2012.08.04 — Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn: Almost Read

Gone Girl: A Novel
by Gillian Flynn.
Publisher: Crown (Random House)
ISBN: 978-0-307-58838-8 (0-307-58838-6)

★★☆☆☆
Almost Read.

GG was a rare, for me, almost-read book. Rare, not because I didn't really finish it, but rare because I began reading it because of a review.

Isn't that a curious hypocrisy?! I rarely read books because of a review, and yet here I am writing a review in a blog I have created for the sole purpose of writing book reviews! What does that say about me? I wonder. Perhaps that I am narcissistic? Or maybe, to put a positive spin on this, that I like to learn about who I am by examining my reactions to what I read. And that is something I find I am unable to do with reading book reviews. Maybe it is simply that from personal experience I trust that the universe will bring me the books I 'need' when I need them, and my reading reviews is not a big part of that process. Of course, I just about completely stopped reading reviews when I realized that the 'official' book review process through the media was largely designed to sell books and newsprint. I was becoming aware at that time that motivation in any activity is of crucial importance in creating that indefinable quality in a final product that separates the creative output from being merely adequate or good to being brilliant.

Yikes! You can tell I was not too impressed by GG as I wax on philosophically and narcissistically about reviews. Okay. Here is my review:

A few months ago, I seem to vaguely remember, I read a review of GG that caught my interest. I've long since forgotten the review, or even where I read it but I suspect it was from Powell's Books' 'Daily Dose.' At that time I reserved the book from the NWPL. I received notice of it being my turn to read it just three weeks ago. Because of the long wait I asked the representative at the checkout 'Excuse me, how many people are on hold behind me?' 'Forty-four,' she said. 'I guess my hoping to renew it is pretty much not going to happen, then?' 'Nope.' And the copy I got was obviously unsullied new, so the library has purchased several if not many copies to keep up with demand.

And so I was hoping against my experience that a popular book would be, for a change, one also liked by me. But alas, GG has re-confirmed that I am not a part of the mainstream of popular culture's consumption of fiction. (Okay, there are exceptions, such as Michael Ondaatje. But then, I imagine he sells less than a tenth of the books of a Stephen King, Jackie Collins, or Len Deighton, so even he is not really mainstream.)

GG was sharply written, meaning Flynn wrote clear well constructed sentences that painted the scene very well. And the scenery is very pretty. However, it had a kind of cleverness that struck me as being glib. Or maybe it was kind of unnecessarily mean in a way that David Letterman's humour always strikes me. And like his jokes, Flynn's writing lacked vitality, and I cannot at this time clearly pinpoint why.

I have been wrestling in my mind with this review for several days. And I keep drifting to the idea that GG lacked depth of human understanding. Flynn was trying to show psychological sophistication, but her writing did not get much deeper into the people than their skin. This may reflect her background as an entertainment magazine writer or, perhaps Flynn having accepted, either consciously or unconsciously, the philosophical belief that the expression of human psychology is delimited by personal experience instead of what a person is able to imagine.

The next bit will be a bit of a spoiler, so don't read anymore if my negative review is proof enough that GG is indeed a worth while read for you.

The marriage, under stress from failed expectations and the financial and emotional dynamics of unemployment, is celebrating an anniversary. The wife, as has been customary, sets up a treasure hunt that the husband is to solve clue-by-clue to a great surprise and celebration. That the husband has failed every previous one miserably in the past drives him to spend much of the anniversary with his best friend and business partner — they own a bar — his sister. He gets the dreaded call: OMG, the wife appears to have been kidnapped on their anniversary, but has managed to leave behind the first clue. And, OMG, it looks like the husband did it.

I just sighed a great big sigh as I wrote that, despite sighing through my initial realization while reading it that this was of course staged, and that the set-up was deliberate to bring a spark back into the marriage. So, here is Flynn's first glib act: that we the readers are supposed to realize that it was staged so that she can twist the denouement.

As I continued reading I kept hoping that the real twist would be that the kidnapping wasn't staged. But the husband's bland stupidity, despite been painted as a clever writer, left me struggling with ennui and the conviction that Flynn was setting us up for the staging.

When I came to accept that I would not be finishing GG, I cheated and jumped to the end. I wanted to see how clever Flynn really was. And the so-called double twist I discovered was when I first thought 'Yup, glib and clever, but without anything revivifying.' Yes, it was indeed staged to make the husband look like the killer, but more importantly that staging was just so the wife could stage a murder she would be able to get away with, and which would save their failing marriage.

