Gone Girl is a missing girl mystery on the surface. On the afternoon of his fifth wedding anniversary, Nick Dunn gets a call at the bar he owns. A neighbor reports that his front door is wide open. Nick goes home to discover that his wife, Amy Dunn, to whom he is not so happily married, is not home. She appears to have left in a hurry; an iron atop an ironing board has been left on, the living room shows signs of a struggle. Immediately, the police become convinced of foul play and Nick becomes the prime suspect, despite the fact that Flynn has pretty much clued us in that Nick is....not a likely suspect. Soon though, a whole host of mysterious and terribly incriminating evidence starts popping up that pretty much points to him, not only the likely, but the obvious suspect.
As the police pursue their case, as Nick tries to make sense of his world as it starts quickly falling apart, we are taken through his and her recollections of the Dunn's marriage. The mystery at the heart of the book is puzzling, but the Dunn's marriage is truly more confounding. There marriage truly is a hell. Neither can stand the other but neither can stand to leave. Very quickly, the reader not only want to know what happened to Amy, but also how and why this couple ever married. What were they thinking?
Actually, the mystery only deepens the further back Nick and Amy go. In the early days, their relationship seems a wonderful union. Later, Nick claims, "I'd fallen in love with Amy becausee I was the ultimate Nick with her. Loving her made me superhuman, it made me feel alive. ..I got smarter being with her. And more considerate, and more active, and more alive"(214). Amy's recollection glows similarly: "[Nick] was the first naturally happy person I met who was my equal. He was brilliant and gorgeous and funny and charming and charmed...I thought we would be the most perfect union: the happiest couple around"(224). And, for a while they are.
Five years on though and all has gone to hell. They become the couple who only stay together because neither can give up the game of besting, torturing the other. And, yet, while Nick is the chief suspect and tons of evidence points to him as the person responsible for Amy's disappearance, Flynn leads us to believe otherwise. So....what' happened to Amy?
If you read this, make an effort not to skip ahead. There are certain structural features, chapter headings, that will begin to give away what has happened. Regardless though, Flynn has contrived a plot that should surprise any reader. And, it's hard to rush through this book since the writing, the detail on the characters, the dialogue, the quips and descriptions are so original and consistently funny. You want to know what happened but you don't want to miss a line of Flynn's fabulous, funny, inventive writing.
Thursday, August 23, 2012
Monday, August 20, 2012
Alif, the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson
Every once in a while you read a book that impresses you a great deal upon reading but which leaves you a little underwhelmed in retrospect. Such was G. Willow Wilson's promising and often enchanting Alif the Unseen, a love story mixed up with a good guys/bad guys adventure chase story. Both unfolding in marvelous, unreal places, the online world and the Empty Quarter, a mythic no-man's land home to the Djinn, mysterious, mercurial spirits mentioned in the Koran as a third creation between the angels and man.
Alif, the main character is, a very real, mixed-blood (Indian and Arab) twenty-something living in frustration with his mother in a backward, unnamed Persian Gulf emirate. He passes his days online and, not of pure Arab bloodscratches out an income of sorts by providing firewalls and encryption to various digital discontents intent on keeping hidden from their State's security apparatus.
In his free-time, he strikes up a romance with a wealthy, upper-class young woman, Intistar he meets in a dissident chat room. Love blooms till her parents insist on her marrying a suitor who comes seeking her hand, a man high-up in the emirate's digital security system, whom the Emirate's hacker community has tagged with the comic-worthy monicker, "the Hand." While she's content to face the reality of her parent's demands, Alif has a tantrum and creates a program to shield himself from Intistar online. Intistar manages to contact him one last time via Alif's neighbor, Dina, a serious young muslim girl from Egypt who holds a candle for the unwitting Alif.
