I'm late to this Gone Girl party. I finally decided to read it because I was the only one of my writing friends who hadn't yet. I had high expectations—I mean, Ben Affleck's going to be in the movie, and he's also going to be Batman, for fuck's sake. He's obviously only choosing the best roles possible these days, probably to make up for all his poor choices in the past.
Anyway, Gone Girl lives up to the hype. The only reason I didn't read acts two and three in one sitting is because my airplane landed partway through. The story wound up more and more and built to this crazy place, and then the end was exactly what an ending should be: completely unpredictable, yet inevitable. The kind of ending you should have seen coming, but didn't. Perfect. I can't recommend Gone Girl enough, really. It absolutely deserved to be the insane bestseller it was.
Not to say that I didn't have my issues. I did. The first and most obvious one was the grammar. Gillian Flynn needs to learn how to properly punctuate independent clauses. They're called periods and semicolons, not commas. You only use a comma to join two independent clauses with a conjunction. It was especially irritating when one of the POV characters said this:
"The woman remained in the car the whole time, a pacifiered toddler in her arms, watching her husband and me trade cash for keys. (That is the correct grammar, you know: her husband and me.)"
This happened twice. Not to say that a character can't say something like this; she totally can. It's great because this particular character is a know-it-all type, and this is the kind of thing she would say. Fine. But dammit, talk to me about proper grammar when you get your own right, Gillian Flynn!
I know, it sounds dumb, overly picky, but this drove me insane. Once you've trained yourself to notice these kinds of things, you can't turn it off.
The other issue I had was one of characterization. Flynn did a crazy effective job with her two POVs, but the other handful of people were so forgettable that I couldn't keep track of who was who whenever they appeared. There were two cops—Boney and Gilpin—and I finally realized well into act three that Boney was the woman. Gilpin was a guy, I guess, and other than that? Yeah, no idea. Same went for Margo. I hardly noticed her on the page because her name was so insubstantial (Just "Go," most of the time), and when she started talking, I had to backtrack to figure out who the hell she was. Oh, this is Go talking now. When did she even get here? And, once again, I couldn't tell you anything about her except that she was female and she was one POV's twin sister. Really weak characterization, which was surprising considering how strongly done the two POVs were.
I mentioned earlier that I almost read acts two and three in a single sitting. I left out that it took me well over a month to get through the first one. I struggled to get into this book because I initially saw something in the first character's POV that bothered me a lot: he was hiding stuff from the reader. He would acknowledge that he was lying to the cops, but he wouldn't say why, or what he was lying about. He would just say, "I'm lying a lot," and I would think, Why you holding out on me, Nick?
When we finally learned the truth, he claimed he was lying earlier so the reader would like him. Clever, Gillian Flynn, addressing me like that, all second person up in here, but you can't fool me. The reason to hide something from the reader is always actually the same: plot. Nick was hiding information from the reader because plot.
At that point in the book, we were still supposed to not trust Nick, and if we knew Nick's alibi, the we know that Nick was innocent. Here's the thing, though: when the POV character knows something, shouldn't the reader know it, too? In a way, it's like the POV character hiding something from himself, which is fine if he's in denial (which means you need to figure out a way to let the reader know the character is in denial), but Nick totally wasn't. Nick really was just leaving stuff off the page to increase the tension. I hate that. Yeah, a story needs tension, but I don't want that tension to be artificial.
All that aside though, the characterization, in general, of these two POVs was superb. We can all learn a thing or two from Gillian Flynn on this: she was in no way afraid that a reader might dislike her characters. This could be the millennial in me talking (we're a gloomy bunch), but I believe that no one is as perfect as he looks, that everyone is miserable and hates his life and his job and everything he does every day. Sure, there's good stuff there too, that bag of chocolate chips accidentally mixed in with the undercooked sorghum pasta, but for the most part, people are utterly despicable, and Flynn embraced that. She was unflinching in letting these people show their ugly sides on the page. To let them be unlikable. And really, that's exactly what made them so likable—it's not that they were being bad people; they were simply being people. Actual people.
So, if there's any lesson to take away from Gone Girl, it's this: don't be afraid of your characters. Let them be honest on the page. Are you worried that your friends will think that your characters' ugly sides are your ugly sides and then will no longer like you? Well, if they're professionals, they'll know how to separate you from your work. And if they don't? Fuck 'em. Get better friends.
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