Occupy by Noam Chomsky

What is your one demand?

[Occupy Protester:] How likely is it that the ruling class in American could develop an openly fascist system here?

[Chomsky:] I think it's very unlikely, frankly.

Blah, blah, blah, a bunch of protesters occupied Wall Street.  The Occupied Media Pamphlet Series has published a number of pamphlets, including this one by Noam Chomsky.  Being a Chomsky fan, I was looking forward to a work addressing an explaining the occupy movement.  I was grossly disappointed.

And not because of Chomsky.  He didn't write this book. What he did, was give a number of speeches and Q&As during various Occupy events; he then, apparently, agreed to have these talks published in the form of this pamphlet.  Undoubtedly, the ideological youth of the movement were eager to have a distinguished scholar and activist's name attached.

The problem with this pamphlet is that Chomsky intentionally avoids taking any responsibility for the Occupy movement.  He supports the movement, both ideologically and practically, but he expressly disavows the role of intellectual leader of the movement.  When asked if he would "ever...allow [his] voice to relay the democratically chosen will of our nation" (whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean), he responds, "My voice wouldn't help you.  And besides, you don't want leaders; you want to do it yourselves."  He'll show Occupy the door, but they have to go through it themselves.

His response reflects a fundamental problem with the Occupy movement: it was a movement that was waiting for guidance and direction.  It was not a movement that guided; it was not a movement that had direction.  As an example, a number of times the questioners asked Chomsky about ending corporate personhood; Chomsky responds by saying, yes, that's a possibility, but let's think about this before we do anything, and let's think about what it would require to do something about it.

When the Occupy movement was happening, I was both fascinated and irritated.  I was fascinated because I liked the idea of grass-roots organization fighting the power.  I was irritated because it seemed like a bunch of people complaining about things without presenting any substantive recommendations for change.  Yes, income disparity is a problem; yes, the foreclosure crisis adversely affected regular people than it did the banks, who caused the crisis.  What are you going to do about it?  I expected this book to answer these questions or fill the gaps in whatever is behind the Occupy movement.  It did not.

And, I want to emphasize that the failure of the book is not Chomsky's fault.  The publishers of this pamphlet want it to be something it's not.  They want to present Chomsky as the intellectual architect of the movement.  He is not.  He was trying to tell Occupy to be its own intellectual architect.  I'm not sure Occupy got it.

Dear Occupy,

Explain to me what the hell you want.

Very truly yours,

-Randy

"Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way..."

"...unless the family consists of a morally depraved patriarch and three highly differentiated siblings who, after years out of contact with each other, convene at the family home for a slowly escalating mess made inevitable by their respective and collective dysfunctions, in which case that family is unhappy in the same way as the Karamazovs."

Arrested Development = The Brothers Karamazov, via blog-friend Helen's new blog at First Things.  What say you, Brent?

UPDATE: Obviously, Helen's cheating a little here by nipping the first line of Anna Karenina.  (Is she trying to make Tolstoy even angrier?)  More appropriately, this post would begin:

[Michael Bluth] was the [second] son of [George Bluth], a landowner well known in our district in his own day, and still remembered among us owing to his [arrest on multiple accounts of 'light treason], which happened thirteen years ago, and which I shall describe in its proper place. For the present I will only say that this "landowner"- for so we used to call him, although he hardly spent a day of his life on his own estate- was a strange type, yet one pretty frequently to be met with, a type abject and vicious and at the same time senseless. But he was one of those senseless persons who are very well capable of looking after their worldly affairs, and, apparently, after nothing else.

Edits mine.

“She tried hard to keep herself a stranger to her poor old father's slight income by the use of the finest production of steel, whose blunt edge eyed the reely covering with marked greed, and offered its sharp dart to faultless fabrics of flaxen fineness."

A sentence from Amanda McKittrick Ros' novel Delina Delaney as quoted by Mark O'Connell in his book Epic Fail, excerpted at Slate.  Can you tell what it means without reading the story first?