And now I have returned it unfinished and disappointed. I had so wanted it to be better than it was. For a summer read, I do not recommend GG but would suggest perhaps Ondaatje's The Cat's Table which exceeded my expectations when I read it last year: Finished 2011.10.23.

2011.10.23 — The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje — finished 2011.10.17

Began 2011.09.27.

Michael Ondaatje.
The Cat's Table.
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2011. ISBN 978-0-7710-6864-5.

Michael Ondaatje is one of the true masters of English poetry in prose. But when I learned that The Cat's Table was in the style of a memoir, I was slightly disappointed because, with some exceptions, I have not been fond of memoirs as such. However I felt curious and expectant that he would convert me. He did. He exceeded expectation because he managed, again, to convince me while reading his latest book that the one in my hands is my new Ondaatje favourite.

★★★★★

And to describe it as a memoir is an accurate description, but only in the same way that to say the sky is blue is accurate: it misses the complexity of the experience. The arc of the story is a memoir of a pre-pubescent boy sent to England on a ship with scant adult supervision. Some critics I've read found that to be a stumbling point, but my childhood spent with scant adult supervision for extended periods of time is eerily echoed in how Michael interacts with the adult social marginals he and his new found friends are assigned to sit with at the cat's table, which is, I learned in this book, that one table in a public space that no one wants to be seated at. Thus he is lumped in with the ship's other dining room undesirables and comes to learn that what does not glitter may very well yield gold and beyond that the even more valuable stuff of a lived life.

In the Q&A portion of the reading I attended, Ondaatje insisted that the book is not a memoir. He claims that, even though he did take a ship from Columbo to England as a child the age of the protagonist, Michael, he has little if even any memory of it. Ondaatje avers that his unremembered childhood trip sparked an idea for a story, that evolved as it was written, to include unexpected characters moving downstage into significance that

he had not imagined.

Regardless memoir or fiction, Ondaatje's writing here is as beautiful as anything he has written:

A peculiarity of Miss Lasqueti was that she was a sleeper. Someone who at certain hours during the day could barely stay awake. You saw her fighting it. This struggle made her endearing, as if she were forever warding off an unjustified punishment. You'd walk past her in a deck chair, her head falling slowly towards the book she was attempting to read. She was in many ways our table's ghost, for it was also revealed that she sleepwalked, a dangerous habit on a ship. A sliver of white, I see her always, against the dark rolling sea.

What was her future? What had been her past? She was the only one from the Cat's Table who was able to force us out of ourselves in order to imagine another's life. I admit it was mostly Ramadhin who coaxed this empathy from Cassius and me. Ramadhin was always the most generous of the three of us. But for the first time in our lives we began to sense there was an unlairness in someone else's life. Miss Lasqueti had, I remember, "gunpowder tea," which she mixed with a cup of hot water at our table, then poured into a thermos before she left us for the afternoon. You could actually see the flush enter her face as the drink knocked her awake (p74).

and:

Sleep is a prison^* for a boy who has friends to meet. We were impatient with the night, up before sunrise surrounded the ship. We could not wait to continue exploring this universe. Lying in my bunk I would hear Ramadhin's gentle knock on the door, in code. A pointless code, really—who else could it have been at that hour? Two taps, a long pause, another tap. If I did not climb down and open the door I would hear his theatrical cough. And if I still did not respond, I would hear him whisper "Mynah," which had become my nickname (p24).

*I read the evocative phrase Sleep is a prison the day after I finished reading the play A Sleep of Prisoners. The uniqueness of both phrases — I hadn't read either one anywhere that I remember — has prompted me to include this as a fushigi. Or at least close enough for me to blog it as such. [Addendum: The Cat's Table is also loosely entangled in another, 'future' fushigi, involving cats. See The Cat & the Camel blog.]

Beyond the sheer beauty of the writing Ondaatje seamlessly moves through the story using various voices. He has captured with perfection what I remember as the feelings of childhood wonder and acceptance of the process of being alive through Michael's eyes. Things simply are: the trip, the people, the intense life changing friendship that lasted for only 21 days. But Ondaatje also brings to the telling the reflectiveness of an adult considering a particular childhood passage. And he does this with a grace and lightness of touch that manages to keep the child's feeling of life's magic fully alive. And then he plays the omniscient writer's role to elaborate the background of two of the characters.

And Ondaatje brings to fruition a mystery that is introduced, invisibly, quite early, that becomes a mystery well into the book, and closes with human simplicity and gentle, quiet satisfaction.

All seamlessly. A breathtakingly beautiful and fulfilling read.