Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

To say “Gone Girl” is a love story would be truthful, but it would be truthful in the same way as saying Hannibal Lecter knows a lot about cooking.

“Gone Girl” is catastrophically romantic, as the character Nick Dunne says of his relationship with his wife Amy. It is a story of obsession, of love curdling into something very close to hatred, then metastasizing into obsession, domination and possession. But one is never really sure who is being possessed, who is obsessed, and where the line between love and hatred exists between Nick and his wife. And the book’s success over the last year can be traced to this hard center which lies at the heart of what might otherwise be only a well-crafted thriller.

Gillian Flynn’s novel uses the device of Nick telling the story of his wife disappearing, seemingly into thin air, one day after they have abandoned New York City for Nick’s hometown in Missouri. His chapters are immediately followed by one written by Amy, giving her side of their marriage. The couple’s move was brought on by the faltering economy, and a sudden change in fortune for the couple, who are both very skilled writers rendered unemployed by the recession and the changing publishing industry. Like many couples, moving unhinges the dynamics that have marked their still-developing marriage. Nick co-owns a bar with his sister Margo, and Amy is struggling to find herself in her new surroundings. But Amy has distinguished herself her whole life – the daughter of a husband-wife team of children’s book authors, their creation being an above average little girl named “Amazing Amy.”

Amy’s disappearance is the catalyst for some truths and some lies between the couple, and each has confessing to do within their pages. But we are conscious early on that Nick is not completely reliable with the truth, and neither is Amy, as we come to discover. Anyone who digests television news on a regular basis can spot the outlines of the story – a woman disappears and her husband quickly becomes the prime suspect. But by putting us in Nick’s (and Amy’s) head, the story doesn’t give us a Rashomon rehash of a marriage coming off the rails, but something else entirely. When the book abruptly changes gears mid-way through, the reader is by this time undeniably hooked.

Tricks? Of course. The couple’s words complement and contradict each other, with chapters ending at just the proper point to drive the reader forward. We know we are getting deeper and deeper into some very dark places, but we hardly care. The Dunnes aren’t a typical couple, by any definition, and they have some surprising things to say about the nature of love.

One theme of the book is genuineness. By taking us back through the beginnings of the Dunnes’ relationship, we see once again how two people assume roles in order to impress and attract the other. The act of courting allows a man and a woman to become, in someone else’s eyes, the person they have always wanted to be seen as. The past can be abandoned and ignored, or even discarded. We find ourselves longing for the artificial instead of the genuine, but the truth will out, as it always does.

But what about in our present world, where the line between the genuine and the artificial, or the genuine and the derivative, is always hard to spot? We live in a time where self-invention takes many virtual forms, but few concrete, tangible ones. Nick remarks on this about a third of the way into the book:

“It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters.”

There is another aspect to the story – that of understanding, of appreciation, in the original sense of the word. When love begins in an emotionally immature or still developing person, it usually begins when one person believes the other person “gets them” – understands them on a level previously unknown by anyone else. Usually, this is a positive, and in places of “Gone Girl,” this holds true even for the Dunnes. But gradually, Amy and Nick want each other to fully “appreciate” who and what they are apart, and together. This is not necessarily a good thing at all. One can appreciate a caged lion in a very different way than appreciating one bearing down on you. Some knowledge is better appreciated from a safe distance through a veil of speculation, rather than feeling the full brunt and savagery of the information. 

And then, there’s love itself. In the final chapter of the book, Amy makes an observation:

“I was told love should be unconditional. That’s the rule, everyone says so. But if love has no boundaries, no limits, no conditions, why should anyone try to do the right thing ever? If I know I am loved no matter what, where is the challenge?...It makes me think that everyone is very wrong, that love should have many conditions. Love should require both partners to be their very best at all times. Unconditional love is an undisciplined love, and as we all have seen, undisciplined love is disastrous.”

Since Christian love is supposed to be unconditional, there is a ready answer for this – what Amy is talking about isn’t total unconditional love, not between two people. Because total love is what makes the other “try to do the right thing.”  It is love that inspires action, even constant action, that keeps the lover tuned into what the beloved wants, and vice versa. What Amy is speaking of sounds suspiciously like an act, a pantomime, but it is a serious observation, because for human beings, undisciplined love is disastrous. It easily changes and warps out of love and into the acts that drive the Dunnes apart, together, and back again, over and over. 

“Gone Girl” puts the hook into the reader, and then slowly reminds him that even the clichés that riddle the evening news are embodied by real people, and sometimes the light shines on them to reveal how much larger – and smaller – we all are than the images we cling to, about ourselves and each other.

Buy my book, "Brilliant Disguises," for .99 cents here. Available in all e-formats.
Buy my book, "The Uncanny Valley," for $5.99 here. Available in all e-formats.

'We didn't need dialogue...we had faces!'

"The Uncanny Valley" sprang to life by way of a magazine cover:

In a 2010 article, Forbes speculated that it wouldn't be too long before Hollywood began making new movies with old movie stars - dead movie stars, that is. Not too long after that, a tabloid story had George Lucas buying the rights to certain dead movie star's images in order to use them, via computer animation. Though this story came to nothing, there is still some buzz, every now and then, about seeing a "new" Humphrey Bogart movie, or a "new" Marilyn Monroe movie. Think about it - take an existing actor, superimpose the older actor's face onto the new, tinker with the voice, and suddenly, you can see what happened to Marilyn after "Some Like It Hot."

