Dueling unreliable narrators: Gone Girl Part II

Gone Girl's Amy Dunne, played by
Rosamund Pike.

Last week, I looked at the novel, Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn, from the perspective of reading an unreliable narrator. I focused entirely on Nick Dunne though, and neglected the other main character, Amy Elliot Dunne, so I thought I owed her more page time. FYI: discussing any part of this book is in itself a *spoiler alert* so reader beware!

To recap: the structure of Gone Girl is a battle of dueling unreliable narrators. The chapters alternate between the point of view of a husband (Nick) and his wife (Amy), and both are unreliable because they omit, distort, and/or are incapable of accurately interpreting information. At the beginning of the book, we're led to believe that a wife has been murdered by her husband, and by the end, we find out that the wife has, in fact, only staged her murder in order to frame her husband.

Actually, I should probably correct myself and say that there are three unreliable narrators--Nick and two versions of Amy. In the first part of the book (Boy Loses Girl), there is Diary Amy--Amy as presented in the pages of a diary that she creates and, later, plants as evidence against Nick. The other is the Real Amy--the one who has gotten away with staging her murder and framing Nick. For the purposes of this post, I'll deal with Diary Amy.

The challenge with Nick's character was to make a murder suspect compelling and charming enough for the reader to want to follow his side of the story. The challenge with Diary Amy is the opposite--she has to read convincingly enough as a victim and a heroine to keep the reader from guessing her more malignant role in this drama. Here's a rundown of how I think this works:

1. The brilliant device of the diary!

This one fact alone--that we think we are reading diary pages--is enough to lure us into a false sense of intimacy and truthfulness, even though the self Amy presents in these pages is largely made up. After all, we might think, who lies in their diary?

The sense of time created by these diary entries is also significant--the entries are spontaneous, genuine, and most importantly, created prior to Amy's disappearance--they presume no foreknowledge of future events, other than Amy's suspicions and worries. This is an important distinction, when compared to Nick's chapters, which are written after Amy's disappearance, and automatically put him in the position of trying to explain what happened to his wife. That means, from the reader's point of view, Nick is under pressure to convince us (and himself) of his innocence from the beginning, while Diary Amy is automatically presumed innocent.

2. Amy's witty self-deflection

Snipped from Favim.com.

The very first paragraph of Amy's diary reads:

"Tra and la! I am smiling a big adopted-orphan smile as I write this. I am embarrassed at how happy I am, like some Technicolor comic of a teenage girl talking on the phone with my hair in a pony tail, the bubble above my head saying, I met a boy! (p10)"

The rest of the diary very much continues in this voice--the delicious mix of irony and earnestness of a reluctant yet head-over-heels woman in love. It's almost hard not to fall in love with her oneself--she's gushy and goo goo-eyed over Nick, but she's endlessly self-aware and self-deprecating about it: "I have become a wife, I have become a bore, I have been asked to forfeit my Independent Young Feminist card. (p38)" Against her best instincts, she has devoted her life to her man.

The result is an expert kind of self-deflection--the portrait of the kind of woman we should hate (and that, in fact, the Real Amy does hate, as we'll find out later), the kind whose life begins and ends with her husband's--and yet we like her! She's just like us--she's smart and funny and, yes, complicated.

3. Nick destroys Amy's dewy-eyed dreams

Diary Amy's treatment of Nick is very cleverly done. He very rarely speaks in her pages--the good times of their relationship are described mostly in summary. However, when Nick does speak, he is hostile or withholding, and hoists himself with his own petard--all without Diary Amy having to pass judgment. This is crucial, since if she did, it would damage her credibility and likability to the reader. Instead, she focuses on scenes that emphasize Nick's tendency toward self-entitlement and passive-aggression. Here's one where he skips their anniversary dinner after his colleagues are laid off, in order to buy them drinks. He stays out all night and when he shows up the next day, Diary Amy greets him with a present to show no hard feelings:

"He sat down...and glanced at the present on the table and said nothing....He clearly wasn't going to even graze against an apology--hey, sorry things got screwy today. That's all I wanted, just a quick acknowledgment. 

