Gone girl

I wore my red rain poncho to school. The highschoolers thought I was disguised for Halloween, but no, I was just prepared for rain.

This afternoon, for the first time in the season, it snowed.

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Mary is on quite the Gillian Flynn kick. She watched Gone Girl in the theater. When she got home, she wanted to read my copy of the novel, but I was like, No way, I’m reading it. And so she bought a copy of her own and sped through it. Then she sneaked into my bedroom and climbed over my laundry and stole my copies of Sharp Objects and Dark Places. It took her just a couple of days to speed through Sharp Objects. Dark Places is taking her a little longer to read because she keeps on having to go to her job.

I too finished reading Gone Girl. I told Mary I thought it ended (sort of) happily, but Mary said it didn’t.

(Mary likes to oscillate between extremes of darkness, e.g. Gillian Flynn, and light, e.g. our lovely cat Bianca.)

(One night, Mary was singing “Meow Mix” to Bianca. Then she put on some *real* music for us to listen to, but soon she was combining it with “Meow Mix”:

Are you going
To Scarborough Fair?
Meow, meow, meow,
Meow, meow, meow, meow, meow?)

I digress. What an ending Gone Girl (the novel) has! (I’ll try not to spoil it, but be wary.) When the Bible says that the sheep shall lie down with the lion, it doesn’t say how the sheep and the lion shall each decide to lie together. Gone Girl describes one way that that could happen. An imperfect way. Still, for imperfect creatures, what else would be appropriate? (Or possible?)

The book has three parts:

• “Boy Loses Girl”;
• “Boy Meets Girl”; and
• “Boy Gets Girl Back (Or Vice Versa).”

Part Three’s title is ambiguous. Is it about reconciliation? Or revenge? Or both?

Authors aren’t infallible. But Flynn insists that she likes both of her characters, the husband and the wife; and as awful as we may think those characters are, if someone likes them – even if it’s someone who happens to have created them – there just might be something about them to like.

Whom we like

Susan Wolf, in “Moral Saints”:

When one does finally turn one’s eyes toward lives that are dominated by explicitly moral commitments … one finds oneself relieved at the discovery of idiosyncrasies or eccentricities not quite in line with the picture of moral perfection. One prefers the blunt, tactless Betsy Trotwood to the unfailingly kind and patient Agnes Copperfield; one prefers the mischievousness and sense of irony in Chesterton’s Father Brown to the innocence and undiscriminating love of Saint Francis.

It seems that, as we look in our ideals for people who achieve nonmoral varieties of personal excellence in conjunction with or colored by some version of high moral tone, we look in our paragons of moral excellence for people whose moral achievements occur in conjunction with or colored by some interests or traits that have low moral tone. In other words, there seems to be a limit to how much morality we can stand.

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Anne Lamott, in bird by bird:

I once asked Ethan Canin to tell me the most valuable thing he knew about writing, and without hesitation he said, “Nothing is as important as a likable narrator. …” I think he’s right. If your narrator is someone whose take on things fascinates you, it isn’t really going to matter if nothing much happens for a long time. I could watch John Cleese or Anthony Hopkins do dishes for about an hour without needing much else to happen. Having a likable narrator is like having a great friend whose company you love, whose mind you love to pick, whose running commentary totally holds your attention … When you have a friend like this, she can say, “Hey, I’ve got to drive up to the dump in Petaluma — wanna come along?” and you honestly can’t think of anything in the world you’d rather do. By the same token, a boring or annoying person can offer to buy you an expensive dinner, followed by tickets to a great show, and in all honesty you’d rather stay home and watch the aspic set.

Now, a person’s faults are largely what make him or her likable. I like for narrators to be like the people I choose for friends, which is to say that they have a lot of the same flaws as I. Preoccupation with self is good, as is a tendency toward procrastination, self-delusion, darkness, jealousy, groveling, greediness, addictiveness. They shouldn’t be too perfect; perfect means shallow and unreal and fatally uninteresting. I like for them to have a nice sick sense of humor and to be concerned with important things, by which I mean that they are interested in political and psychological and spiritual matters. I want them to want to know who we are and what life is all about. I like them to be mentally ill in the same sorts of ways that I am; for instance, I have a friend who said one day, “I could resent the ocean if I tried,” and I realized that I love that in a guy. I like for them to have hope — if a friend or a narrator reveals himself or herself to be hopeless too early on, I lose interest. It depresses me. It makes me overeat. I don’t mind if a person has no hope if he or she is sufficiently funny about the whole thing, but then, this being able to be funny definitely speaks of a kind of hope, of buoyancy. Novels ought to have hope; at least, American novels ought to have hope. French novels don’t need to. We mostly win wars, they lose them. Of course, they did hide more Jews than many other countries, and this is a form of winning. Although as my friend Jane points out, if you or I had been there speaking really bad French, they would have turned us in in a hot second — bank on it. In general, though, there’s no point in writing hopeless novels. We all know we’re going to die; what’s important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this.

Sometimes people turn out to be not all that funny or articulate, but they can still be great friends or narrators if they possess a certain clarity of vision — especially if they have survived or are in the process of surviving a great deal. This is inherently interesting material, since this is the task before all of us.

On cultivating one’s own garden

Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; but I tell you, not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these.
[Luke 12:27]

They know me? They like me?
[Dr. Seuss’s Pontoffel Pock, Where Are You?]

The best compliment I ever got was from the Romaniacs’ mother, the Dragon. Or rather it was from the Dragon’s husband, the Romaniacs’ father/chauffeur; but it was about the Dragon. What you need to understand is, I pretty much worship the Dragon. She’s beautiful and good and fierce, and she has no time for me.

One day I was at Popeyes with the chauffeur, and he said, “___ [the Dragon] really likes you.”

That was the compliment.

It wasn’t surprising, because I’d been noticing a softening in the Dragon’s (distant) face. Still, it was good to hear. The Dragon is not effusive. And she has no time for me.

After a few moments, I pulled myself together and said, “How long did it take for her to like me?” “Oh,” my friend said, “about four years.”

Four years.

Two things, I knew at once. First, what an achievement it’d been, getting liked (for who I was!) by the Dragon; all my demonstrations of intense, guileless integrity had finally started paying off. The second thing I knew was that for the rest of my life, with person after person, I’d have a tough row to hoe.

It’s so crucial to be liked, to have some appreciation given you; otherwise, like a shaded flower, you’ll wither and die. But for it to be meaningful, the appreciation can’t be grounded in falsehood. Your integrity must be complete. And that’s what makes the hoeing so very tough.

I write in order to be liked. Like Pontoffel Pock, I seek appreciation — affection — all over the world. These days I’ve been getting page views from Russia, from the Philippines, from Luxembourg. … They can’t all possibly be from real readers; I don’t know what robots they’re from. I don’t understand how the Internet works.

But sometimes I’ll get page views from Montana, from British Columbia, Romania, Ecuador. I can guess who those readers are. Those page views make me happy. And I get hundreds of views from Indiana, which warms my heart, even though I don’t track the different readers.

All this effort to be liked. And yet there’s One who sees perfectly through my guilelessness, who likes what He sees: despite my efforts, not because of them.