Gone Girl

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn is an ingenious "thriller" about which I have two quibbles.

1. Like many such best-sellers these days it takes pleasure in manipulating the reader, constantly pulling the rug out from under one.  I think that some readers must like this because it is so common these days but I am not fond of being led to views that turn out to be nonsense.  Some may think this is even "Hitchcockian" but Hitchcock understood the important of suspense over surprise:  one can be quite sloppy and still surprise the reader or viewer but producing successful suspense takes much more skill.  One criterion is whether one would return to a work or not:  I can't imagine re-reading Gone Girl after one knows what happens, yet I can enjoy Hitchcock's Vertigo over and over again, the emotional and psychological elements being more important than the plot.  And one of the reasons Vertigo is so successful is because Hitchcock revealed the mechanics of the plot rather than making the ending a surprise (he was roundly criticized for this at the time).  I find some of the same to be true about comedy.  Comedy writer James L. Brooks once said that the key to comedy is surprise; I totally disagree.  Again, surprise can be an easy laugh but well-constructed humor is funnier and more satisfying:  Lubitsch and Chaplin are much funnier than Woody Allen and the Marx Brothers.  And when it comes to detective stories or murder mysteries I much prefer the first-person narration of John D. MacDonald and Raymond Chandler, where we only learn and know things as Travis McGee and Philip Marlowe do and we are only manipulated as they are, not by a smug author.

2. I reject the idea that foul language is necessary in the name of "realism", even if it were true that middle-class people, such as those in Gone Girl, use it constantly.  It is ineffective and numbing to use it as routinely as it is in Flynn's novel.  In March Jesse Sheidlower had a piece in The New York Times that suggested the paper should use various vulgarities, again in the name of "realism."  I think there is little to gain in that and much to lose, in the coarsening of public discourse.  The more these words are used the more they lose any power to shock (which some, of course, would think a good thing), as has happened as they become more common in The New Yorker, among other places.  I once thought that the loosening of censorship on films and cable TV would be liberating for writers, but it seems --at least so far-- that's it's become a lazy substitute for good writing. One of the (many) reasons I think that Vince Gilligan's Breaking Bad is a better series than The Sopranos or The Wire is because it was on AMC rather than HBO and therefore the writers could not take the easy way out and use vulgarities as a substitute for good writing.