Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

If you can play party games that sound like "George or Brad?", "Ice Cream or Cake?", "Mountains or Beach?" and if you can choose between options A or B, then Gone Girl might be a great book for you. I unfortunately am terrible at those party games. I would answer the above questions with "But have you seen Clive Owen?", "Cake WITH ice cream" and "a mountainous cliff overlooking the ocean". Admittedly, I'm a both/and kind of girl, which holds equally true for me when it comes to books. When asked to choose between "good plot, good writing, or good character studies?", I'm the one in the room who simply says, "Yes!" For this reason, I was incredibly frustrated with Gone Girl .

In Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn has created a Rube Goldberg-esque plot. A gimmicky yet precise arrangement of events and premeditated madness that result in a twisty plot that asks the reader to hold tightly to the maxim "Truth is stranger than fiction". However, I found Gone Girl just to be a strange story that tries too hard to be clever with gratuitously foul mouthed characters that are each wholly unlikeable and that have not even a vague ring of veracity or authenticity to them. There may well be people like Nick and Amy in this world, but I pray I never meet them.

You know it's bad when the male lead admits an unsavory truth, suffixed with an admission that it's time to start disliking him and you silently counter, "Honey--you lost me at 'hello'." You know it's bad when the author writes sentences like, "They say it's important for Nick and me (the correct grammar) to have some time alone. . ." That's a direct quote. I guess this is just in case I'm too uneducated to understand the correct use of personal pronouns? Please. You know it's bad when the next page is titled "Acknowledgments", and you actually thought it was another cheap jokey trick: "just another chapter or the actual end? Ha ha--made you look!"

However, it was not only the character development and story structure that suffered under Flynn’s clumsy hands. The writing felt immature, clunky, and forced. Flynn does as horrible a job of writing from a man's perspective as she does from a woman's. She uses so many nonessential adjectival clauses that when you get dropped back into the meat of the sentence, you forgot what she was talking about. Frankly, I was happier skipping through whole paragraphs. And no stranger to "sentence enhancers" myself, an unphased fan of necessary, contextually appropriate roughness in things like "Fight Club" and "Deadwood" etc., I found her use of bad language to be gratuitous at best. Her use of derogatory and profane words felt like a crutch to cover up her utter lack of skill or finesse--it's how people who wish they were writers think real writers write.

I fully understand that this kind of book is a lot of fun for many readers as its twisty turns feel like a summer roller coaster ride. If that's your kind of book, please don't let me ruin this for you--truly, it's a heck of a concept. However in my opinion, the plot is so contrived that the author twists and turns her way so far up a tree that she can't see her way down. For me, this book was an utter struggle because I had to work so hard to overcome the character's unlikeability (I never did succeed) that reading this was a chore. If it is true that the purpose of good manners is to put those in your presence at ease, then the purpose of good writing is to make the experience effortless for your reader. This felt like work to me and I pushed through only to see what the final move was in Flynn’s Rube Goldberg machine. But when, after such a carefully constructed build up, the machine ended with a barely audible whisper, I felt robbed. Sadly, this served only to confirm my distrust of the best sellers list.



u