According to O'Connell, Ros was a favorite among literary types:

There were Amanda McKittric [sic] Ros societies at Oxford and Cambridge. C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and their fellow Inklings were largely responsible for this enthusiasm: the informal Oxford literary group held sporadic Ros reading competitions, in which the winner was the member who could read from one of her novels for the longest without breaking into laughter. Delina Delaney dinners became a fad on the London social scene, and there was an Amanda Game, made popular by the members of the London Amanda Ros Club, in which one diner would put a question to another, who then had to answer it in the style and spirit of Ros’ writing. Lines from her books were commonly quoted in the hallways of the House of Commons. She was a sort of Bizarro World Oscar Wilde: an Irish author who became a London cause célèbre for the complete witlessness of her writing. Her fame even reached the shores of the New World, with no less a figure than Mark Twain crowning her “Queen & Empress of the Hogwash Guild.”

Notwithstanding the distance of history, what makes this kind of poking fun morally acceptable when poking fun at a traditionally incompetent novelist might be seen as bullying or in bad taste?  Is it that Ros, like Dan Brown, profited handsomely from her poor prose?  Or the fact that she probably wouldn't have profited at all without the fandom of those poking fun at her?  Or is it her irascibility and delusions of grandeur, which would have made her seem like a deserving target?

On the other hand, the sentence above hardly displays a lack of intelligence or control--rather, the fascinating thing about it is that, with its highly structured, ornate circuitousness, it seems like the product of someone who knows exactly what they're doing but chooses to do something so bizarre it's outside of our realm of appreciation.  Once you look at it that way, doesn't it open up the possibility that Ros wrote terrible prose on purpose?  Maybe we ought to be thinking about Delina Delaney as an epic success.

Final thought: If Amanda McKittrick Ros were writing and receiving attention in the same way today, would the New York Times use it as an illustration of the perfidy of irony?

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

     "Well, I think that Michael was a nice guy and I don't understand why he did it.  As much as I feel sad, I think that not knowing is what really bothers me."
      ...
      The counselor said that he suspected that Michael had 'problems at home' and didn't feel like he had anyone to talk to.  That's maybe why he felt all alone and killed himself.
     Then, I started screaming at the guidance counselor that Michael could have talked to me.  And I started crying even harder.  He tried to calm me down by saying that he meant an adult like a teacher or a guidance counselor.  But it didn't work and eventually my brother came by the middle school in his Camaro to pick me up.

Because I have a crush on a girl who loves this book Because the movie looked good, I decided to read this book before heading to the theater.  I loved this book.  Why?  Answering that question is more difficult:

Cynical Randy:  This is a trite coming-of-age high school novel, which is redundant because all coming-of-age novels are trite.  Why does anyone bother reading this shit?
Sentimental Randy:  Because it conveys a sense of the alienation coupled with the desire to belong that people who went to high school can relate to.
Cynical Randy:  You are such a little bitch.
Sentimental Randy:  And, Perks is noteworthy because the protagonist, Charlie, is an icon of sensitivity.  He's sensitive to everything and everyone around him.
Cynical Randy:  Is anyone still listening to this?  This is a trashy high school novel published by MTV.  It's about as literary as N'Sync.  This is Catcher in the Rye Lite, 0 trans fat, 0 calories.
Sentimental Randy:  But, it's not.  It comes from a different place than Catcher; Holden is outwardly critical of everyone around him.  Everyone's a phony, except him.  Charlie's the opposite: he accepts everyone around him.
Cynical Randy:  You're making stuff up.  I'm calling shenanigans.
Sentimental Randy:  Maybe I am.  Probably.  Maybe I just like this novel because I like it, and that's enough.  In fact, that's definitely enough.

Whatevs.

Writing this review made me feel infinite.

Christopher's Review

Christine's Review

Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow

Africa reached my feelings right away even in the air, from which it looked like the ancient bed of mankind.  And at a height of three miles, sitting above the clouds, I felt like an airborne seed.  From the cracks in the earth the rivers pinched back at the sun.  They shone out like smelters' puddles, and then they took a crust and were covered over.  As for the vegetable kingdom, it hardly existed from the air; it looked to me no more than an inch in height.  And I dreamed down at the clouds, and thought that when I was a kid I had dreamed up at them, and having dreamed at the clouds from both sides as no other generation of men has done, one should be able to accept his death very easily.

What do you do when it's twenty degrees in New York City?  Well, you read books about Africa.  Literary Africa offers a kind of earthbound escape, not so different from the escapism of science fiction or fantasy, though it also offers the risk of reducing a continent of real people and cultures to a playground for white men and their symbols.  (This is what Chinua Achebe rightly blamed Joseph Conrad for.)  Henderson the Rain King, Saul Bellow's novel about a Connecticut millionaire who goes to find himself in rural Africa, runs that risk but succeeds, I think, in part because its fantastical Africa is more nuanced than Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," and in part because it's such a terrific novel.

