerably good actor. And he was perfect for this too, with his big-and-slightly-bloated face.
The one major difference between the book and the film was that I feel like Nick (Affleck's character) came off as way more sympathetic in the film. In the book, I always felt like he was terrible and sort of deserved what he got. But in the film, I was always rooting for him.
Part of this was, I think, because of the cat. In the movie, he's always picking up this adorable cat and stroking it and feeding it and cuddling with it. And you're all like, "Well if he loves his cat, then he can't be all bad!"
The other part was his sister. His sister is a really down-to-earth, sympathetic presence. And the easy rapport that the two characters have really makes him seem pretty human. I mean, if he's capable of forming a connection to another person, then he can't be all bad, right?
These are just inherent differences between the two media. In film, we're able to see the cat. We're able to see the grace with which he and his sister inhabit the same space. What we're not able to see are his thoughts. In the book, we got to see his thoughts. And many of those thoughts are pretty ugly.
As I mentioned in my last entry, I’ve finished reading Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn’s recent insane super best-seller. The novel occupies an interesting cultural place: it’s a crime thriller that’s found a substantial readership amongst both sexes. It so often feels like literature (and all pop culture, in general) is very gender-segregated. There are women’s classics and men’s classics; women’s bestsellers and men’s bestsellers. Gone Girl kinda bridges that divide.
There’s something of a war of the sexes element in the novel. For those who don’t know, it has two first-person narrators: a husband and his wife. After the wife goes missing and the husband becomes the chief subject in her presumed murder, a media frenzy ignites in a manner that’s somewhat reminiscent of the O.J. Simpson or Scott Peterson cases.
The plotting of the book is phenomenal. What blew me away right from the beginning is the table of contents. I mean, look at this Table of Contents (I’ve elided some things from it to make it more readable on the web):
Part One: Boy Loses Girl
Nick Dunne: The Day of
Amy Elliott: January 8, 2005
Nick Dunne: The Day of
…
Part Two: Boy Meets Girl
Amy Elliott Dunne: The Day of
Nick Dunne: Seven Days Gone
Amy Elliott Dunne: The Day of
Nick Dunne: Seven Days Gone
Amy Elliott Dunne: Five Days Gone
…
Part Three: Boy Gets Girl Back (Or Vice Versa)
Nick Dunne: Forty Days Gone
Amy Elliott Dunne: The Night of the Return
Nick Dunne: The Night of the Return
Amy Elliott Dunne: The Night of the Return
Nick Dunne: The Night of the Return
Amy Elliott Dunne: Five Days after the Return
Nick Dunne: Thirty Days after the Return
…
Amy Elliott Dunne: Ten Months, Two Weeks, Six Days after the Return
Right away, just from looking at this ToC, you know three things:
Amy is not dead (because although her narration begins seven years in the past, it does eventually come up to the present day).
She eventually comes back
She has some kind of future. Or, at least, ten months after the main action of this book, she is still alive.
This is wonderful! Right in the Table of Contents, Flynn has thrown away some of the most obvious generators of suspense: Did he kill her? Is she alive? Will she survive?
And throughout, the plotting is just superb. Information is revealed at the right time and the revelations are shocking but not absurd. There’s something delightfully playful about the story. It eschews the expected thing and the easy villains. It really kept me reading.
The writing is…interesting. The novel does not have that typical bestseller style, with short sentences and plain language. It’s told by two first-person narrators who both have strong voices. They both jump around in time and hide information from you and narrate things in their own way. There is plenty of figurative language and complex sentence structure and detail.
But…there’s something about the writing that makes the book a bit hard to read. For the first fourth of it or so, I found my eyes skipping over paragraphs and then getting lost (since this is not the kind of book where you can really skip whole paragraphs, since information is buried in the center of paragraphs and doled out at semi-random intervals). There’s just something about the writing that screams out that you shouldn’t be reading all of it. Eventually, the difficulty went away and I no longer had trouble reading it.
But, after I finished the book, I started to think that maybe the problem was that the details that the book chooses to include often seem kind of extraneous. They don’t really advance the plot or reveal much about the character. Like, take this paragraph from literally moments before the narrator discovers that his house is in shambles and his wife is missing.