'Happy day after anniversary,' I start. 

He sighs, a deep aggrieved moan. 'Amy, I've had the crappiest day every. Please don't lay a guilt trip on me on top of it....' 

'I was just saying happy anniversary.'

'Happy anniversary, my asshole husband who neglected me on my big day.'

We sit silent for a minute, my stomach knotting. I don't want to be the bad guy here. I don't deserve that....(p67)"

Diary Amy comes across as making a good faith effort, while Nick reads like a self-involved jerk.

In short, Diary Amy is a brilliant construction of an unreliable narrator--one that reads just as compellingly after the reader knows the novel's outcome, as before.

Dueling unreliable narrators: Gone Girl

Well, I'm late to the party, but I finally read Gone Girl (Random House: New York, NY; 2012) by Gillian Flynn, which is a really interesting case of dueling unreliable narrators. (By the way, there's pretty much nothing you can say about this book that is not a spoiler alert--so reader beware!)

Just to refresh the memory, an unreliable narrator is a narrator who is not credible. Sometimes they're not credible because they're emotionally or mentally instable, sometimes because they omit or distort information, and sometimes because they are too naive or inexperienced to accurately interpret the world around them. In the case of Gone Girl, both narrators--the husband Nick and the wife Amy--are unreliable, since they alternately lie, omit information, or exhibit various aspects of narcissism. They "duel" back and forth in the sense that the chapters alternate between their points of view and slowly reveal information that has been hidden or manipulated--over time, we discover that the initial situation is not what it appears to be (the murder of a wife by a husband), but is something else entirely (a wife staging her own murder and framing her husband for the crime).

What makes studying an unreliable narrator interesting is that he/she is, by definition, a kind of liar. We tend to be repulsed by liars, though, so the challenge to keeping a reader invested is making him/her a compelling liar. Here is a quick look at what I think makes Nick compelling as a narrator--even though he makes for a convincing murder suspect at the start of the book.

1. He comes across as a pathetic puppy dog.

Guilty puppy snipped from here.

The "screen" his narration uses, if you will, is that he's basically a well-meaning, sweet guy who can't help the fact that he's a loser with poor decision making skills--not someone who could mastermind a cold-blooded murder. This screen is just endearing enough to charm the reader, but uncomfortable enough for the audience to withhold trust. 

For example, Nick openly admits to one of the bad decisions that has contributed to the deterioration of his marriage--promising his sister that he'll move to Missouri to take care of his parents without consulting Amy--but then he disappears into a sort of hang-dog act (pun!) to excuse himself. He says:

"I simply assumed I would bundle up my New York wife....and transplant her to a little town on the river in Missouri, and all would be fine. I did not yet understand how foolish, how optimistic, how just like Nick [a phrase Amy uses when placing blame on him] I was for thinking this. The misery it would lead to. (p6)" 

His sentiments seem to reveal genuine regret, and yet they also manage to divert responsibility by invoking Amy's past criticisms and by implying that he was too young and naive to understand the situation--he's good at making external factors the straw man, while simultaneously slinking away with his tail between his legs. 

To further complicate, the character Amy
is the star of her own kid's book series--
written by her parents when she was a child.

2. It's tough to live in the shadow of unbeatable expectations. One of my favorite pieces of the books' first section is the anniversary treasure hunt that Amy organizes for Nick every year--it's so wonderfully manipulative on Amy's part (she devises clues so obscure that hardly anyone but herself could guess them, yet she is disappointed when Nick cannot solve them). This, of course, feeds perfectly into Nick's sense of failure and self-styled "loser" image. Nick's summary of the treasure hunts reads as follows: "...[A] genuine tradition was born, one I'd never forget: Amy always going overboard, me never, ever worthy of the effort. Happy anniversary, asshole. (p20)"

Amy's expectations--in both the treasure hunt and in life--seem impossible and crushing, and it's tough not to feel sympathetic to Nick, even despite his self-sabotaging tendencies.