Intistar contacts him to deliver a book, The Alf Yeom, to Alif. It is a mysterious collection of stories, like the One Hundred and One Nights. Alif quickly learns it is an ancient, powerful and much wanted book. In particular, Intistar's husband to be covet's the book and immediately puts the Emirate's security service to work to locate Alif and the book. And, although he's primarily interested in Intistar because of the book, he nevertheless is jealous of Alif and looks to stick him in a prison and starve him to death.
Alif is forced to go on the lam with Dinah who gets swept up into his predicament by accident. Their escape takes them on a wild journey across a variety of digital and spiritual realms, from back-alleys in the Old Quarter of the city where they meet the sinister, mercurial and supernaturally powerful Vikram the Vampire, to immaterial planes where the Djinn make their home, to a mosque in the heart of the city where they encounter Imam Bilal, the voice of a wise Islam. All prove no match for The Hand, and Alif finds himself locked away like the Count of Monte Cristo, starving in the dark without hope, till.....
The mysteriously peers from her author photo bedecked in a veil and the veil is a central preoccupation of the book. Wilson attempts to reconstruct it's meaning by presenting the veil as an instrument of power, a piece of clothing that affords woman a species of privacy and anonymity, the power to observe without being observed. The veil confers a power and pleasure on a par with that conferred by the anonymity of the web. Poor and foreign, Dinah picks up her veil as a class statement, defying her parent's hopes that she will eventually be able to go into high-priced servitude with a wealthy sheikh's family. Not for her.
Although Alif is the central character of the book and the action is instigated by him, Dinah is the book's soul. She is a religious person, but capable of surprises, of tremendous strength and daring. The ostensibly more modern Alif is indeed the drearier, more predictable character. Indeed, as Wilson is at pains to point out, we are all "programmed" by our culture and it is up to us to inject code from elsewhere, to write into that programming some fuzzy logic if we wish to grow and be more. Dinah is there to teach this to Alif. Yet, I'm not sure that Wilson manages to fully pull this off. This is meant to be the education of the digital, non-spiritual Alif by the girl-wonder Dinah and the Imam Bilal.While Alif grows, the nature of that growth is murky: he comes to realize that surfaces are just that, that much lies beyond and behind what is visible to the eye, that one can never pay enough attention, that ritual and routine are necessary to our happiness? I guess. And, he comes to some of this but I'm not clear as to how that reflects Dinah or her brand of Islam.
Still, there's plenty here to keep one's attention and I loved the blending of old and new. It seems important to have modern, imaginative forward thinking voices who maintain a healthy respect for traditions. Wilson seems at pains to keep all of this together, most likely to the displeasure of many, and it seems chary to criticize.
Alif, the main character is, a very real, mixed-blood (Indian and Arab) twenty-something living in frustration with his mother in a backward, unnamed Persian Gulf emirate. He passes his days online and, not of pure Arab bloodscratches out an income of sorts by providing firewalls and encryption to various digital discontents intent on keeping hidden from their State's security apparatus.
In his free-time, he strikes up a romance with a wealthy, upper-class young woman, Intistar he meets in a dissident chat room. Love blooms till her parents insist on her marrying a suitor who comes seeking her hand, a man high-up in the emirate's digital security system, whom the Emirate's hacker community has tagged with the comic-worthy monicker, "the Hand." While she's content to face the reality of her parent's demands, Alif has a tantrum and creates a program to shield himself from Intistar online. Intistar manages to contact him one last time via Alif's neighbor, Dina, a serious young muslim girl from Egypt who holds a candle for the unwitting Alif.
Intistar contacts him to deliver a book, The Alf Yeom, to Alif. It is a mysterious collection of stories, like the One Hundred and One Nights. Alif quickly learns it is an ancient, powerful and much wanted book. In particular, Intistar's husband to be covet's the book and immediately puts the Emirate's security service to work to locate Alif and the book. And, although he's primarily interested in Intistar because of the book, he nevertheless is jealous of Alif and looks to stick him in a prison and starve him to death.