Of course, there are questions of taste to consider. But I was immediately struck by the image, and by the idea. Anybody who got my last novel, "Brilliant Disguises," knows how important the image of the face was in that book. This time, I was carried away by several ideas - for example, Hollywood replacing someone's natural face with the one it thinks you would rather see. It's the sort of thing Nora Desmond would understand:

Another, more obvious idea, is resurrection. This is the best Hollywood can do - a computer generated image, brought back to life, just on the slim hope you can relive a thrill, just for an instant. 

So my novel would be about an imaginary actor from the past, brought back to life, my only little version of "Frankenstein." But what to base him on? The Humphrey Bogart image obviously stuck with me, as did the role he was playing when he wore that famous white evening coat - Rick Blaine in "Casablanca." Umberto Eco observed that Casablanca does an almost mystical job of mixing a host of screen cliches into something fresh and totally captivating. But my story couldn't be about a Bogart character. Instead, I mixed in a little of that 50s icon who in many ways has been overshadowed by the intervening years - James Dean.

Like him, my character Buck Trapp would only make a handful of films - just enough to gain a cult following, and only enough so that a whole mythology might attach itself to him without any regard for who and what he actually was. Buck Trapp would encounter many of the 50s Hollywood benchmarks - westerns, religious epics, noir mysteries, even foreign films - and he would die violently, and all too soon.

But what to call his film? "The Uncanny Valley" is the name for a psychological phenomenon, the switch in your brain that tells you something that is supposed to look lifelike is not real. For any work of fiction to succeed, it must trigger the brain's "willing suspension of disbelief" - even though you know you're looking a series of still images projected on a screen, and you know those images are actors playing parts, you are willing to be lied to, on several levels, to be entertained. In the case of computer generated images though, especially those involving the human face, the closer an image gets to a real face, the harder it is to trick the brain into accepting it as "real." The Uncanny Valley is the distance between reality and fantasy, an expanse which seems small but can be vast. It also sounds like a mystery...

But "The Uncanny Valley" may also be the distance between the reality we perceive in our lives, and what others experience. We are often the poorest judges of who we are, where we're going, and what we're doing. Like many - too many - entertainers before him, Buck Trapp loses control of his life, forgetting the lessons he learned in a life before he was transformed into an idol unworthy of worship.

It is only when a present day actor, Newman Self, is asked to star in a sequel to Buck Trapp's greatest role that he tries to unlock the mystery of the earlier star's life, and learns what he lost. Resurrection, as the world practices it, is never permanent. But the journey to the land of the dead and back is always with us in life and literature, which is why there's a little bit of Orpheus thrown in our journey, mixed with bits from Mozart, and that other Resurrection which continues to dog our steps. And our movie is a little mixture of "Casablanca," "Gone With the Wind," and "Citizen Kane" thrown in for good measure.

And besides, who doesn't like the movies? The show's about to start...

To read an excerpt, click here. To order a copy, click here.

Buy my book, "Brilliant Disguises," for .99 cents here. Available in all e-formats.
Buy my book, "The Uncanny Valley," for $5.99 here. Available in all e-formats.

I Will Not Let Thee Go, Except Thou Bless Me

In this excerpt from "The Uncanny Valley," the actor Buck Trapp meets his costar Olivia Marks at a bar in the Chateau Marmont. He is also supposed to be meeting his director, Otto Heller. It is the 1950s in Hollywood, and Buck has spent several unpromising years in B movies after leaving his small town life, but understands this role could be his big break.

****

The first time Buck stared into the eyes of his future wife, she was very much the same as she had been when she had first arrived in Hollywood only four months before. He spotted it at a glance, because he understood the feeling. It was the same sensitivity to the stares of others that he had when he first came to the city. Then, Buck Trapp had been Bacchus Trapp - the unpolished country boy, who entered studio offices and arrived for screen tests and rehearsals convinced he would be sent back on the next train. He was afraid to say anything for fear of revealing his ignorance, and afraid of being too quiet. He smiled graciously because he had been taught to do so in adult company, but only a few stale words came from him until he understood that no one was, as yet, out to discover the terrible secret that he didn’t know what he was doing.

Olivia was the same, he felt. She still had that small town look on her face, the look of a girl teetering on a pair of heels she wasn’t used to wearing.

But she was gorgeous. That too was apparent. The studio hadn’t yet polished her, which was good because she didn’t possess that air-brushed, gauzy glamour look the studios cherished. The studios were corporations and they appreciated women who looked like corporations - attractive, aloof, dangerous and only vaguely human. There was something about her that reminded him of strawberries still on the vine, fresh and wet and deeply red. Her flesh was rosy and she looked as though she was blushing as she offered her hand. Though he didn’t notice what she was wearing, it was white and made her blonde hair shine. She glowed in the light hanging over their table.

“Are you Olivia?” he asked.

“You must be Mr. Trapp.”

“Buck, please. That’s me.” He held her seat until she sat back down.

“Well I must say. I’m feeling way under dressed.”

“Don’t mind me. I’m from the country. They tell you to get dressed up and you figure they mean it.” She laughed at him. It was a tantalizing laugh, because it meant she understood he was empathizing with her. Here they were, two kids who just happened to be in this place where they made moving pictures for a living. It meant they had to stick together. “You been here long?”

“No,” she said. “Well, yes. I got here thirty minutes ago. I was afraid of being late.”

“What are you drinking there?”  

“Water. I wasn’t about to start drinking anything stronger. I was afraid I might blow the whole thing.”