Henderson the Rain King manages to be somehow more personal and universal than the culture-clash narrative you might expect.  The titular Henderson (first name: Eurgene) is a vibrant, wonderfully realized character, brash but needy, overflowing with good intention but reaping mostly misery.  His problems are uniquely his own but essentially human.  A voice nags inside him: I want, I want, I want--but never identifies what it wants, much less how to get it.  It's this voice that drives him to Africa, where he hires a guide to take him "off the beaten path."

Henderson visits two neighboring cultures: The Arnewi and the Wariri.  The Arnewi Queen Willatale identifies his need as grun-tu-molani: "Man wants to live."  In gratitude and love he vows to rid the village of a scourge of frogs that have invaded the sacred, and thus untouchable, water supply:

"Grun-tu-molani," the old queen said.

"What's that?  What does she say?"

"Say, you want to live.  Grun-tu-molani.  Man want to live."

"Yes, yes, yes!  Molani.  Me molani.  She sees that?  God will reward her, tell her, for saying it to me.  I'll reward her myself.  I'll annihilate and blast those frogs clear out of that cistern, sky-high, they'll wish they had never come down from the mountains to bother you.  Not only I molani for myself, but for everybody.  I could not bear how sad things have become in the world and so I set out because of this molani.  Grun-tu-molani, old lady--old queen.  Grun-tu-molani, everybody!"

But Henderson's plan backfires--he blows up the cistern with the frogs--and leaves in disgrace, eventually coming to the village of the Wariri, where the bulk of the novel takes place.  He befriends the king there, Dahfu, who has been educated in Western medicine yet remains ensconced in a tribal system that refuses to grant him total legitimacy until he captures a specific lion believed to house the soul of his father, the previous king.  Henderson, moved to participate in a village ceremony by hoisting an immense statue of the culture's rain goddess, becomes the "Rain King," a title with its own set of ritual responsibilities.

Dahfu has committed himself to a theory of human physiology and behavior that says that human beings can absorb traits from animals and vice versa, and for this reason he keeps a lion (though not his father, who remains at large) in his private room.  By exposing Henderson to this lion, he hopes to unlock his human potential, and although Bellow seems at times to be surprisingly in sympathy with Dahfu's ideas, it seems to me that Henderson blooms when forced to confront the fear of death the lion inspires in him:

My nether half turned very cold.  My knees felt like two rocks in a cold Alpine torrent.  My mustached stabbed and stung into my lips, which made me realize that I was frowning and grimacing with terror, and I knew that my eyes must be filling with fatal blackness.  As before, he took my hand as we entered and I came to the den saying inwardly, "Help me, God!  Oh, help!"  The odor was blinding, for here, near the door where the air was trapped, it stank radiantly.  From this darkness came the face of the lioness, wrinkling, with her whiskers like the thinnest spindles scratched with a diamond on the surface of a glass.

Bellow's prose is really something, though it seems more mature and reserved, less ornate than in Augie March, which was published just five years before.  Henderson, too, is something like an older Augie, in his unending quest to live more fully.  Even Bellow's sense of plot seems more developed, in that it replaces the sprawling, aimless narrative of Augie March with a tight, concise story that resists the urge to travel all over Africa, focusing instead on one story, one friend, one friendship.  Henderson the Rain King avoids the Heart of Darkness trap because it refuses to be about Africa, or about America (though Henderson, the millionaire pig farmer, is as essentially American as the scrappy Augie) but about one man's--and thus every man's--fear of death and need to live, his grun-tu-molani.

Bonus material: This spoilery comic. 

Other reviews:

Books That Matter (really comprehensive)
Kristin's Book Blog
Connecticut Museum Quest (really negative)

The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle

And yet the more I thought of the lady's face and of her manner the more I felt that something was being held back from me.  Why should she turn so pale?  Why should she fight against every admission until it was forced from her?  Why should she have been so reticent at the time of this tragedy?  Surely the explanation of all this could not be as innocent as she would have me believe.

