"Gone Girl"

[fiefoe]

Can a novel set in contemporary America be called distopian? Overall I guess we are not supposed to love Amy and Nick. The part of Amy's misadventure with the fish poacher was a somewhat intriguing tangent.

• it was the back of the head I saw, and there was something lovely about it, the angles of it. Like a shiny, hard corn kernel or a riverbed fossil.
• her mind. Her brain, all those coils, and her thoughts shuttling through those coils like fast, frantic centipedes. Like a child, I picture opening her skull, unspooling her brain and sifting through it, trying to catch and pin down her thoughts.
• I rarely woke at such a rounded time. I was a man of jagged risings: 8:43, 11:51, 9:26.
• Here was a task, a purpose, held out on my sister’s palm like a plum.
• There’s something disturbing about recalling a warm memory and feeling utterly cold.
• But our first customer, a gray-haired woman in bifocals and a pink jogging suit, said, “I like the name. Like in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Audrey Hepburn’s cat was named Cat.
• quaint little 1950s town that bloated itself into a basic midsize suburb and dubbed it progress.
• Just one olive, though. It is a line that is only a little funny, but it already has the feel of an inside joke, one that will get funnier with nostalgic repetition.
• I’ve always found my wife a bit dazzling, in the purest sense of the word: to lose clear vision, especially from looking at bright light.
• and a genuine tradition was born, one I’d never forget: Amy always going overboard, me never, ever worthy of the effort. Happy anniversary, asshole.
• the paper so creamy I expected my fingers to come away moist... Neither of us liked our presents; we’d each have preferred the other’s. It was a reverse O. Henry.
• They flitted in and out of my life like well-timed stage actors, one going out the door as the other came in
• The whole book made me want to punch Amy right in her stupid, spotless vagina.)
• They have no harsh edges with each other, no spiny conflicts, they ride through life like conjoined jellyfish—expanding and contracting instinctively, filling each other’s spaces liquidly.
• but the children of charmed marriages have their own particular challenges.
• Give me a man with a little fight in him, a man who calls me on my bullshit. (But who also kind of likes my bullshit.)
• isn’t that the point of every relationship: to be known by someone else, to be understood?
• maybe he understands that you’ve made a witty remark but, unsure of what to do with it, he holds it in his hand like some bit of conversational phlegm he will wipe away later.
• unreal, I believed I had become merely a shimmer. The chilly mist on my skin pulled me back, Amy pulled me back, toward the golden glow of the tent, where the gods were feasting, everything ambrosia. Our whole courtship was just like that.
• Nick is like a good stiff drink: He gives everything the correct perspective. Not a different perspective, the correct perspective.
• I spend my days thinking of sweet things to do for him—go buy a peppermint soap that will sit in his palm like a warm stone, or maybe a slim slice of trout that I could cook and serve to him, an ode to his riverboat days.
• My wife had a brilliant, popping brain, a greedy curiosity. But her obsessions tended to be fueled by competition: She needed to dazzle men and jealous-ify women.. In New York, Amy made and shed friends weekly; they were like her projects.
• And even as my wife was offering me this kindness, I was thinking, Of course she has to stage-manage this.
• Over just a few years, the old Amy, the girl of the big laugh and the easy ways, literally shed herself, a pile of skin and soul on the floor, and out stepped this new, brittle, bitter Amy.
• She released her grievances like handfuls of birdseed: They are there, and they are gone.
• we all eat small plates of food bites that are as decorative and unsubstantial as we are.
• (“I hate them all, just by name,” said Amy, a grave judge of anything trendy. The good stuff in me I got from my mom. I can joke, I can laugh, I can tease, I can celebrate and support and praise—I can operate in sunlight, basically—but I can’t deal with angry or tearful women.
• they discuss people with jobs in the pitying tones you talk about a fat girl with “such a nice face.”
• Being married to Nick always reminds me: People have to do awful things for money. Ever since I’ve been married to Nick, I always wave to people dressed as food.
• I can’t recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn’t immediately reference to a movie or TV show... the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can’t anymore.
• person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters. And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don’t have genuine souls.
• spoke delicately, as if my words were an unwieldy stack of fine china.
• Basically, he does a lot of things over. It’s nice to take some actual do-overs, when you get so few in life.
• Confusing spineless with morality.