'Gone Girl': Reading Saudade for Gen-X in Landscape

Gone (v.) 1. past participle of go. --(adj.) 2. departed; left. 3. lost or hopeless. 4. ruined. 5. dead; deceased. 6. past. 7. weak and faint; a gone feeling. 8. used up. 9. Slang. a. pregnant: two months gone. b. great; outstanding. c. exhilarated; inspired. --Idiom. 10. far gone, in an advanced state as of love, exhaustion, or illness. 11. gone on, Informal, infatuated with; in love with.

Saudade (n.) A Portuguese and Galician word that has no direct translation into English. It describes a deep, melancholic longing for someone or something that is loved but is absent. A repressed knowledge that the object of longing may never return tends to increase the nostalgia or melancholia.

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After learning that Cape Girardeau, Missouri, was serving as the backdrop for filming part of Gillian Flynn's novel and screenplay Gone Girl, I decided to purchase the book and read it. I don't usually care for murder mysteries, especially when a husband is the prime suspect--too much of that sort of thing going on in real life--but I had heard from a reliable source that this one would surprise me. Boy, did it ever.

While someone else who has read this as well as Ms. Flynn's other novels recently gave me her opinion that the ending of this one was disturbing or unsatisfactory, I had just the opposite reaction. For some reason (maybe it's the gardener-in-me), the moment near the beginning when Nick Dunne (husband-suspect) comes home from The Bar (his business in a fictional Missouri town) to find his wife Amy missing, the mention of "red peonies along the border looking fat and juicy, asking to be devoured" stops me dead in my reading tracks. Why? Because when he wakes up that morning, it is to the glaring sun "revealing its full summer angry-god self." Peonies do not bloom in the middle of summer.

Green Lynx spider guarding her egg sac and babies

Naturally, I'm intrigued by this seemingly awkward intrusion of peonies on the scene. Is it just authorial or editorial ignorance or clumsiness? Ah. No, I don't think so. This is a New York Times bestseller, after all, carefully crafted and edited, and soon to be a major motion picture. Red peonies out of time, out of place are there for a reason.

Before the red peonies appear and the husband-suspect discovers his missing wife, before he gets out of bed that morning to face the glaring sun, he remembers what brought him back to his roots: the impending death of his "indomitable mother" with the expectation that his "nasty"-minded, "miserable"-hearted dad would soon follow suit. And if that weren't heart-string tugging enough, he has a twin sister, Margo or Go as he calls her, who needs his help caring for their parents.


A word of advice to the potential reader/movie-goer: Think critically. Don't be fooled and don't feel sorry. The main characters in this novel are Gen-X-ers, a generation caught in the throes of a midlife crisis.(A.O. Scott, a writer for the New York Times, established the presence of this phenomenon in an article published May 9, 2010.) Nick, Amy, Margo. They're all goners. They're over the hill and done (Dunne?) been sold down the river--unemployed--by dot-com washouts and various financial meltdowns. They have become Beverly Hillbillies in reverse. Their new-found poverty takes them from The Shiny Big Apple (New York City) to one of the unlucky buckles of the Rust Belt--Missouri....

When SAM and I were newly married and he was fresh out of college, back when the last of the Gen-X-ers were still toddling around and filling their diapers, we considered that we were relatively fortunate. We were debt-free (college tuition was cheap), one income was enough to pay the bills, and there were years ahead of us in which to work hard, have several children, save money for retirement, and eventually watch our many grandchildren grow up, in between long vacations to various far-flung, exotic places. New York City? Yep, maybe that too. It'd be nice to see what imagination can build with other people's money. The Rust Belt, though, would keep its grip on us for more than two decades while the dreams mentioned above slipped away. Life was a struggle, up and down, mostly down. But we stuck together and muddled through because that's what Rust-Belted Baby-Boomers are supposed to do....

Floodwall in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, overlooking the Mississippi River

The river that Life is takes its toll, I guess, on most people and their dreams. This past week saw the death of Nelson Mandela. As so many public figures have proclaimed, he has gone to a better place. His spirited fight against apartheid in South Africa was subdued by 27 years in prison--not vanquished, just subdued, but something else too. It was refined, like gold by fire, made brilliant like diamonds by heat and pressure. If he hadn't been caught and imprisoned, South Africa as a nation might have collapsed or been torn apart by a fiery uprising out of control.