Randy recently recapped The Hound on this esteemed blog, so I mostly defer to his recap.  The aspect of this fun, lively novel that I wanted to touch on was the privacy aspect.  The quoted passage is a perfect example of the pervasive view that people only need privacy protection if they have something to hide.  This mistaken belief is used to erode civil liberties time and again, and it doesn't help that most of the time it shows up in pop culture it's true: the person does, in fact, have something to hide.  Like Randy pointed out in his recap, The Hound of the Baskervilles very much shows the utopian version of law enforcement.  Holmes, as far as I can tell, isn't technically a member of the police force and we don't know exactly what he did while he was snooping around Devonshire, but his intrusion into Stapleton, Lyons, etc's private affairs is much harder to object to because they were, in fact, guilty/complicit.  I could go on and on, but I'll leave it at that.  But the story was fun and Holmes is always entertaining.

The King of Torts by John Grisham

There was his face, in one of those hideous sketches made famous by The Journal, and just above it was the headline

THE KING OF TORTS, FROM $40,000 TO $100,000,000 IN SIX MONTHS. Under it was a subtitle: "You gotta love

the law!"

I was worried about reading this Grisham book and making it only my second blog post here.   I am a lawyer, but I have not read anything else by Grisham...I promise.  I feared I would just LOVE Grisham and  be like that old lady from North Dakota who wrote an absolutely glowing review of Olive Garden, which was roundly mocked by the city-types (see http://www.grandforksherald.com/event/article/id/231419/).  Unfortunately for me (and Grisham, I guess), I did not come away as impressed as Ms. Hagerty was about Olive Garden.  Although, the book did remind me of Olive Garden...

First, like Olive Garden, Grisham is predictable.  The plot is simple.  Clay Carter is a bored and slightly overqualified public defender who falls ass-backwards into a lucrative mass tort against a pharmaceutical company.  After this initial success, Clay thinks he's invincible - and a relative orgy of financial excess and free-wheeling settlements follow. Then, of course, there's a fall from grace - a fall that Grisham couldn't have made any clearer:

Throughout the long night, Clay drowned in self-pity—his badly bruised ego; the utter humiliation among peers,

friends, and employees; the delight of his enemies; the dread of tomorrow and the public flogging he would take in

the press, with no one to defend him.

Finally, Clay, and the reader, learn a lasting lesson from this experience: money isn't everything.  Bet its the first time you've heard that one!  

Second, like the food at Olive Garden, everything in this book is plain and one dimensional.  The supporting characters are all stereotypes: there's the street-wise black guy, the whoring gold-digging blonde, the ambitious young associate and the lazy mooching roommate.  The most absurd characters, by far, were the group of plaintiff lawyers.  They were all slick, fast-talking, uncaring, money-hungry, morally deficient, and universally hated by all, including their own clients.  Consider this quote from a dissatisfied client (a.k.a. any client, ever), which perfectly encapsulates the general attitude towards plaintiff lawyers: 

"You're a bunch of crooks, you know that? I don't know who's worse—the company that made the drug or my own

lawyers who're screwing me out of a fair settlement."

"Sorry you feel that way."

"You're not sorry about a damned thing. Paper says you're getting a hundred million bucks. Thieves!"

 

Its painfully obvious that Grisham thinks plaintiff lawyer's sole purpose in this world is to put good companies out of business for honest mistakes.  In one case, Clay brings a class-action against a brick manufacturer who made a deficient batch of mortar, and his aggressive negotiations force the company to declare bankruptcy. Grisham portrays the brick company as the benevolent corporation who made an honest mistake and the plaintiff lawyer as the evil outsider looking for profit (as he did in every case described in the book).  He spends an entire chapter talking about how Clay's actions led to the devastation of a small town.  This view is overly simplistic and wrong; and I spend most of my day fighting plaintiff lawyers.  The purpose of this book, however, is not to present all sides of an argument.

Despite the predictable plot and simplistic characters, King of Torts, like Olive Garden, gets the job done.  Its just fun to read about large settlements, private jets, yachts and tropical island vacations.  With all my complaints about Grisham, the dude can write.  He dumbs down big ideas, but does do a good job concisely explaining legal details without slowing his fast-pace plot.  Despite its predictability, I never wanted to put the book down.   So if you're looking for the reading equivalent of an Olive Garden meal, read this book and don't complain.

The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay

He left me, and I stayed there and the rail, looking at the bitter Black Sea and its steep forested shores by which the Argonauts had sailed and where presently Trebizond would be seen, that corner of a lost empire, defeated and gone under so long ago that now she scarcely new or remembered lost Byzantium, having grown unworthy of it, blind and deaf and not caring any more, not even believing, and perhaps that was the ultimate hell.  Presently I should come to it; already I was on the way.  It would be a refuge, that agnosticism into which I was slipping down.

