Gone Girl Review
What do you do when you have the perfect girl? The cool one that likes chilli dogs and watches baseball games with your friends, burps and lets you sleep in on a Wednesday morning after a particularly sordid hangover? Well, for starters. You don’t lose her. Surprisingly enough that’s exactly what Nick Dunne manages to do on the morning of his fifth wedding anniversary. She is gone. Amy is gone. Not the Well-I-am-a-trashcan-archetype-American-husband-who-doesn’t-care-two-bits-for-my-wife kind of gone. It’s the My-wife-is-missing-from-our-faux-wood-paneled-Missouri-home-and-now-I-am-a-murder-suspect kind. In this New York Times best seller; author Gillian Flynn explores the intricacies of a dying marriage against the dissipating livelihood of a town hit by recession.
The book is essentially a soliloquy that alternates between Nick – the journalist husband who lost his New York job and moved back home to care for his cancer stricken mother and his abusive father lost to Alzheimer’s and Amy - Amazing Amy, with her trust fund parents and her job as a magazine quiz writer (she loses her job as well) which the bourgeoisie of East End New York can most certainly afford.
The book navigates through the murky quagmire of marriage as Nick perpetually keeps asking himself, ‘What have we done to each other?’ A story line that could have possibly been watered down to a simple whodunit is unyielding. The plot twists have plot twists of their own and it’s impossible to narrow down on the truth of things.
Amy Elliot Dunne goes missing on the morning of her fifth anniversary and sets into a chain of events leading up to the manhunt for the brilliant daughter of successful author duo Rand and Marybeth Elliot-their primary source of income being the Amazing Amy books fashioned after their daughter. Needless to say poor Missouri boy Nick is the primary suspect after several instances all culminate in pointing a red neon sign towards Nick that says HE DID IT.
Flynn manages to take characters that may come off as clichéd at first and adds the complexities plaguing the lives of Mid Westerners in a dying economy. There’s Go, Nick’s twin sister who runs the “The Bar” with him. The ironic reference often being the highlight of their banal lassitude. Burdened down with dying parents and a twin with wife issues Go is pulled into Nick’s vortex of problems.
Then there are the dumb and dumber to cops that unfortunately do not fall into the doughnut munching overweight cops mould; because honestly who doesn’t love a dumb cop with weight issues?
Also we have the phantoms of Amy’s past looming at the fringe. People with manic obsessions maintaining a civil distance. But how long before that distance is bridged and Amy finds herself in danger?
The plot contradicts itself over and over again. Who’s lying? Is it Nick? Is it Amy? Was Amy really as scared as she made it to be? Why did she need a gun? What’s been keeping Nick, sweet Nick, up all night as he sweats into his sheets? A sweet fifth anniversary treasure hunt that Amy organized for Nick soon turns into a hellish wild goose chase with Nick realizing that his wife is not who he thought she was.
There’s a vapidity to Nick’s narrative. A listlessness that borders towards indifference. Whereas Amy’s diary entries – the main source of contribution on Amy’s part to her point of view gives it an alarming quality as you see the red flags go off in her naïve penning down of the silences that impregnate the air with suspicion and the screaming that claws on her insides.
The book delves into the depths of the human psyche and the profoundness of the bond that two people share after they’ve slept no more than six feet apart. There’s abhorrence. There’s carnal lust. And there are lies left at the reader’s disposition to sieve through to find an iota of truth.
The book is well written. The prose is well paced, it doesn’t hurry the reader through a series of relevant events nor does it stagnate; leaving the reader for a taste for something more. Basically the book tries to break down misconceptions about marriages. Abusive childhoods. And the fairytale dynamic duo without children clichés.
The book encapsulates it all, the legal drama, the marital drama, the murder drama, the sibling flare ups and the different facades of Nick and Amy we get to see as each layer is peeled off, slowly, intimately revealing the core of a relationship that drives them to do unspeakable things to each other.
I would say the book is definitely worth a read. Especially for all those of you who've been persistently putting it off seeing how the movie's out starring Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike and Neil Patrick Harris. The movie is expecting some spectacular reviews but let us be completely honest here. When was the last time the movie was better than the book? So grab that neon orange book next time you are at a bookstore.