Alif is forced to go on the lam with Dinah who gets swept up into his predicament by accident. Their escape takes them on a wild journey across a variety of digital and spiritual realms, from back-alleys in the Old Quarter of the city where they meet the sinister, mercurial and supernaturally powerful Vikram the Vampire, to immaterial planes where the Djinn make their home, to a mosque in the heart of the city where they encounter Imam Bilal, the voice of a wise Islam. All prove no match for The Hand, and Alif finds himself locked away like the Count of Monte Cristo, starving in the dark without hope, till.....
The mysteriously peers from her author photo bedecked in a veil and the veil is a central preoccupation of the book. Wilson attempts to reconstruct it's meaning by presenting the veil as an instrument of power, a piece of clothing that affords woman a species of privacy and anonymity, the power to observe without being observed. The veil confers a power and pleasure on a par with that conferred by the anonymity of the web. Poor and foreign, Dinah picks up her veil as a class statement, defying her parent's hopes that she will eventually be able to go into high-priced servitude with a wealthy sheikh's family. Not for her.
Although Alif is the central character of the book and the action is instigated by him, Dinah is the book's soul. She is a religious person, but capable of surprises, of tremendous strength and daring. The ostensibly more modern Alif is indeed the drearier, more predictable character. Indeed, as Wilson is at pains to point out, we are all "programmed" by our culture and it is up to us to inject code from elsewhere, to write into that programming some fuzzy logic if we wish to grow and be more. Dinah is there to teach this to Alif. Yet, I'm not sure that Wilson manages to fully pull this off. This is meant to be the education of the digital, non-spiritual Alif by the girl-wonder Dinah and the Imam Bilal.While Alif grows, the nature of that growth is murky: he comes to realize that surfaces are just that, that much lies beyond and behind what is visible to the eye, that one can never pay enough attention, that ritual and routine are necessary to our happiness? I guess. And, he comes to some of this but I'm not clear as to how that reflects Dinah or her brand of Islam.
Still, there's plenty here to keep one's attention and I loved the blending of old and new. It seems important to have modern, imaginative forward thinking voices who maintain a healthy respect for traditions. Wilson seems at pains to keep all of this together, most likely to the displeasure of many, and it seems chary to criticize.
Monday, July 30, 2012
Leadership?
I saw this interesting quote from Joel Ewanick who was head of marketing for GM up till Sunday when he was given the heave- ho. In what I presume was an earlier interview cited in an article in the WSJ, he confessed to being polarizing and adds:
"One of my jobs is to make sure people don't relax, to keep the tension high....I don't mean to hurt people, but everything matters now and we have to be great."
So, I like the notion of people not relaxing or getting slack. I agree that if you are doing anything well, everything matters and you need to convey that to all stakeholders. And, you should always try to be great. Does this invariably lead to tension and hurting feelings? I know it's easy to simply say no, it doens't have to lead to those things but I wonder. And, maybe it doesn't have to lead to those things, but there is a big cost to pursuing greatness without inducing tension and hurting feelings.
Of course, Mr. Ewanick was basically let go from GM, only two years after being hired by the firm. They pulled, or better, stole him from Nissan where he'd been working all of six weeks when GM called. That's not nice, or loyal.
"One of my jobs is to make sure people don't relax, to keep the tension high....I don't mean to hurt people, but everything matters now and we have to be great."
So, I like the notion of people not relaxing or getting slack. I agree that if you are doing anything well, everything matters and you need to convey that to all stakeholders. And, you should always try to be great. Does this invariably lead to tension and hurting feelings? I know it's easy to simply say no, it doens't have to lead to those things but I wonder. And, maybe it doesn't have to lead to those things, but there is a big cost to pursuing greatness without inducing tension and hurting feelings.
Of course, Mr. Ewanick was basically let go from GM, only two years after being hired by the firm. They pulled, or better, stole him from Nissan where he'd been working all of six weeks when GM called. That's not nice, or loyal.
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