She was careful. And smart. Buck thought to himself that perhaps she hadn’t been picked to come here to Hollywood, like he had, but had sought this life out. And maybe she wasn’t afraid to show weakness to him.

So he would try flattery. “You’ve been at this awhile, haven’t you?”

“No. No, I haven’t.”

“Really? That’s quite impressive. I would have thought, since you have that much figured out, that you had been in town at least a year or so…”

Her expression changed, and Buck felt, for some reason, that he had overplayed his hand. “They probably told you I just got into town a few months ago, Mr. Trapp. But I guess you’ve been at this thing awhile, haven’t you?”

Now he felt like he was blushing. He motioned for the waiter and fiddled with the flower in his lapel and stammered out the only response he could think of. “That’s right. They said this was your first picture.” He was careful to avoid her eye.

“This is your seventh, isn’t it?”

“Is it?”

“Oh, come now,” she said. She had education, at least. Probably better than most. She seemed older than he had been told.

“I’m not joshing. I’ve lost count. I’d like to forget some of the ones I’ve been in.”

“I’ve probably seen one of your pictures.”

“Bet you haven’t.”

“Bet I did. Name them.” Her tone was of the schoolyard know-it-all spoiling for a fight.

Buck recited the list. When he got to “The Dead Don’t Mourn,” the one where he played a Caribbean tourist in an unlikely voodoo trance, she pointed at him. “I remember that one.”

“Go on. You don’t.”

She put her arms out, bulged her eyes, and performed a passable impersonation of his trance. “Let me sleep,” she said, like the undead herself, and he knew instantly she had seen it.

“Incredible! I wasn’t aware anyone paid to sit through that.”

“Oh yes. My girlfriends and I did three times. We love scary pictures.”

“Lord. I’ll never be able to work with you now. Of all the things for you to see…”

“Oh, it wasn’t that bad. It was quite entertaining. You were very good in it.”

“You think so?”

“I remember it, don’t I?”

“There’s that. I forget sometimes about how many of these things they’re turning out every week. Like I told you, it’s easy sometimes to forget what you’ve been in. That was the one I wanted to forget.”

“That’s your worst? That’s probably better than a lot of people in this town.”

Usually, it took the new ones awhile to realize that the waiters, waitresses, bellhops, mechanics, taxi drivers, dancers and store clerks around town who populated the backgrounds of every public place had usually once been would-be actors off the train from Somewhere Else, with expectations of box office glory that lasted only so long. That explained the blank stares and long faces.

He laughed, taking out a cigarette case. “Listen,” he said, his eyes still avoiding hers, “I’m sorry about that earlier.”

“What?”

“I don’t want you to think I was snowing you. Buttering you up.”

She smiled the kind of grin he had seen on the faces of mothers when he came to pick up their daughters for dates. A knowing recognition of danger, mixed with an appreciation of boyish charm. There was even a little longing, he could hope, mixed in. “You’ve got a reputation, Mr. Trapp.”

“It’s Buck, please. Do I?”

“I’ve been warned about you, let’s just say that.” Her smile wasn’t disappearing. There was a little self-regard there, and some embarrassment. She probably felt like she was holding some of the cards, but not all of them. “It’s no big deal though. I’m a big girl, even if I’m new in town. I want this picture to work just as badly as you do.”

“I respect that. I really do.” He was patting his jacket for his lighter, then his pants’ pockets, when she produced a lit match. He puffed away and then thanked her.

“You smoke?”

“No,” she said, and blew out the match.

“I’ll admit, I was wrong about you. When I saw you, I thought you were green.”

“Easy?”

“Not the same thing. Can I call you Olivia?”

“Sure thing, Buck. Is that your real name?”

“It is now. No, I mean, when I saw you, I thought you one of those types that need helping. Shelter.”

“I’m a type?”

“I mean, well, you know what I mean.”

“You thought I couldn’t wait to run into those big strong arms of yours and find relief.”

He winced as he drew a puff from the cigarette. “Where’s my drink?”

“You haven’t ordered one yet.” She was really good. Too good, in fact. He was wondering if she might not chase him off the set.

She was quiet for a second as he began picking flakes of tobacco from his tongue. Then he gestured again for the waiter.

“Listen, maybe I should apologize,” she said. “I just met you, Buck. I feel like I’m already fighting it out with you. I am a little nervous. I’m probably trying to hide it.”

He smiled and laughed generously. At least he thought he sounded that way. “Don’t worry about it.” He put both palms up, as though surrendering. He would try to regain some of his position, hopefully get control of this conversation before she wrestled it away from him again. “I have a sister. Our conversations are a lot like this sometimes.”

“Younger or older? What’s her name?”

“Diana. She’s five years younger than me. Smarter than me too. What about you?”

“Yeah, I figure I’m probably smarter than you,” she said. When he realized what she had said, they both convulsed into laughter.

“You know, I think we’re going to have a lot of fun on this shoot,” he said. He reached across and gave her hand, resting on the table, a pat. That was all. Just a touch. He couldn’t gauge any reaction from her. “When did you find out they wanted you for this picture?”

“Got the call a couple of days ago. Mr. Heller called me himself. To tell the truth, I could barely understand what he was saying.”

“Don’t worry. You spend enough time around him, he starts making sense. Then you start speaking with the accent.”

She smiled again, only this time, he thought he detected her trying deliberately not to laugh. “When did you find out?”

He coughed. “Well, they wanted somebody else at first, but he was unavailable.”

“Don’t sound so sad,” she said. “I’m sure they would have wanted you just as much.”

