David Patneaude's Blog: Different Worlds - Posts Tagged "suspense"
Gone Girl
Unless I'm on vacation or taking some other major break from the day-to-day, I read almost exclusively on the Stairmaster at the Y. Reading does a lot of things for me, but one of the benefits of reading while exercising is the diversion, the anesthetic effect of having something else to think about besides the heart-pumping, breath-stealing, sweat-producing annoyance of climbing 165 flights of stairs in 35 minutes or so. Anyway, that's where I read now and where I've read in the recent and not so recent past--until I picked up GONE GIRL and discovered that 35 minutes and waiting until the next day to get back at the book just wasn't doing it, that is. Gillian Flynn definitely knows how to get a reader hooked, and she does it the right way, with fine writing, complex characters, and a strong plot. I found that I simply couldn't NOT read it, and I was prepared to love it.
But in the end I found it fell a little short for me--not as a writer, necessarily, because she definitely knows how to write--characters, scenes, dialogue, conflict, suspense, narrative format--and not really as a reader, although there were a few places where the suspension of disbelief was stretched thin and close to the breaking point, and I could see through the sheerness of it to the devices holding the whole thing up. What it came down to was my viewpoint as a human--after getting to know the characters and having a lot invested in them and having hopes and expectations for how things should turn out--and having that viewpoint soured.
In a way, that's a testament to the author's skills. If we didn't think of the characters as fellow human beings, if we didn't care about them, we wouldn't care what happened to them, good or bad. We wouldn't be thinking about it days or weeks later. But still...
This isn't another CORRECTIONS, or HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG, where it's hard to care about any of the characters and in the end all you're left with is admiration for the writing and an empty feeling about the story itself and questions about the point of it all. But it's not far removed from those books. The characters in GONE GIRL are flawed, but for a while we're allowed to pull for them, and then we're not. Maybe that's consistent with the overall narrative, but I don't have to like it. Not everything provocative is booth engaging and enjoyable. Just ask anyone who's had to endure Miley Cyrus or that guy with the foot-long fingernails or two dogs humping. Distaste and disappointment aren't feelings you can turn off or on; they just are.
But in the end I found it fell a little short for me--not as a writer, necessarily, because she definitely knows how to write--characters, scenes, dialogue, conflict, suspense, narrative format--and not really as a reader, although there were a few places where the suspension of disbelief was stretched thin and close to the breaking point, and I could see through the sheerness of it to the devices holding the whole thing up. What it came down to was my viewpoint as a human--after getting to know the characters and having a lot invested in them and having hopes and expectations for how things should turn out--and having that viewpoint soured.
In a way, that's a testament to the author's skills. If we didn't think of the characters as fellow human beings, if we didn't care about them, we wouldn't care what happened to them, good or bad. We wouldn't be thinking about it days or weeks later. But still...
This isn't another CORRECTIONS, or HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG, where it's hard to care about any of the characters and in the end all you're left with is admiration for the writing and an empty feeling about the story itself and questions about the point of it all. But it's not far removed from those books. The characters in GONE GIRL are flawed, but for a while we're allowed to pull for them, and then we're not. Maybe that's consistent with the overall narrative, but I don't have to like it. Not everything provocative is booth engaging and enjoyable. Just ask anyone who's had to endure Miley Cyrus or that guy with the foot-long fingernails or two dogs humping. Distaste and disappointment aren't feelings you can turn off or on; they just are.