Mid-century Turkey, as described in The Towers of Trebizond, hardly qualifies as a foreign country for Westerners: you can't throw a stone without hitting a well-heeled Brit writing his "Turkey book," or a BBC crew filming a television program, or even Billy Graham on a missionary tour.  The protagonist Laurie travels to Turkey with her Aunt Dot, who has two goals: to write her own Turkey book and to aid Muslim women by converting them to Anglicism, though she rarely makes headway in either.  With them is the Father Hugh Chantry-Pigg, an "ancient bigot" whose name perfectly captures the kind of religious boorishness he exemplifies.  Also, a camel.

Aunt Dot's earnestness and Father Chantry-Pigg's obliviousness might otherwise make for a darkly tragic novel of culture clash, but Macaulay's light touch ensures that the setup remains comic and harmless:

But first it was to be the eastern end of the Black Sea, and we were to sail in a ship that took camels and plan our campaign from Istanbul.

"Constantinople," said Father Chantry-Pigg, who did not accept the Turkish conquest.

"Byzantium," said I, not accepting the Roman one.

Aunt Dot, who accepted facts, said, "How many of our friends are in Turkey just now?"

"A lot,"  I said.  "They are all writing their Turkey books..."

It also contains one of my new favorite sentences:

Then he stopped laughing, and said in the voice one uses when a friend has been killed by a shark, "You heard about poor Charles?"

Yet The Towers of Trebizond is heavily invested in questions of personal faith and social religion.  Laurie, coming from a stolidly Anglican family, is carrying on an adulterous relationship with a married man which has led her away from the Church:

I was agnostic through school and university, then, at twenty-three, took up with the Church again; but the Church met its Waterloo a few years later when I took up with adultery; (curious how we always seem to see Waterloo from the French angle and count it as a defeat) and this adultery lasted on and on...

Turkey seems like an awfully odd place to set a story about one woman's struggle with her specifically English religion, but it provides an isolation for Laurie that is crucial to her self-reflection.  Moreover, Macaulay draws an explicit link between Laurie's faith and the Orthodox Christianity that has disappeared from Turkey, only to be found in the form of ruins.  I particularly like this exchange, in which she talks with a Turkish convert to Anglicism who is thinking of converting back to Islam for her lover:

She sighed as she ate her yoghourt.  I thought how sad it was, all this progress and patriotism and marching on and conquering the realms of culture, yet love rising up to spoil all and hold one back, and what was the Christian Church and what was Islam against this that submerged the human race and always had?  It had submerged Anthony and Cleopatra, and Abelard and Heloise, and Lancelot and Guinevere, and Paolo and Francesca, and Romeo and Juliet, and Charles Parnell and Faust, and Oscar Wilde and me, and Halide and her Moslem man, and countless millions more.  It kept me outside the Church, and might drive Halide out of it, it was the greatest force, and drove like a hurricane, shattering everything in its way, no one had a chance against it, the only thing was to go with it, because it always won.

I love the control Macaulay exhibits in this passage, carrying us along rapidly as if on the hurricane of love, yet her prose is brilliantly clear.  And I appreciate this attitude, because I think we are bombarded constantly with the idea that love between two people is stronger and more valuable than any belief or other facet of human experience.  It can be a destructive force, too; it binds us to another flawed person, after all.  No wonder that it blindsides us so frequently with agony.  And yet it is hard to escape from under, as Laurie knows.  Macaulay has a way of making everything seem ironic or insincere, but I think that these words are genuine.

Eventually, Aunt Dot and Father Chantry-Pigg abscond into Russia to convert the Soviets and Laurie has to travel around Turkey on her own.  The farcical elements of the book recede without them, though I did laugh at the bit in which Laurie, having mistook the phrase in her Turkish phrasebook for "I don't speak Turkish," accidentally asks everyone she meets to "telephone Mr. Yorum," until a real Mr. Yorum appears at a hotel and they share a very confused dinner.

The end of the book caught me completely by surprise.  It seems, like I've said, like a harmless tale, one in which even getting killed by a shark is played for a joke and not for pathos.  Yet the ending is incongruous and deeply sad, in a way that is somehow more sad because the book is exceedingly not.  It was, for me, one of "the times when you wake suddenly up, and the fog breaks, and right and wrong loom through it, sharp and clear like peaks of rock, and you are on the wrong peak and know that, unless you can manage to leave it now, you may be marooned there for life and ever after."