Snipped from here.

3. The boy's got self-esteem issues.

It's also tough not to draw a dotted line from Amy's role in Nick's life to the role of Nick's father, Bill. At the time of the novel, Bill has Alzheimer's and lives in a nursing home, but he still looms large over Nick's life, and if readers recognize Nick's s inadequacies, I think they also find the evolution of his personality compelling. For example, Nick borrows money from Amy to start a business in Missouri. This makes him feel somewhat guilty and emasculated, and he imagines what his father would think: "I could feel my dad twisting his lips at the very idea. Well, there are all kinds of men, his most damning phrase, the second half left unsaid, and you are the wrong kind. (p7)"

It's safe to say that Nick's self-image and ideas about manhood have been deeply influenced by his father: never be made dependent, vulnerable, or otherwise compromised by a woman. The father also projects a strong judgmental, dismissive energy--a parallel to Amy, who may also see Nick as the wrong kind. Take Amy's constant refrain about her husband (referenced in point #1 above):"Just like Nick, she would say. It was a refrain of hers; Just like Nick to...and whatever followed, whatever was just like me, was bad. (p5)" If Nick is a bad apple, he's an apple fallen from a rotten tree--and that gives his narration a context that rings true.

In short, we like our liars to be compelling, relatable, and plausible, even if they're not justifiable or likable.

Do you hear it, too? Specificity and universality

I came across a clever device recently when reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon. This was quite a popular book when it came out and is now a Broadway show, but for those of you don't know, it is a sort of mystery book written from the point of view of a highly functioning autistic boy named Christopher.

One of the enjoyable things about the story is that it gets filtered through the perceptions of the narrator, which are highly unusual and fascinating to the non-autistic reader. It shouldn't really work, because the narrator tends toward the literal, admits he doesn't understand metaphors, and can't interpret emotional cues from other people--all things that make it hard to succeed at good storytelling. But on the other hand, Christopher loves specificity, feels emotions intensely, and loves a good mystery--and these are the things that make the book come alive.

Another thing that makes it work is that Christopher tends to assume that you (the reader) experience thing just like he does--and when he does this it serves not only to highlight the way in which Christopher might experience things differently from his audience, but also to transmit that experience more vividly than would be possible by simply "explaining" it. Here's the example that caught my attention. Christopher has just discovered the corpse of a neighbor's dog and is highly distraught:

"I rolled back onto the lawn and pressed my forehead to the ground again and made the noise that Father calls groaning. I make this noise when there is too much information coming into my head from the outside world. It is like when you are upset and you hold the radio against your ear and you tune it halfway between two stations so that all you get is white noise and then you turn the volume right up so that this is all you can hear and then you know you are safe because you cannot hear anything else."
--pp7-8. Mark Haddon. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. Vintage Contemporaries: New York, NY; 2003.

Snipped from the Guardian.

Christopher's comparison is to an experience he assumes he has in common with the reader: "It is like when you are upset and you hold the radio against your ear..." etc. From this, we discover that Christopher finds multiple stimuli disarming and prefers focusing on one, constant noise or activity.We also learn that his groaning is not merely an expression of distress, but also a soothing mechanism. This discovery is all the more compelling for that fact that many of his audience probably feel just the opposite--the sound of radio static turned up full volume might actually cause some to go crazy, for example--and for Christopher's age (he is taking pre-college math courses), rolling on the ground and groaning is not generally how most would find comfort, at least not in public.

The fact that Christopher doesn't know that his reactions are unusual gives the universe of the narrative all the more power--it dramatizes his emotional limits and the limits of his perceptions, while paradoxically, admitting us more fully into his inner life. For example, even though we might not relate specifically to radio static as an emotional outlet, the way he speaks about it makes it feel familiar--he listens to it "so that this [noise] is all you can hear and then you know you are safe because you cannot hear anything else." We've all sought this kind of refuge in some context--absorbing ourselves in a task or distraction to avoid some larger discomfort. With this device, suddenly something very specific to one boy becomes universal.