Quiet. The complex was always disturbingly quiet. As I neared our home, conscious of the noise of the car engine, I could see the cat was definitely on the steps. Still on the steps, twenty minutes after Carl’s call. This was strange. Amy loved the cat, the cat was declawed, the cat was never let outside, never ever, because the cat, Bleecker, was sweet but extremely stupid, and despite the LoJack tracking device pelleted somewhere in his fat furry rolls, Amy knew she’d never see the cat again if he ever got out. The cat would waddle straight into the Mississippi River – deedle-de-dum – and float all the way to the Gulf of Mexico into the maw of a hungry bull shark.
The paragraph is not overtly bad, it’s just pointless. Bleecker barely appears in the rest of the novel. The characters almost never think about him. Furthermore, although we now “know” that Amy is the type of person who loves and cossets her cat, we never really get the sense that this is true. Like, nothing in the book discredits this, but nothing supports it, either. The cat is just sort of tossed in here for the hell of it.
And that’s not really how novels should be written.
It’s also weird because I’m reading Flynn’s second novel right now (Gone Girl is her third), and this novel doesn’t have this issue at all. The writing is sharp and the details are well-chosen.
I think the issue I have with Gone Girls’ writing is directly related to the complexity of its characterization. Basically, in this novel, Nothing Is As It Seems. And in order to support the mystery, each character needs to be described in ways that support two separate portraits. It has to be possible for Nick to seem both like a roguish schmo and a cold-hearted wife-beater. And the novel has difficulty threading these lines. With two first-person narrators like this, there’s just not enough ambiguity. I mean, everything almost hangs together. You can almost see how it’s possible for someone to see either version of Nick and Amy…but sometimes the strain shows through.
Basically, in order for this story to work, the characters have to be complex in an incredibly multi-faceted and contradictory way. And I can believe that they are that complex, because I want the story to work. But the story never quite succeeds in showing us what that complexity would look like. We never quite get a sense of what Nick and Amy do and say and talk about when they’re not, you know, enmeshed in a bizarre murder plot.
But whatever, it’s an incredibly ambitious and thought-provoking novel and it’s really fun to read. I highly recommend it.
I only read one book at a time. But, since I’m in graduate school, I need to read a book a week as part of my readings’ course. Thus, I now need to time exactly when I’m going to finish my books. This has resulted in a huge leap forward in my ability to assess how long it’s going to take me to read any given book.
Basically, the lynchpin of this system is the Kindle. Anyone who has used one knows that the Kindle doesn’t use page numbers to mark your location in book: it uses location numbers. For instance, Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (the [amazing] book I just completed) is around 7000 locations long. Now, there’s no hard and fast rule for what a location actually means. Really, it measures the length of the encoding that underlies your text. Thus, even if you have two texts that’re of the same length (in terms of a wordcount), the text with more encoding (italics, bolding, lists, tables, fonts, etc.) will have more locations than the one with less encoding. However, a general rule of thumb is that 1000 locations = about 22,000 words. For instance, Gone Girl has 7000ish locations and is about 150,000 words.
As I noted years ago, I used to read about 15,000 words an hour. Now, that was an actual reading speed: it included bathroom breaks, checking my email, fidgeting, making a snack, staring into space, etc. It also tended to include 10-15 minutes of going outside and smoking. Since quitting smoking, I’ve observed that I’m usually able to read 1000 or so locations (20k or so words) in an hour. If the novel is a very fast-paced thrillerish novel (i.e. one that has a lot of skimmable prose), that can sometimes be more like 1300-1400 locations in an hour (it’s possible that some of this is due to fast-paced books catching my interest and resulting in fewer distractions per hour)
Thus, I knew, even before I began it, that Gone Girl was going to take me at least 7 hours to read (it actually took more like 5.75 hours, since this was one of those books that you can read fast). Next, I’m going to read George Saunders’ Tenth Of December: Stories for a Monday book club discussion. Since it’s about 3000 kindle locations, I know I’m going to have to devote about three hours to it tomorrow. I don’t know what I’ll read after that, actually (although I am feeling an urge to return to either return to J.M. Coetzee or to read one of Gillian Flynn’s earlier novels), but I know that I need to finish it by Wednesday night (when I have to read the text for our Thursday class—it’s short, so this should take no more than an hour). Generally speaking, I can’t expect more than two hours of reading time on a weekday, so I need to make sure that I don’t select anything longer than 100,000 words. It’s all a very orderly system.
The result of this calculation is that I feel less afraid to take on long books. Even if book is about 300,000 words, I know that only represents 15 hours (or about a week and a half) of effort.
I mean, it was good. Pretty good. I'd forgotten that Ben Affleck is a tolerably good actor. And he was perfect for this too, with his big-and-slightly-bloated face.
