Sorry about the unclear title, haha. Anyway, I feel it is our duty to take down rich, pretentious, ass-suckingly untalented “artists.” And I’ve been wanting to take down this dreadful book for years. I couldn’t finish it; I could barely start it. The writing is so insufferably “cutesy” that it makes me want to scream. Before telling you what I hated about it, I want to share some quotes from some 1-star Amazon reviews for it:
I believe this book is the worst I have ever read; the ending really was the sprinkles on top of stupidity.
(apparently Amazon wants reviewers to use at least 20 words):
This book sucks. Zero stars. Don’t waste your time. I need eleven more words. This book sucks. This book sucks.
Junk food for the spirit.
If you overwhelmingly want to read this book, read the first half, then throw the book into a fireplace.
Twilight, 50 Shades and now Gone Girl. It’s a great time to be a talentless hack. Every now and again you come across a book so badly written, with characters so terrible, so unsympathetic, so stupid, that you wonder who the author slept with to get this book published. And when that book gets turned into a movie, you know they’ve sold their soul and body to Satan. The plot, predictable, ending predictable and moronic. The characters are all too easy to hate. To be a good book you need characters people can love and relate to. Not characters you want to beat with a spike-covered bat, chop into pieces and feed to a pig, then kill the pig and burn the body, then take the ashes and ship them to the center of the sun. Don’t read this book. I could feed my dog alphabet soup and she could poop out something better.
If this book were a person I’d slap it.
Writing insufferably cute.
A lot of the one-star reviews liked the writing style (heaven forbid) but hated the ending and the unlikeable characters and the profanity. I will give Ms. Flynn the fact that she has more imagination than I do (almost every writer does), but that’s it. I was not in the least surprised to hear that she had written for Entertainment Weekly magazine. I found some of her writing for it online (seems to be mostly TV program reviews) and most of it was just straightforward opinions, nothing too painful. Then we find this “gem” of a beginning sentence for a 2007 review of NCIS:
TV so easy, it’s like a diligent mama bird chews each episode for me and places it gently in my drooling mouth, right next to those Cheezits I forgot to swallow.
That hurts my brain. It also sort of makes me want to never write any sentences that I think are funny and clever, ever again, lest they seem “cutesy” to someone else. Oh well, you have to be who you are, I guess, and, though I’ll never reach her level of fame and income, I couldn’t suck that much. What strikes me as being great or horrible about most writing is not the whole plot, the entire book, the “character development,” the foreshadowing, the “voice” and all that other Freshman Comp crap, it’s whether or not I enjoy individual sentences or paragraphs or descriptions. And this here “Gone Girl,” great title notwithstanding, is full of awful crap like this:
He has a great smile, a cat’s smile. He should cough out yellow Tweety bird feathers, the way he smiles at me.
or
I even swoon over his socks, which he manages to shed in adorably tangled poses, as if a puppy carried them in from another room.
or
They were the Pet Rock of parenting.
or (Holy Mother of God, please kill me)
lazy-condomed sex
or this final horror:
Our dignified elephant of a chesterfield with its matching baby ottoman sits in the living room looking stunned, as if it got sleep-darted in its natural environment and woke up in this strange new captivity, surrounded by faux-posh carpet and synthetic wood and unveined walls. I do miss our old place, all the bumps and ridges and hairline fractures left by the decades. (Pause for attitude adjustment.)
Now, the sentence right before the parenthesis isn’t so awful, not great, but not unbearable, and a normal comment an author might make, but then it’s as if she doubted herself for slipping in a sentence that wasn’t ridiculously sophomoric and moronic, and decided she needed the “aside” about adjusting her attitude.
There are books which just leave a sick feeling in my gut, that are just sort of inept in a “background” kind of way, but if I were to dissect the book line by line, paragraph by paragraph, I couldn’t come up with individual segments like I was able to here, to back up my claims, that (as I’ve bored some readers with before), a bear pissing on a tree would be a better use of that tree than turning it into paper for this abomination.
One good thing about “Gone Girl,” though–now I have the search phrase “what the fuck is lazy-condomed sex, you talentless twit gillian flynn” burned into my computer’s memory. And, of course, of course, when I tried to search for “lazy-condomed sex,” Google tried to tell me I meant “lazy condom sex.” Only when I put quotes around it did Google finally admit that that stupid phrase actually existed somewhere and that my memory wasn’t completely batty.
What would lazy-condomed sex be anyway? The “wearer” is too lazy to “bottom it out” on Little Waldo, so it flop-flops bizarrely around inside the woman, kinda destroying the vibe? Is that a thing?
I borrowed the book from the library, thank goodness, and returned it without finishing it. Oh, and thanks, PBS, for mystifyingly including this crap book in your 100 books in the “Great Read” thing, so that you actually made this now-old book a current topic, thereby ruining the “joke” I was going to end this dumb post with, which was: “Now that I’ve reviewed this hot new bestseller, I’m going to follow it with discussions about that new stalker song “You Oughta Know” by Alanis Morrissette, about whether Nixon should resign, and what that crazy Adolf guy thinks he’s doing by annexing Czechoslovakia.”
Oh well, I can’t have nice things, I guess.
Man, if this is my “big comeback” after a 9-month hiatus, well, you deserve better, but what the hell. Thanks for reading.