Great expectations: happily or tragically ever after?

I'm currently reading the novel, An Untamed State, by Roxane Gay. Before this, I read an essay collection, Bad Feminist, by the same author. In an essay entitled, "The Smooth Surfaces of Idyll," she talks about her interpretation of Untamed (which came out the same year as the essay collection) as a kind of fairy tale:

"My novel...is in its own way about fairy tales. The story follows a woman who was living a fairy tale and then she is kidnapped and her fairy tale ends.... In the novel, Mireille Duval's  [the protagonist's] happy ending comes all the way apart and then I had to figure out how to put the pieces back together, how to get my characters back to something resembling happiness."

--p122 (Kindle edition). In: Roxane Gay. Bad Feminist. New York, NY: HarperCollins; 2014.

In fact, Part I of the novel is called "Happily Ever After." That got me thinking about happy endings and...well...not-so-happy endings, and how the reader sort of gets a sense from the beginning whether the book will end (a) with some kind of redemption or rebirth, (b) a major tragedy, or (c) a little of both.

My prediction so far (slightly less than halfway through the book): option C
Okay, this is sort of a cheat because the quote above alludes to "something resembling happiness," but I think it will be interesting to write down my experience-to-date as a reader in the middle of the book, and then check back in to talk about how the ending unfolds--tragically, happily, or somewhere in between. Here's where I am so far in gauging this in plot, setting, and character:

1. Plot/conflict
The basic premise of the novel is this: Mireille (a Haitian-American woman from Miami) is taken from her husband Michael and son Christophe and held for ransom while vacationing at her parents' estate in Port-au-Prince. So from the start, we've got tragedy--the best outcome for Mireille is to be returned after suffering brutal abuses, and the worst is to be killed--either way, Mireille's fairy-tale life with her husband and son is shattered. It tells us upfront that there will be no neat endings.

Further, Mireille's battle is not only with her kidnappers, but also with her father, Sebastien, a proud, hard-working businessman who refuses to pay the million-dollar ransom because (a) it means losing the wealth that represents his conquest over a lifetime of poverty and injustice, and (b) he genuinely believes that showing weakness makes him and his family more vulnerable. In phone negotiations with the kidnappers, he tells his daughter to "Stay strong" rather than promising to negotiate her release at any cost. Because family is the central theme of this novel--from the history of her own parents' romance to Mireille's courtship with Michael--this represents, in some ways, the ultimate betrayal. Again, these tragic events point to no good--the best outcome here is a troubled, if not destroyed, father-daughter relationship.

2. Time/setting/structure
However, with that being said, it's made clear that Mireille will survive--physically, at least. First, the author establishes upfront that kidnappings are commonplace in Haiti and that Mireille knows many relatives and acquaintances who have survived the experience and been returned to their families. Generally, it seems that perpetrators are more concerned with getting their money than killing their victims. More directly, Mireille herself indicates an end to the ordeal as she narrates, mentioning her "thirteen days of captivity" and structures her story by referring to "the before" and "the after" of this trauma, as in: "In the before I took the sanctity of my body for granted. In the after my body was nothing."

3. Character/relationships
The rest of the indicators come more from character. Make no mistake--Mireille is strong. Although she isn't able to escape or hurt her tormentors in any physical way, she resists them from the beginning. When she refuses to relieve herself in the presence of a guard, the man tells her she should be more thankful, and she responds, "I'm not going to thank you for a damn thing let alone taking a piss." When her kidnapper orders her to beg Sebastien, via the phone, to save her life, she says only, "I am fine and being treated as well as can be expected..." Her resistance continues, both directly and indirectly, despite being repeatedly assaulted, raped, and tortured, and despite the humiliation of her father's "indifference."

