Sometimes Being Overweight Can Also Lead To Knee Problems

The other day I either meant to say and forgot or hadn't yet mulled over the idea that the "big idea" in Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl is that modern lives (or recently modern, or at least in the last ten years) are so mediated that — do I need a spoiler alert here? I'll try not to have to — the, uh, main character makes the surprising and somewhat unbelievable decision that the, uh, trying not to use a pronoun, main character decides that this person can't live without the other person.

If you look at the characters that inhabit Gone you realize that they all interact in the story through the mediated world — from the groupie using the cable show to get 15 minutes of fame to the former magazine writer protagonist to the side characters who are on Facebook. Flynn makes a point of circling back to these details and in the end (and this is a spoiler), it only makes sense that the logical end of the story is to create a reality television show. There's some stuff in the end about spinning and controlling narratives that makes sense in retrospect this way.

As a sort of aside, it's funny that even in the definition of "cipher" they use the sentence "She was nothing more than a cipher" — I think that's the only way I've ever heard the word used! Specifically, the "nothing more than a" construction . . .

Something I really did forget to mention was that it was a smart move on Flynn's part to make the characters writers. This is something Meg Wolitzer does really well (in my opinion) in The Wife: A Novel. As an aside, I wonder if the colonic appendage of "A Novel" in titles is ever done sincerely or if it's always supposed to sound ironically pretentious and ridiculous. Anyway, (and this is also a spoiler — a real one this time) by making her first-person protagonist a writer, Wolitzer lets herself indulge in fun perceptive writing; Flynn does the same — it's a great strategy because writers seem to default to "writing really perceptive fun prose" and so often it sounds fucking asinine to have, say, a nine-year-old protagonist spout wonderfully perceptive ideas about the world. Maybe it's a personal failing of mine, but I find it absurd, reprehensible, vile and several other outsized, inappropriate terms when characters are, uh, ciphers for a pretentious writer's "wonderfully big ideas." Might as well go with your strengths and just make your characters writers. Call spades spades and whatnot.

Also, one more thing I forgot — and this came to me while washing dishes and I just spaced — was that I really wanted to title the original post "If You Seek Amy." If I wrote headlines in the Book Review section, this is what I would have chosen.