Gone Girl
One of the most critically acclaimed suspense writers of our time, New York Times bestseller Gillian Flynn, takes that statement to its darkest place in this unputdownable masterpiece about a marriage gone terribly, terribly wrong. As The Washington Post proclaimed, her work “draws you in and keeps you reading with the force of a pure but nasty addiction.” Gone Girl’s toxic mix of sharp-edged wit with deliciously chilling prose creates a nerve-fraying thriller that confounds you at every turn.
On a warm summer morning in North Carthage, Missouri, it is Nick and Amy’s fifth wedding anniversary. Presents are being wrapped and reservations are being made when Nick Dunne’s clever and beautiful wife disappears from their rented McMansion on the Mississippi River. Husband-of-the-Year Nick Dunne isn’t doing himself any favors with cringe-worthy daydreams about the slope and shape of his wife’s head, but hearing from Amy through flashbacks in her diary reveal the perky perfectionist could have put anyone dangerously on edge. Under mounting pressure from the police and the media—as well as Amy’s fiercely doting parents—the town golden boy parades an endless series of lies, deceits, and inappropriate behavior. Nick is oddly evasive, and he’s definitely bitter—but is he really a killer? As the cops close in, every couple in town is soon wondering how well they know the one that they love. With his twin sister Margo at his side, Nick stands by his innocence. Trouble is, if Nick didn’t do it, where is that beautiful wife? And what was left in that silvery gift box hidden in the back of her bedroom closet?
Employing her trademark razor-sharp writing and assured psychological insight, Gillian Flynn delivers a fast-paced, devilishly dark, and ingeniously plotted thriller that confirms her status as one of the hottest writers around.
Review: Gone Girl is a thriller with a focus on a marriage. On their fifth wedding anniversary, Amy disappears from their home under suspicious circumstances, and her husband Nick is quickly escalated to the prime suspect for her assumed murder. Told in intervals of Nick confiding to the reader and excerpts from Amy's diary in the months leading up to her disappearance, the story takes an abrupt turn halfway through, and then continues to have dramatic plot twists until the very end. Neither Nick nor Amy is who they appear to be from the outset of the novel.
It's clear from the very first page that the narrators, Nick and Amy, are not to be trusted. Nick opens up the novel with a very creepy description of his wife's head; "When I think of my wife, I always think of her head. The shape of it, to begin with. The very first time I saw her, it was the back of her head I saw, and there was something lovely about it, the angles of it. Like a shiny, hard corn kernel or a riverbed fossil. She had what the Victorians would call a finely shaped head. You could imagine the skull quite easily" (2-3). It's also clear, as both Nick and Amy slowly reveal details they've withheld from the reader that Flynn is using narration to manipulate the reader's perception of the couple and who may or may not be guilty. The existence of not one but two unreliable narrators made me not only wary as a reader but frustrated. This seems like an exercise in how many alternative versions of the story can the author make her readers believe.
I feel conflicted about this novel. Despite its popularity right now, I did not love it. While part of that may be because it's not my normal sort of read, I think a large part of it was that I didn't buy into the manipulative quality of the narrative. Furthermore, I found the plot twists far from believable. I wasn't able to suspend my disbelief for the sake of the story and kept questioning how someone would have pulled off deceiving law enforcement numerous times over the years. The conclusion was also absurd and showed one of the main characters to be a complete psychopath. I also didn't like any of the characters. Nick and Amy are both pretty awful by the end of the novel's revelations, Nick's twin sister Margo was a pretty stock character without much presence, and that leaves Amy's PDA-rich parents, the sleazy lawyer Nick hires, or a few other minor characters. The police officers were tolerable, I guess, but not many other redeemable figures.
Although I'm hesitant to discuss the plot twists so as to avoid spoilers, I think the opening epigraph, a quote from Tony Kushner's The Illusion, most clearly sums up the relationship between Nick and Amy: "Love is the world's infinite mutability; lies, hatred, murder even, are all knit up in it; it is the inevitable blossoming of its opposites, a magnificent rose smelling faintly of blood." I can say that the mystery of how the novel would conclude kept me reading, however, I was less impressed by this than I had hoped.
Stars: 2
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