Also woven into Mireille's narrative are her memories of her romance with her husband Michael. She remembers the many challenges to their coming together--some have to do with his being very different from her (raised on a farm, wears "Republican" clothing, oozes Mid-western charm and innocence), but most have to do with the obstacles Mireille overcomes to let Michael into her life--"I do not love easy," she says--obstacles that go to the very core of her identity and body. These include a disastrous trip to Michael's childhood farm (where Mireille plainly does not fit), an equally disastrous, earlier trip to Haiti (Mireille takes Michael's ambivalence to the country as a rejection of her culture), and an earlier miscarriage (which Mireille chooses never to tell Michael about). Through each episode, Michael eventually responds--to Mireille's surprise--with love and acceptance. The resulting portrait of the marriage is of a profound and hard-earned partnership. If this book is about the ways in which love is tested and the way love tests one's personal narratives, then Mireille's inner strength and the strength of her marriage seem capable of achieving some kind of rebirth.

And finally...
Another reason why I feel that the ending will include rebirth and/or redemption is that the novel's antagonists (primarily the kidnappers, and secondarily, Sebastien) are not without their humanity. Mireille gives a complex portrait of her father and, to some extent, of her captors. These are men desperately clawing for the last shreds of dignity, manhood, and salvation they can reach. Mireille's situation--and her body--are literally and figuratively dominated by these men, but in some ways, they are living in a far more illusory fairy-tale than she, especially her father. The redemption of the novel may be at the cost of destroying these harmful fantasies--and the relationships that hang on them--but perhaps sparing Mireille and the life she has built with her husband.

This is my thought process at this stage of the novel--this may turn out to have been a horrible idea, where I end up looking stupid--but I guess we shall see. Stay tuned for spoiler alerts! and whether I was on the right track or not.

"Fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies..."

I just finished reading one of those books that you wish would never end--that book was Lauren Groff's The Monsters of Templeton.

It was inspiring for another reason, too--the novel has a unique method of approach: it takes a real-life town--Cooperstown, New York--and turns it into a magical alter-ego: the fictitious Templeton, New York. Instead of  a pedestrian, run-of-the-mill upstate town that most of us would take for granted, Groff creates a treasure trove of ghosts, lake monsters, and violent family histories for the main character, Wilhelmina (aka Willie), to discover.

Fictional Templeton map, snapped
from Monsters book preview at Amazon

It's a refreshing and interesting approach--a happy medium between creating an entirely new universe (as in some fantasy or sci fi stories) and remaining rigidly faithful to the truth (like a historical biography or a naturalistic period novel). For example, Groff keeps some of the recognizable features of Cooperstown--the family seat of a great American writer, and the home of the Baseball Hall of Fame and Lake Otsego--but she gives them all a twist. She turns James Fenimore Cooper, author of The Last of the Mohicans, into Jacob Franklin Temple, whose family is the town's namesake; she includes the Hall of Fame as is, but incorporates its 1936 inauguration into the plot with a black twist; and Glimmerglass becomes the alternate name of the lake, complete with a Nessie-like monster named Glimmey. She also takes the characters from some of Fennimore Cooper's fiction and turns them into part of Willie's family history: Marmaduke Temple, Natty Bumppo, and Remarkable Pettibones (although Groff calls her Prettybones in this version).

It's also an interesting solution to a common writer's problem--you want to write about a place, time, or subject dear to your heart, but when you begin to faithfully set it down, it suddenly becomes dull and boring. Or, you begin to find other possibilities more interesting.

Real-life Cooperstown map,
snapped from Google Maps

In my Kindle edition, the author's note explains that this is exactly what happened to Groff when she first set out to write the novel. She says she first started reading as much as she could about Fenimore Cooper, because he's so close to the history of the town, and she wanted to stick to that, but:

"...a curious thing happened: the more I knew, the more the facts drifted from their moorings. They began shaping themselves into stories in my head, taking over. Dates switched, babies were born who never actually existed, historical figures grew new personalities and began to do frightening things. I slowly began to notice that I wasn't writing about Cooperstown anymore, but rather a slantwise version of the original."