The words did many things to him. He was touched by the almost maternal tone in her voice. But his pride was wounded because she felt she needed to reassure him. Not wounded much, but he still felt as though she was in control.

“Where did they say Otto was?” he said finally, putting the cigarette out when he was only halfway done. He stubbed the butt out as though it had personally offended him.

“They said he telephoned ahead to say that he was running late,” she said. Then her voice dropped a little above a whisper. “But I think Mr. Heller is that gentleman sitting right over there at that table. The one who isn’t reading that newspaper.”

Buck glanced over. There was a bald headed man in sunglasses, and he indeed held a paper at an odd angle which made it hard to believe he was reading it. Especially by the light of the lamp over his table. Though he only knew Otto from reputation, he was pretty sure the joker was wearing a false beard.

“You don’t miss much, do you?” he said. “What do you think we should do?”

“What do you think he would do if we left? Just now. Just got up and walked out?” Her face had no smile on it, just a tempting, teasing look that he recognized from his sister, though with an added refinement. She didn’t look like she was prepared to ignore everything he said, just yet.

“Let’s do it. If I keep waiting for that guy at the bar, I’m going to die of thirst.” He grabbed her water glass and drained it of what was left before she might protest. He then leapt up in a deft move and withdrew her chair as she rose. She thanked him with a breathy, voiceless move of the lips and the two of them began walking out of the bar. They did not look in Heller’s direction. They let him draw his own conclusions.

Without thinking it through, the two walked to the hotel elevator. When the doors opened, the two of them expected a hotel man to be there to push the buttons for guests, but there was no one. The two glanced at each other as they got on. Olivia pressed the button for the eleventh floor. After a second, Buck pressed the nine button.

“What’s your room?” he asked. “Hope you don’t think I’m forward.”

She named the room. I don’t think you’re forward. But my door is going to be locked, Buck.”

“What a coincidence. I’m exactly two floors below you.” The passing of each floor was indicated by a bell.

“Nice to know.”

“And my door is going to be locked too,” he added, smiling in self-satisfaction. The elevator doors opened.

“Good. But if I were you, I’d pay attention.”

“To what?”

“To the fact that this is your floor.”

He looked over and saw a large brass “9” hanging in the wall just beyond the double doors.

“Well, I guess this is good night,” he said. He carried the same expression as a child who has just learned his mother isn’t taking him to the park today. It was as if he suddenly realized her ploy to leave the director behind also involved getting rid of him. He stepped from the car as though he half expected her to follow him. The seconds passed for Buck like stones heaved from the top of a tall building. She hardly even twitched in his direction.

“Good night then,” she smiled.

Then Buck stepped forward to hold the elevator. “Of course, we do need to get to know more about each other, so we can have a good relationship on screen.”

“That’s true, but I think that’s why Otto wanted us together with him. I’d feel something wasn’t right if we cooked up something on our own.” Her voice sounded so innocent, as though she had no idea that men and women occasionally were alone together in varying states of intimacy. But when he looked in her eyes, he saw something else. She was reveling in this! She wanted to see him abase himself.

“Well, you shouldn’t trust the director too much to know what he wants. That’s why they hire us,” he said, with the sound of a man who has toiled in a business so long he knows all the ins and outs.

“We’ve got plenty of time to fill in the details,” she said.

His mind, working feverishly now, understood the rest of her plan. She had arranged the whole thing. Otto would believe that the two of them went off and figured out which room to spend the night in together. Then it would put the director’s fears about casting chemistry to an end, as well as frustrate Buck’s momentary interest in her.

Because, he did have to admit to himself – now he was very intrigued by this woman. He desperately wanted to impress her somehow, but he seemed to be growing steadily more unsure of whether this was possible.

So he stepped forward again and stopped the car, just as the doors were about to close again. The doors noisily buffeted his hard body.

“You want me to say it?”

“Say good night? You already did.” Again, the voice was innocent, almost ignorant, while the eyes were steely and arrogant.

“No. I mean. Well…”

“Yes?”

“Surely we can’t just end up this way?”

“There’s always tomorrow, Buck,” she said. Somehow, the fact that she used his first name thrilled him.

“But what about now?” he asked.

“You ever read the Bible, Buck?” she said.

He nodded, and had another understanding - she had perfectly sized him up, right down to the country boy who was born and bred in a pew.

“Be as wise as serpents, and as harmless as doves. Good night.” The greeting was nearly cut off by the closing doors.

“You haven’t heard the last of me,” he said, and he really wished she could have heard him say it. 

"The Uncanny Valley" is now available.  

Here's the book trailer:

And here's another:

Buy my book, "Brilliant Disguises," for .99 cents here. Available in all e-formats.
Buy my book, "The Uncanny Valley," for $5.99 here. Available in all e-formats.

Predestination and the Hero of Our Time

It's amazing what staring down the barrel of a loaded gun will make you believe.