Emily Dickinson's Scraps

Rebecca Onion at Slate's The Vault passes along this collection of Emily Dickinson's papers digitized and hosted at Amherst College.  Taken together they give the impression of a mind that is ceaselessly composing, but not always organized; many of these are scraps of poems written of scraps of paper, even old envelopes like this draft of "A great Hope fell":

It's fascinating to see Dickinson in the act of composition here: She gives two options for the last word of the second line, reading either "You heard no noise," or "You heard no crash."  The former is the one I've seen in print, though I don't know to what extent Dickinson composed final drafts and what she did with them.  Similarly, the third line may read either "The Ruin" or "the damage was within," or a third word I'm not sure I can read--it looks like "horse," but that doesn't make much sense.

You can access the whole collection here, though I will tell you nothing in it approaches the sheer simple poetry of this poem, "Kate's Doughnuts":

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

I'm the bitch who makes you better, Nick....I'm the bitch who makes you a man.

Gone Girl is a thriller, and as a result I can't really talk about it without spoiling it.  It's good, though, and worth the read.  I can't remember a book that evoked such strong impressions in me and then completely turned them on their head.  I'm still trying to figure some things out, but I will say this: I think it's probably hard to write a thriller/mystery that straddles the line between predictable and absurd, but this book achieved that goal in a very satisfying way (even despite the review I read prior to reading the book that clued me into the twist).

For the first half of the book, I was distracted and kind of pissed off by the constant, uninspired misogyny.  All of the women were shrews or nags, constantly slaves to the whim of their feminine emotions.  The book is half told through Nick, the husband whose wife, Amy, goes missing, so I wanted to chalk it up to him being a misogynist and that trait being just one of the ways Flynn tries to make him somewhat of an antihero (or just a miserable jackass).  But the hits keep coming from other characters, too.  Nick's sister and father spit out unflattering opinions of women in general, and the perspective comes through in the chapters from Amy's POV, told through her diary entries from the day she meets Nick through her disappearance.  The sentiment is so internalized as she berates herself repeatedly for being upset when Nick is an inconsiderate jackass.

Fortunately, Flynn flips this message on its head.  Earlier in the book, Nick talks about the effect of his parents' divorce on his mother.  His father was emotionally abusive, and after his mother escaped from his influence she blossomed and became the happy, caring, outgoing person she was before she married him.  At this point, I noted that I hoped that the incessant misogyny was a vehicle for the theme that women aren't these terrible creatures, but that men's cruelty toward them shape them into (or make them seem to be) these insufferable bitches.  Nick even confirms this at one point, thinking, "I turned her into the brittle, prickly thing she became.  I had pretended to be one kind of man and revealed myself to be quite another.  Worse, I convinced myself our tragedy was entirely her making.  I spent years working myself into the very thing I swore she was: a righteous ball of hate."   Even this theory is a little suspect because it denies women's agency and ability to live their lives uncontrolled by men, but I thought it was better than the irredeemable misogyny I thought Flynn was espousing.

About halfway through, however, the chapters from Amy's point of view switch from her diary to her experiences after her (spoiler alert) staged disappearance and we see what a brilliant sociopath she really is.  She immediately launches into a diatribe against exactly the anti-feminist situations that had so irritated me in the first half of the book.  She explains that for the first half of her relationship with Nick she was pretending to be the "Cool Girl," the one who pretends to like football and pretends not to mind when her boyfriend/husband ignores her and generally acts like a doormat.  "They're not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they're pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be," she says.  Most of her bile is directed at these women themselves, but that makes sense coming from the character, who, it turns out, has a massive superiority complex.  I think we can safely consider the criticism to be directed at society as a whole, which convinces women that if they are to ever find a husband they have to become something they are not and simply cater to his desires.  I must say, it was a relief to see the book take this direction, not to mention thrilling.  I had suspected that Amy might not be dead, but I had taken her diary character (which it turns out was almost entirely made up in order to frame Nick) at face value, and it was exciting to be completely surprised.

The remainder of the book continues to subvert this message, with Nick becoming the pawn to be manipulated to meet Amy's wants and needs.  I thoroughly enjoyed Gone Girl and would definitely recommend it, especially if you're looking for something fun and not too deep.