She then returned to reading Fenimore Cooper and noticed that in his novel, The Pioneers, he reinvented his town as "Templeton, New York," thus granting her a kind of permission to do the same. Groff says: "I relaxed and followed his lead." And in the end, she discovered that "...fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies."

So, reread your favorite author, or take inspiration from a history book, a Golden Classic, or even something as exotic as a grimoire--and don't be afraid to steal, borrow, or completely rearrange material. You never know what could take shape.

Names: get a bigger bang for your buck

The movie "Maleficent" is out now, and besides admiring Angelina Jolie's razor-charp cheekbones, it had me thinking about how Maleficent is probably one of the better character names I've come across.

Creating character names seems to be kind of like how pharmaceutical companies come up with prescription drug names--you don't want anything too on the money, but with enough suggestion that people get your "message" without you having to lift a finger. The FDA won't let you get away with calling an Rx "Sleepy-time", but they're okay with "Lunesta," which is sort of a combination of the romance language root for "moon" ("lune" or "luna") and "rest" (without the "r", of course.)

Same with characters--it's never good to name a villain "Mistress Black Hat" but a name like "Maleficent" tells you all you really need to know, even before you start reading. Consider all the nice little suggestions in the name--it's contains a bit of all of these:

Jolie as Maleficent, from Eonline.

1. Mal or Malevolent -- "Mal" being french for "bad", and "malevolent" meaning evil or ill-willed in English.
2. Magnificent -- Awesome, extravagant, larger-than-life
3. Millicent -- A girl's name meaning "work" or "strength"
4. Mellifluous -- Of sound, meaning sweet or musical
5. Cent -- This might be a stretch, but "cent" reminds me of "century", which suggests something ancient

The resulting combination hints at a character who is powerful and strong, ancient and dangerous, and possibly even beautiful or delicate. Not bad for four syllables.

Bazinga! More learning to write by watching TV

Happened to be flipping through last week's edition of New York magazine and there was a great article on the TV sitcom, The Big Bang Theory, and why it's so popular. One of the reasons given was--Bazinga!--the central character, the emotionally stunted but brilliant physicist, Sheldon Cooper. Here was the explanation:

"There's a character in so many classic sitcoms that's just a big monster. He takes up a lot of room, and everybody has to deal with him," says [Phoef] Sutton, [producer and writer on Cheers]. "Roseanne, Jackie Gleason, Sgt. Bilko"--and Big Bang's Sheldon. "Many times, the best characters are the worst people on the planet. Sheldon is constantly insulting the people that he loves and we just accept it gleefully, because he doesn't understand. He's an innocent," says Evan Smith, professor of television, radio, and film at Syracuse University.

Jim Parsons, aka Sheldon,
in May 5 New York Magazine

We could probably add a million more examples from TV to this list: Archie Bunker, Al Bundy, Alf--and those are just the A's. In fact, when you think about it, most TV comedy centers around the know-it-all, the wise-ass big mouth, or the bungling overachiever. Actually, if you draw that out to drama, some of our favorite characters are the almost-monsters, too, or sometimes even the complete monsters, a la Breaking Bad. The key ingredient seems to be a character who will easily fall into trouble over and over again, whether it's because of a fatal flaw or an Asberger's syndrome-like ability to alienate. All of it is good drama--and even better entertainment.

My spidey senses are tingling

Still from Big Ass Spider

One of my favorite things as a reader is when I start getting vibes from the writer that all is not well, and my spidey senses turn on, waiting for the fly in the ointment to be revealed—if the writer’s good, this happens almost unconsciously. I came across a good example this morning, in this scene from Jennifer Weiner’s novel, The Next Best Thing (I was intrigued by a New Yorker article about Weiner, which I posted here.)