Late in Mikhail Lermontov's "A Hero of Our Time," its Byronic hero Pechorin bets one of his barracks fellows, a Serbian lieutenant named Vulich, that there is no such thing as predestination. The bet stems from an argument, and comes after Pechorin has survived various physical and romantic threats that have thus far failed to stir his blood. However a game of Russian roulette, so to speak, ends with Vulich aiming a pistol at his own head to no effect, when it misfires. Moments before, Pechorin had sensed from Vulich's manner, and a feeling in the air, that the man was going to die. As he walks away, Pechorin tells Vulich he does indeed believe in predestination, then he goes out into the night air: 

"Stars shone calmly in the deep blue sky, and I was amused to think that there were once wise men who imagined the stars took part in men's petty squabbles over a patch of land or somebody's 'rights.' While in fact these lamps, which they supposed had been lit for the sole purpose of shining on their battles and triumphs, still burn on as bright as ever, while they, with all their passions and hopes, have long since vanished, like a fire lit by some carefree traveller at the edge of a forest. Yet what strength they derived from this certainty that the heavens with all their countless hosts looked down on them in silent, but never-failing sympathy. And we, their pitiful descendants, drift through the world, without beliefs, pride, pleasure or fear, except that automatic fear that grips us when we think of the certainty of death. We can no longer make great sacrifices for the good of mankind, or even for our own happiness, because we know they are unattainable. And as our ancestors rushed from illusion to illusion, so we drift indifferently from doubt to doubt. But, unlike them, we have no hope, nor even that indefinable but real sense of pleasure that's felt in any struggle, be it with men or destiny." 

This beautiful passage sums up our hero and his time. Pechorin confesses to various people that he gains little pleasure from life, and sees it as mostly pointless. He comes to embody a new wave of Russian, less certain of the religious truths that had long dominated the nation, and a student of the absurdity of life. But for just a moment, he is faced with the disconnect between his intuition - which told him Vulich was doomed, and the reality - with Vulich collecting on the bet.

Predestination in Lermontov's time was a Christian idea, of course, though the novel also points to the Islamic idea as well. The argument hinges on when a person's appointed moment of death will come, but the question deals with life as well. What will we do? What can we do? How much control does God have over us? Is the future already written? If we are fated to know Him (or not know Him as the case may be) then should we do anything at all to speed or change the outcome? Pechorin is bored with an absurd life, seeing little point to anything, but we see him in this little moment as questioning all he has believed or not believed, if only for a second. Pechorin disbelieves in it because he does not believe in a divine order, or perhaps any other.

Our time has a different version of predestination that is more scientific, and perhaps more pitiless. Some scientists who study the brain tell us that what we have come to believe is free will may be nothing more than the biological responses of our brain to external stimuli. That our deepest fears and emotions, not to mention our most dire decisions, are the product of silent chemical and electrical impulses is a disquieting and dispiriting thought. In this world as in Lermontov's, the "hero" is robbed of his heroism because heroism itself isn't anything more than a name we give to a behavior, which no longer seems as mystical or praiseworthy. All social strata and every emotion loses its "magic," for lack of a better word. If he becomes a hero then, it is only because he is not afraid of a world robbed of meaning. But a hero to himself? To others? In the eye of the beholder...

But the story does not end with his walk. When Pechorin returns, he finds that shortly after winning his bet, Vulich was the victim of a Cossack sword stroke. He is dead, so Pechorin's intuition, and Vulich's fatalism just before putting the gun to his head, were both right and wrong. Whatever fate was ordained, it was not what we or they expected. Pechorin indulges his own fatalism in nabbing Vulich's murderer, then states that he prefers to doubt everything. "I always go more boldly forward when I don't know what lies ahead. After all, the worst you can do is die, and you've got to die some time."

The author of "A Hero of Our Time" died as a young man, and in a preface to his work says that the novel is full of bitter truths that are meant for people who have dined on sweets for too long. Yet he curiously ends his introduction by saying that mankind suffers a malady and "Heaven alone knows how to cure it!" The argument over predestination obscures an older one in each human soul over meaning and the inadequacy of human beings to find meaning on their own. We learn midway through the novel that after Vulich's death, Pechorin will eventually meet his end in Persia. Through his and our sleepless nights, the silent stars go by.

Set Your Fields on Fire

The award-winning novel by William Thornton

Available now

Read the first chapter here

Some of the coverage of "Set Your Fields on Fire"

 You can order "Set Your Fields on Fire"for $14.99 through Amazon here.

It's also available on Kindle at $3.99 through Amazon here.
Read an interview I did with AL.com on the book here.   
Here's my appearance on the Charisma Network's CPOP Podcast. 
Here's an interview I did with The Anniston Star on the book. 
Shattered Magazine wrote a story about the book here. 
The Alabama Baptist wrote about the book here.
This piece appeared in the Marietta (Ga.) Daily Journal.
Here's the write-up from The Birmingham Times.
Read a story for Village Living here.
This story appeared in The Trussville Tribune and this video.

Here's my appearance on East Alabama Today.
Story and video from WBRC Fox6 here. 
Here's the write-up in The Gadsden Times on the book.
Read a piece I wrote for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
A piece about some inspiring works for me.

This is another interview with the fleegan book blog here. 

Read a piece I did for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
Read another interview with the fleegan book blog here. 

Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

"I am a sick man...I am a wicked man," begins the anonymous narrator of Dostoevsky's "Notes From Underground," in words that sound just as current and common in the 21st century as they must have read on the page in the 19th. It is a voice we hear every day and with increasing regularity, as we become animals both more and less social, more and less giving, more and less self-destructive. Even in the smirking author's voice behind that of the Underground Man is a reminder that human consciousness curdles without attention, and without love.

You could argue that the book and its themes are hardly needed anymore. Over the past month, American society, at least, has gotten a refresher course in just what sick, wicked men are capable of. On July 20, a would-be comic book villain interrupted a midnight screening of a movie by killing 12 people and wounding 58. His act overshadowed a similar one a few days before, when an angry unemployed man shot 17 people in an Alabama bar after other acts of violence, none of them, thankfully, fatal. Within the past week, an apparent racist killed six and wounded two others at a Sikh Temple before turning his gun on himself. And not long after, the author of a Jan. 8, 2011 attack at a political rally pleaded guilty to killing six and wounding 13 others, among them, a sitting U.S. Congresswoman.

