Gone Girl: So. Terrible.

I’m training for another marathon (have I mentioned that already?) and so am back into listening to books while training (nothing like a good “read” to get you through the kilometres). My latest listen was to Gillian Flynn’s *Gone Girl* and I’m sorry to report that it was Just Terrible.

Sentences like “he was so angry his head literally exploded” —> needless to say the rest of the paragraph did not focus on a headless protagonist as the “literally” might have you believe <— occur with a frustrating regularity. The contrived oppositional accounts of events do, at first, provide some interesting questions about narrative reliability, but the device gets dull as the intent for the back-and-forth becomes a clear echo of the “he said” “she said” question the book asks about reliability and persuasion. In short the form reflects the content far too closely to be anything other than obnoxious.

And then there’s the sexism. The reduction of women to whores, bitches or saints with nothing else to complicate them – no stand alone reasons for their actions or feelings – all is naught but evidence of their eternal and inherent archetypes. It was gross. And frustrating. And so terrible.

Forget the hype. Ignore the book. There’s nothing thrilling about wishing – so hard – that characters would just kill one another already and finding that they just won’t.