Vibe #1: Trouble in paradise? My spidey senses started tingling as soon as I read these first ~150 words—all you need to know is that the main character, Ruth, has had her TV pilot script picked up for production, and that she’s heading with her boyfriend to a celebration dinner thrown by the network that bought it:

“’So tell me the timeline,’ my boyfriend, Gary, said.... I reached for his hand and was pleased and a little relieved when he let me take it and gave me a reassuring squeeze. When we stopped at the light, I looked at him, marveling, as I often did, that he was actually interested in me, that we were actually a couple. Gary had pale skin, dark hair and dark eyes, and a cleft in his chin... He’d gotten dressed up—or at least his version of dressed up—for the occasion, wearing a belt with his jeans, black leather shoes instead of sneakers, and a sportscoat instead of a fleece. True, there was an ink stain on his cuff, but he was here and he was trying, and I felt lucky, loved and lucky...”

As soon as I read this, I knew (well, subconsciously, anyway) that something's fishy with Gary. Here are some of the reasons why, I think. First, there’s a good use of imbalance (tension)—Ruth feels “lucky” that Gary’s interested in her, while he barely puts any effort into dressing up for her big event. Okay, maybe he’s just a schlub—some boyfriends are—but Ruth also shows surprise at his “reassuring squeeze,” which makes Gary seem less than supportive. 

Vibe #2: Literal (and figurative) out-of-stepness. Reading on:

'The timeline for tonight or the timeline for the show?’ I asked. The light turned green. Gary dropped my hand and started walking, so that I had to half run to catch up.

‘Show,’ he said.

‘Okay. Well, let’s see.... We start pre-production next week, and for the next eight weeks I’ll be working on the pilot. I’ll have to cast it, of course, and hire a director, and a DP—a director of photography—and a line producer...” I paused, waiting for him to ask what a line producer did... but Gary didn’t ask. My voice was high and chirpy, slightly breathless from hurrying, as I kept talking....

‘How long will all that take?’ he asked as we walked across Beverly.

Now the plot thickens. Not only is Gary a schlub, but it’s clear he’s not really with Ruth on her journey—in fact, he’s literally leaving her in the dust (a nice touch of irony, because later Ruth notes that she's already surpassing him in material success). Nor, apparently, is he interested in her party—jerk. Again, there’s great tension in Ruth’s hurried speech and Gary’s selective inattention (he’s not interested in the process of the TV show, only the timeline, indicating impatience and doubt about the outcome).

Vibe #3: Is that all there is? Ruth gives Gary a lengthy explanation of next steps, ending with—if all goes well—the eventual premiere of the show. Gary answers with:

'That’s it?” His voice was flat, his tone uninterested, his expression impossible to read in the darkness as he walked with his hands jammed in his pockets and his head down. He looked like a guy being led to the guillotine instead of to a party.

‘That’s it. Then you have to wait to see if you get good reviews, and if you find an audience, and if you get renewed.’

‘It’s a lot of waiting,’ Gary observed.

‘It’s not so bad,’ I said, trying not to sound disappointed.

My Kindle edition!

Vibe #4: Sweet, sweet vindication! Okay, now I feel totally justified for thinking that something was off—Gary is no longer even pretending to try. And now for the payoff—commiseration with Ruth in real-time as his jerkiness sinks in (“All I wanted was for Gary to be happy for me . . .  [but] all he’d done was ask picky questions, pointing out the problems, prodding at the soft spots. . .”) And there’s nothing like a good boy gone bad for either fiction or pillow talk with your favorite character!

(Sorry, I don't have a page number for quoting here—I usually like to give that, but I've been using my Kindle edition. The excerpt comes from Chapter 4.)

Gesture Writing

Drawing by master-draftsman  A. Watteau

Just read this article in The New York Times today, and fell in love immediately. I took an atelier-style drawing class for 2 years, and just like the author suggests, gesture drawing was a big part of that. There are quite a few things that the atelier-style method of training could teach beginning writers, but this exercise of trying to quickly capture the essence of a scene in bold, broad strokes is one of them. I hope to try it out sometime soon!

Also a good reminder that writing can only be improved by spending time around other types of art and artists--here's a link to the Met museum collection page for works by Antoine Watteau. A thumbnail of his drawing (to the right) is one of my favorites and manages to capture something about the essence of character, I think.