In each of these cases, what we have are varying forms of mental illness, diagnosed and undiagnosed, suddenly disclosed behind the trigger of a firearm. Some of the perpetrators seem to us insane, some disaffected, and some simply angry and armed at the worst time. In each case, as in all the cases where some seemingly crazed loner uses a gun to announce his almighty existence to the world, media outlets set up vigil at the scene of the crime and begin to look in vain for the causes of such acts. The inevitable stories follow - the seeking-out of the gunman's neighbors, with either memories of antisocial behavior or the mystified "he seemed so quiet, so harmless." There are the psychologists who try to put the private traumas we all struggle with in society in context. Then the victim's families are interrogated for their observations on the senselessness of it all, in the vain hope of finding "closure." This is the media's hunt, not the victims', because closure will allow the interviewer to move on. If these horrors teach us anything, it is that there will be no moving on for some.

And yet, the world does move on. It is the maddening nature of existence that nothing - nothing at all - brings existence to a halt. The world goes madly on. Yet we all secretly covet that moment when we can, as Eliot observed, dare to disturb the universe. The narrator of "Notes" is just such a being. Richard Pevear reminds us that Dostoyevsky's Underground Man relates to us "the instability, the perpetual 'dialectic' of isolated consciousness." What we have are the writings of a man whose brain will not relax, who desperately wants an acknowledgment from someone of his importance. From the first sentence, we are aware that he is very aware of his sickness, yet he still feels he has much to offer, if everyone would merely give him his moment. And as he himself observes, he not only takes pride in his sickness, but swaggers in it.

"And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something."

Here is a man stewing in his consciousness, as the first section, "Underground," makes plain. The Underground Man surveys history and finds himself akin to its movers and shakers, yet can't quite understand why he has been robbed of his place among them. He detects the outlines of a conspiracy, and finds it extends from his front door to the very zenith of civilization. Not that there are any secret meetings on his behalf, but it is an unstated and unshakeable pact to deny him his importance. He perceives an ungrateful world that will not acknowledge what he has to offer, but yet he continues to address his comments to a group of "gentlemen" he presumes are reading what he has to say. We can assume that our hero feels, even in his solitude, that he is playing to a crowd.

There are two ideas that we can impose on the text from the comfort of more than a century's remove. The first is that the Underground Man's feelings are not at all unique. We all feel, at one time or another, the feeling of disappointment that life has not, as yet, fully grasped all we can give to it. It goes hand in hand with a similar feeling that the world is "on to us" and will no doubt in the next second figure out just how naked we are in our armor against it. But the other idea we can see now is that even in our solitude, we tend to believe what we are doing matters, or should matter, to a group of eyes far away from our own. Anyone who has read, say, the Unabomber's Manifesto or the ravings of Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho, hears the same sad and sinister music of someone resolved to not remain forever anonymous.

It is in the second section, "Apropos of the Wet Snow," that our Underground Man interacts with the world. At least, he does in his own way, resolving to bump into his enemies in the park and force them to acknowledge him. His stewing ravings, which are exceptionally literary, reveal themselves as dead when uncorked among living, breathing people. His actions are freighted with cosmic significance to himself, but his fear restricts him from carrying out his plans. He turns "coward before reality," he tells himself. He is a martyr for an embattled cause - himself.

It is only when he finds Liza, the prostitute, that we see him reveal the tenderness that is still within him. Dostoevsky picks a female foil for him, sure to excite and yet bewitching because of her distinct "otherness." We have the faint sniff in the air of perhaps a happy ending for the embattled narrator, finding love in the presence of another who simply wants to be acknowledged. But even this comes to nothing. When Liza tries to reach out to him, he lashes out that society will not allow him to be good. She flees from him, and the Underground Man leaves us as he came to us, alone. "Which is better?" he asks. "Cheap happiness or lofty suffering?" He will take suffering, and one presumes he does not mean ultimately to suffer alone.

As I said, the voice is familiar. One sees it in the anonymous postings that follow news articles and opinion pieces on every website, where a person stripped of identity is suddenly capable of the most vile, poisonous words, left in answer to no one and everyone. The identity of the Underground Man can be both the voice of the teenagers who pick one of their number and begin assaulting him socially until he crumbles, or the one who crumbles under the weight of their taunts. It is the voice of the letter to the editor that inevitably digresses from the issue of the day to the obscure slights of a lifetime, seemingly for reasons known only to the author. It is the voice of the amateur blog, where the writer leaves an observation that perhaps no one else may read, but is desperately important to the one writing.

Dostoevsky created his character as a reaction to certain strains in Russian philosophy. He recognized them as perhaps the seed of something destructive, though it would be perhaps too much to say that he perceived the coming Bolshevik tyranny and all its subsequent horrors. But instead of writing a philosophical response, he created a character who has educated himself and will not learn. Instead of finding the connection between himself and the rest of guilty humanity, he exalts himself in a kingdom of his own creation. Such is the nature of sin that we are always merciless on ourselves but even more on others, grasping God's infinite mercy to our own bosoms and hoping for His terrible justice to be visited upon everyone else.

The Underground Man is a man without gifts who intends, at some point, to teach someone else what he believes society has taught him. If he has felt a keen anguish, then others must as well.  His tragedy is that he is all too aware, of everything. If he speaks for our time, as Dostoevsky felt he spoke for his own, then we find in our fractured social networks, where even children can create true and false personas for themselves, the verdict that we are most dangerous when we are left alone to exult in our wickedness. But the personal audience we create for ourselves never is, and will never be, enough to satisfy.