With all of the media hoopla that has gone on surrounding his death, you can definitely sense saudade surrounding an iconic figure from a bygone era. According to a program I watched on PBS, Mandela belonged to a group of people bent on destroying the government of South Africa. His fellow political prisoners recall what life was like during those long years of waiting for change to happen. Theirs was a progressive movement, informed and inspired by communism. It was tired of the status quo and wanted change in a hurry, never mind the damage or loss of life. The river that Life is slowed them down, made them think, ponder, consider. Apartheid eventually crumbled, but the nation of South Africa remains intact. Blacks and whites alike mourn the man who is gone.

Now, going back to the book, Gone Girl. It has done a lot lately to "trouble the waters" of my mind. I guess that's what a well-written book is supposed to do. Now, I won't say that it's flawless, and I'm sure that a good critic can really pick it apart and expose the flaws. It's unsettling, maybe even disturbing, as my fellow reader mentioned at the beginning had decided. Isn't that what a well-written book is supposed to do? Unsettle. Disturb. Make you think, ponder, consider. Let's hope the movie does justice to its namesake.

High Marks for Progress--Lessons for Me on a Tutorial Tuesday

To show you that I have a softer, gentler side, I present these Celosia flowers blooming with abandon in my mother's yard. I drove a few miles down the road this past weekend to visit her in Southeast Missouri, while Hubby finished up his 80-plus-hour week at the rig in Southern Illinois.


I hope that these pictures of Celosia can soften what now appears to me as a rather harsh comment left on TC's site, The Write Gardener. Maybe I should avoid visiting other blogs on Mondays. Those days invariably bring out the worst in me for some reason. It must be from the effects of the moon that gave its name to Monday.



My mom's hybrid tea roses are just about finished blooming for the year, but I found a single rosebud holding itself proudly above the rather tired looking leaves of the shrub. It's fresh and lovely.



Now here is a full-blown rose showing evidence of its encounter with some kind of marauder. Whoever he was, he must have felt sorry for the old gal and left her in peace for the rest of her show. She will live for a while longer on my blog.


I took my mom to lunch in Cape Girardeau at this historic eatery, Port Cape Girardeau. I wonder if the Coca-Cola being advertised so boldly on the side of the building contained at one time a secret ingredient to combat fatigue. Amazing, isn't it, how prices have changed?





After lunch, we took a stroll on the street-side of the Mississippi River floodwall. The wall has become a showpiece for the city, inviting visitors to take a step back in time.



Looking back up the hill from the floodwall, I could see the Common Pleas Courthouse, still in use today as a site for the administration of justice. It was built in 1854 and has witnessed a lot of pleas since that time.




Turning back to the floodwall and going back a bit farther in time, this panel on the wall captured my attention. Perhaps justice was more blind than usual in this instance.




At the edge of the wall, the river-level gauge bears witness to progress. Skeeter had an interesting remark about progress in her comment on my last post: Arrrgh! The river's dimensions, course, and boundaries have been fiddled with for years by a certain government entity known as the Army Corps of Engineers. They have made a valiant effort to spur economic progress to the area with barge traffic. Unfortunately, nature has a way of foiling the efforts of even the most dedicated public servants.



Cape Girardeau proudly proclaims its heritage and progressive attitude to any passersby who happen to be traveling on the river. It is a beautiful city with friendly people and a thriving healthcare industry, a virtual medical mecca for folks coming from hundreds of miles away.



This piece of progress came just in the nick of time for millions of travelers like me who cross the river from Illinois to Missouri. The old bridge was a crumbling bit of high anxiety that I dreaded every time I drove to Missouri to visit my parents. The kids in the back seat learned to pipe down whenever mom gripped the steering wheel in anticipation of the crossing. Two narrow lanes (one each way!), somehow, for many years accommodated heavy traffic which included semi-trucks. Horror stories about near misses occurring with great frequency kept this driver on her toes.



Crossing the bridge now seems like a cake-walk compared to the old days of white-knuckled driving. I felt confident enough to snap a picture (while driving!) of my approach to the bridge while heading back to the Land of Lincoln on Sunday afternoon. Kids, please don't attempt this stunt. Only (idiot) drivers with plenty of experience crossing dangerous, old bridges are qualified to perform this feat.



On the road home, when no other cars were in sight, I snapped another picture of the floodwaters which have almost completely disappeared from the floodplain on the Illinois side of the river. The wetlands tried to make a comeback this year and almost succeeded.