Fooling Yourself, You Don’t Believe It

There are rules.

There were a lot of things that bothered me about Gillan Flynn’s Gone Girl. I enjoyed the book, but there were aspects of it that bothered me – most notably, the inconsistency of Flynn’s POV writing. The main problem is Nick, who somehow contrives to not think about his mistress once during the early sections of the book told from his point of view. I mean, we’re in his head. His burner cheater phone is blowing up all the time. It would be more than natural for Nick to make a passing mental reference to his mistress, in his own thoughts. Yet he doesn’t. We’re supposed to believe that a man in the pickle Nick finds himself in would maintain bizarre mental discipline concerning the existence of his youthful side piece – as if he knew we were reading his thoughts.

Of course not. Flynn needed to keep that twist under wraps, and she was telling the story from Nick’s POV. The only solution was to simply, and incredibly (in the old sense of not being believable), have Nick never once think about her until it was time to reveal her to the surprised reader.

IN short, Flynn’s got a POV problem. And she’s not the only one. And it’s one of my pet peeves.

Breaking the Deal

The thing is, when you write a story from a certain POV you make a deal with the reader. They know you’re going to control information. But you’re promising to remain consistent. If you offer us a glimpse into the head of a character, you’re telling us that we can rely on that information … or be given a good reason why we can’t – say, insanity, or because the POV narration is actually a confession being recorded somehow. If we’re supposedly getting the unvarnished thoughts of a character, playing cheap tricks like them miraculously not thinking about vital relationships or other facts is just weak writing.

Even with Unreliable Narrators, there is a deal – albeit a deal only fully revealed to the reader at the end of the story. An Unreliable narrator must still be consistent, must still have rules. You should be able to go back and re-read their sections and see where they fooled you, and how.

There are worse examples. In her novel The Five Red Herrings, Dorothy L. Sayers informs the reader that she deliberately won’t mention a clue that would be perfectly visible at a scene she’s describing. She just says fuckit and tells you in no uncertain terms that if she mention the item, you’d be able to figure out the whole mystery, so she’s just not going to, but didn’t think she could get away with just not mentioning it because it would be obvious. And then, to add insult to injury, she implies archly that you shouldn’t need her help:

“(Here Lord Peter Wimsey told the Sergeant what he was to look for and why, but as the intelligent reader will readily supply these details for himself, they are omitted from this page.)”

That is what literary scientists call bullshit.

He Told Them

There are other examples. Have you ever been reading a book and a character is asked an important question, the answer to which will explain much and go a long way to solving mysteries, and the next line is a variation on “He told them”? A made up illustrative example:

“Mr. Somers,” Captain Awesome said in his booming voice,  “I’ve solved the mystery. There is one vital clue you missed.”

Somers wiped blood from his face. “What’s that? For god’s sake, man, tell me!”

He told him. When he was done, all the blood had drained from Somers’ face. “That one sentence has changed the universe,” he said solemnly, then belched.

Again: This is what scientists call bullshit. It’s weak. It’s a lazy way of getting out of a jam, as a writer. It’s a trick I’ve used, but I feel dirty about it.

I’ve also played a dirty trick on you, because from now on you won’t be able to read a book that uses these tricks without noticing, and, like me, you’ll hurl the book across the room and hiss bullshit!