Set Your Fields on Fire

The award-winning novel by William Thornton

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Some of the coverage of "Set Your Fields on Fire"

 You can order "Set Your Fields on Fire"for $14.99 through Amazon here.

It's also available on Kindle at $3.99 through Amazon here.
Read an interview I did with AL.com on the book here.   
Here's my appearance on the Charisma Network's CPOP Podcast. 
Here's an interview I did with The Anniston Star on the book. 
Shattered Magazine wrote a story about the book here. 
Here's a review of the novel by Robbie Pink.
This piece appeared in the Marietta (Ga.) Daily Journal.
Here's the write-up from The Birmingham Times.
Read a story for Village Living here.
This story appeared in The Trussville Tribune and this video.

Here's my appearance on East Alabama Today.  

Story and video from WBRC Fox6 here. 

Here's the write-up in The Gadsden Times on the book.
Read a piece I wrote for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
A piece about some inspiring works for me.

This is another interview with the fleegan book blog here.

HHhH by Laurent Binet

History demands a great deal from those who study it, and even more from those who don't.

Historical fiction, though, serves two purposes - it informs us about the things history can only hint at - the ambitions, the motivations, the petty humanity that drive events forward. It also allows author and reader to experience events we may or may not know as they happened the first time, with only a shared wink that these things matter enough to be told and retold, shaped and reshaped. We live our lives moment to moment, not knowing what decisions will bring, nor whether any given day could be our last. But no one in history is any different, and our advantage in the present over those in the past is that we at least know, in part, how their stories panned out.

But Laurent Binet's "HHhH" is a house divided against itself - a historical novel that tells a story even as it tries not to, a story about a story that tries not to be a story. It is a story about an event as much as a story about how we tell stories.

Binet did not go too far into the past to begin his laboratory experiment in yarn spinning. He chooses the career and assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the "Butcher of Prague," the SS executioner who was Heinrich Himmler's lieutenant. This is where the enigmatic title comes from - the initials for a German expression meaning "Himmler's brain is called Heydrich." World War II, as we have seen in several works I've examined, is a gold mine for the contemporary novelist concerned with humanity, both base and glorious.

But our author here isn't interested in a rollicking spy story, or of its heroes. The two men who killed Heydrich - Jozef Gabcik and Jan Kubis - do not begin to appear fully until nearly 100 pages into this book, and this event is presumably what the plot builds toward. Binet announces on page four his resolution, as he attempts to set a scene with one of his "characters:"

"I am reducing this man to the ranks of a vulgar character and his actions to literature: an ignominious transformation, but what else can I do? I don't want to drag this vision around with me all my life without having tried, at least, to give it some substance. I just hope that, however bright and blinding the veneer of fiction that covers this fabulous story, you will still be able to see through it to the historical reality that lies behind."

Reading this, I was reminded of John Updike's objection to one of my favorite novels, E.L. Doctorow's "Ragtime," which blended historical figures with invented characters. Updike felt there was something obscene in digging up long dead people to perform for the author and the audience, doing and saying things they either couldn't have thought or might not have done in real life. But this sort of thing has been going on as long as mankind has been telling itself stories.

So Binet has announced for himself a grand aim - to tell a story on the nature of storytelling using this particular story. Its real characters - the ones in the present - are presumably himself and the woman Natacha, to whom he is giving his pages. She will often chide him that he is "making up" this or that detail. He also reexamines previous tellings of this story, comparing them with his own. The narrator suspends action for his own pronouncements, or observations, freezing in time these heroes and villains before pushing "play" once again for our amusement.

I'm not sure this works, frankly. This novel and its author seem very satisfied with themselves at times, so that even when the author frets that he is missing this or that important detail, we don't think he's sweating all that much. And whatever observations the author brings to the drama don't strike us as being all that revelatory about the story or storytelling. No, the point is what we know about the author. This pose isn't all that new or revolutionary, by the way. The teller of the tale is supposed to be important because his success or failure at telling the story matters. Why else would we care to remember, millenia later, that the poet who sang of Achilles and Odysseus might have been blind?

By choosing this particular tale, Binet allows himself the ability to invoke the Nazis' handsome death angel without giving us a sense of who the man was. He has no more depth than the Nazi henchmen who populate the Indiana Jones movies. He's there, but it isn't in our minds anymore than through a photograph. He is there simply to be a bogeyman. We are supposed to feel against him, or for him, based solely on Binet's sometimes dry recitation of a few pertinent facts.

Ah, you might say, that's the point of the story! If he "dramatized" the action, he would be making it up! By giving us the postmodern distance of an ironic reimagining of the novel, by the author fussing or not fussing over what color somebody's shirt might have been, we instead get something "truer."

Baloney. Even as Binet eschews sentences allowing his characters to "check their watches" to set a scene, he is still making something just as artificial. He is creating a character even by not doing so, and so doing, doing it badly. Like it or not, this is the story he has chosen. If it deserves our attention, it isn't necessarily because of the selfless bravery or, if you will, absurdity of our two assassins - it's because the author decided to tell the story. The right author can make a story with Nazis, no Nazis, a murder, no murders, six million murders, worth reading.

Another example, from later in the novel, when Natacha reads in Magazine litteraire:

"Has there ever been a biographer who did not dream of writing, 'Jesus of Nazareth used to lift his left eyebrow when he was thinking?"...I don't immediately grasp the full meaning of the phrase and, faithful to my long-held disgust for realistic novels, I say to myself: Yuck! Then I ask her to pass me the magazine and I reread the sentence. I am foreced to admit that I would quite like to possess this kind of detail about Heydrich..."

Binet invokes Jesus, for whom the only solid biographical information comes from the Gospels, which are persuasive texts written to express theological mysteries and not the inner life of a man who proclaimed Himself divine. So in reading that story, we might find ourself wanting the kind of detail we don't get in biographies, but in novels. What did His face look like? What did His voice sound like? What did He feel, weeping at Lazarus' tomb?

In Binet's theory, one simply can't make up that sort of detail, even the lifting of an eyebrow, in a novel without it being a cheap lie. So in reading this, I'm tempted to think that "HHhH" isn't an exercise in theory, or a failure of the author's imagination. It's a pose, and the worst kind really, because it appears like nothing else so much as ... a pose.

But to say all that isn't to say that "HHhH" isn't worth reading - it is. My objection, then, is that Binet fails in his ambition to write a novel of ideas because the ideas he animates this novel with, frankly, aren't all that interesting. We know when we read a book that we aren't reliving the events. If we were unable to tell the difference, most of us would succumb to heart attacks before we aimed our weapons, destined to jam, at the executioner's oncoming car. And perhaps there is something vulgar in reanimating the dead for the sole purpose of entertaining the living.

But this isn't so much a manifesto against the artifice of storytelling as much as what it claims not to be - an entertainment designed to enlist the past at a comfortable mental distance. The strategy is just different, and all too familiar. One still hears the wheels we are supposed to ignore, and senses the dripping features of the waxworks figure.

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Prometheus: Engineering a Creator and Destroyer

Before it was the title of a summer science-fiction offering, Prometheus was known as the trickster titan who stole fire from the gods for the use of humans. The story’s ancient subtext is that man needs something extra to contend with the supernatural – that man aspires to contact with God, to understand Him, but cannot approach the throne without a short cut.

In that light, it’s interesting that the lead character in “Prometheus” is Dr. Elizabeth Shaw, an archeologist looking for the roots of humanity, who wears a cross around her neck, the reminder of her late father. From cave paintings and ancient relics, she and her colleague Charlie Holloway – the skeptic - find that several ancient representations of men and some superhuman beings show a similar star pattern in the background. After some investigation, they find a star pattern matching it a great distance from earth. And so begins our quest in the year 2093– to find the extra-terrestrial origins of our species. Shaw’s hypothesis is that beings came from the stars to earth and somehow made mankind.

But as one scientist on board the ship “Prometheus” observes, such a hypothesis flies in the face of “three centuries of Darwinism.” From this light, “Prometheus” bears a resemblance to stories like “Childhood’s End,” “Contact,” “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and even the much-maligned plot of “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.” The scientist is saying that what we call God is instead another being from another world. That is, until Dr. Shaw sets him straight – the question isn’t who created us, but who created it all. Dr. Shaw isn’t interested in some species that can tinker with DNA and produce something new, but a Presence that can create it all from nothingness. Still, she wonders not only where we came from, and why.

Along for the ride is David, a robot obsessed with the movie “Lawrence of Arabia” who is at times passive and at times sinister. David is the HAL-9000 computer from “2001,” only with arms and legs. There is much in this movie that seems similar (or ripped off) from Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s famous collaboration, but it is the question of faith which is new here. Clarke and Kubrick gave us a secular faith, scrubbed of God with the mystery of the universe substituted. Dr. Shaw journeys into space with a vague idea of what she seeks, but it’s interesting that in this universe, God is also part of the journey.

The character of David also allows the film to explore the meaning of existence. When he asks a crew member why he exists, the answer is for no other reason than because humans could build him. David observes that a human being would be very dissatisfied with that kind of answer for himself. A compensation would be that there is no purpose, and no meaning to existence. Yet while that offers consolation for someone who feels they need no god to justify themselves to, it still leaves a void when the end of life approaches and one craves meaning.  

In charge on the journey is Meredith Vickers, an employee of the trillionaire Peter Weyland. He was willing to fund this expedition, but Vickers expected to find nothing. Instead, when they find a seemingly deserted complex that appears to validate Shaw’s hypothesis, Vickers seems shocked. The ship’s captain, Vanek, asks her, “Did you want them to be wrong?” A fair question. Some people say there is no point in looking for God, and that conclusion keeps them happy, because finding God might require something of them. As long as my thinking stays the same, in other words, there is nothing that might require it to change.

Just as Lawrence of Arabia was told there was nothing in the desert – “and no man needs nothing” – the crew of the Prometheus seemingly find a void with their discovery. The remains of “the Engineers” are nothing they can communicate, or commune with. They find an alien species with a similar DNA profile but also with a dark side that seems too familiar. The remaining Engineer is not happy with his creation, evidently, and means to destroy it. When Weyland, who has also come on this journey, goes to the Engineer hoping to prolong his life, he discovers how dissatisfied the Engineer is.

On a very elementary level, “Prometheus” is a science fiction horror film, which is why its main message seems to be, “longing for the Creator brings on death.” The end of the movie gives no answers to Dr. Shaw as to why the Engineers made the human race, and even though she has barely survived, she wishes to continue the journey to find out. But before leaving, she retrieves the cross she has worn around her neck. “After all, you still believe,” David tells her.  It was a journey of faith that took her to the stars, and it is faith that perhaps will lead her home.

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