Who are you?
What have we done to each other?
These are the questions Nick Dunne finds himself asking on the morning of his fifth wedding anniversary, when his wife Amy suddenly disappears. The police suspect Nick. Amy's friends reveal that she was afraid of him, that she kept secrets from him. He swears it isn't true. A police examination of his computer shows strange searches. He says they weren't made by him. And then there are the persistent calls on his mobile phone. So what really did happen to Nick's beautiful wife?"
A smash hit literary juggernaut, Gone Girl is the ultra-successful 2012 boook-club thriller that runs 200 pages too long and reads like two separate books unwillingly pounded into one unsatisfyingly predictable zzzz-fest.
If you havem't read Gone Girl (you're lucky), and want to (you're silly), look away now, because there will be spoilers.
The story of the disappearance of Nick Dunne's wife, Amy (the titular 'Gone Girl') and the subsequent investigation into him, framed around his account of the aftermath of Amy vanishing and her diary recounting their relationship, the idea is to create a split narrative in which nobody can be trusted.
Unfortunately it's slightly undermined by two things. Firstly, Nick is initially written to be utterly dreadful; a man who cheats on his perfect, chaste and beautiful wife, can barely be bothered with her or anyone else, and through his generally over-the-top stupidity manages to turn you against him from the start. His main character traits read like the first draft of the worst CV; he lies to stay out of trouble, and overcompensates in awkward situations by acting disinterested and hiding emotion. Two flaws that are fine by themselves but which signal a monstrous lack of cooperation in a murder investigation.
In the postscript, Gillian Flynn, the author, hand-waves away the negatives surrounding the character, suggesting he's not that bad a guy. Unfortunately, having spent the first half of the book doing everything possible to suggest that Nick isn't just a bit inept, but outright capable of murdering his Mary Sue wife, it's kind of hard to row that back round in order to create sympathy for him come the, not at all shocking, third act twist that he didn't kill her.
Not that you'll care. If you've been paying attention you're probably already willing to take a claw hammer to Nick's smug, stupid head whilst society cheers you on and films it on their phones to show their kids that they were there the day this asshole got his, clapping and whooping, and when it comes time to sentence you the Judge just winks and lets you off with a warning because, really, we all wanted to do that, didn't we. It's just that you did it. If this were a choose your own adventure book you would win by cracking Nick open like a pinata; a crappy, loser cheat husband full of sweets and booze and rage.
And here comes the second problem, because having created a character so unloveable that every other person in the book, including his own twin sister, not to mention probably most of the reading audience, accepts could straight up murder his flawless wife, Flynn then has to redeem him. You need to root for him, hope that he'll be cleared and want to continue reading about a man who's main contribution to the plot up to this point has been harassing old friends of Amy's and hiding evidence.
Now, in the hands of a good writer, this could go one of two ways. Nick could continue to be flawed, but could start to show some positive traits; he could cooperate with the police, at the very least. Or, alternatively, you could create a world in which Nick, an asshole, is not the worst person in the relationship.
Guess which one is going to happen.
Because Gone Girl, it turns out, isn't actually a thriller at all. It's a horror. I married a psychopath. Amy, perfect, loveable Amy, turns out to have faked her own death to punish Nick, which I think is supposed to be bad, but by this point I'm quite happy to see Nick get a hard time. Until it turns out that no, Amy is going to go on with enough until Nick is convicted of her murder so she can see him executed, because he cheated on her.
It should be noted that you'll have probably called this sequence of events at about the time it's revealed that Nick has had a mistress for the last year or so. Amy is written, in both narratives, as too perfect, and Nick as too much of a baddy, for the plot not to undo itself by reversing our preconceptions.
Our two protagonists people Who to root for? Do you cheer on the guy who straight-up drove his wife to the point of supervillainy, or the woman who decides that murdering her irritating husband is less embarassing than filing for divorce.
Trying to reboot Nick's character at this point requires some Lazarusian levels of personality resurrection. He isn't easy to redeem, so Flynn decides to just not bother. Instead, we get in a final sequence in which a full blown psychopath who has spent years setting up the perfect crime comes home, because Nick asks her to and she got kind of bored and made some bad decisions whilst hiding out, or something. Oh, also she killed someone else, but they can't pin that on her because the books finishing now and so he sticks around and she gets pregnant to keep him there.
Jeez, these two deserve one another, if only so that only two people are unhappy instead of four.
Also Try:
The Prince, Machiavelli
A Song of Ice and Fire (but just the Joffrey bits), George R. R. Martin
Silence of the Lambs, Robert Harris
Lamb to the Slaughter, Roald Dahl
The story of the disappearance of Nick Dunne's wife, Amy (the titular 'Gone Girl') and the subsequent investigation into him, framed around his account of the aftermath of Amy vanishing and her diary recounting their relationship, the idea is to create a split narrative in which nobody can be trusted.
Unfortunately it's slightly undermined by two things. Firstly, Nick is initially written to be utterly dreadful; a man who cheats on his perfect, chaste and beautiful wife, can barely be bothered with her or anyone else, and through his generally over-the-top stupidity manages to turn you against him from the start. His main character traits read like the first draft of the worst CV; he lies to stay out of trouble, and overcompensates in awkward situations by acting disinterested and hiding emotion. Two flaws that are fine by themselves but which signal a monstrous lack of cooperation in a murder investigation.
In the postscript, Gillian Flynn, the author, hand-waves away the negatives surrounding the character, suggesting he's not that bad a guy. Unfortunately, having spent the first half of the book doing everything possible to suggest that Nick isn't just a bit inept, but outright capable of murdering his Mary Sue wife, it's kind of hard to row that back round in order to create sympathy for him come the, not at all shocking, third act twist that he didn't kill her.
Not that you'll care. If you've been paying attention you're probably already willing to take a claw hammer to Nick's smug, stupid head whilst society cheers you on and films it on their phones to show their kids that they were there the day this asshole got his, clapping and whooping, and when it comes time to sentence you the Judge just winks and lets you off with a warning because, really, we all wanted to do that, didn't we. It's just that you did it. If this were a choose your own adventure book you would win by cracking Nick open like a pinata; a crappy, loser cheat husband full of sweets and booze and rage.
And here comes the second problem, because having created a character so unloveable that every other person in the book, including his own twin sister, not to mention probably most of the reading audience, accepts could straight up murder his flawless wife, Flynn then has to redeem him. You need to root for him, hope that he'll be cleared and want to continue reading about a man who's main contribution to the plot up to this point has been harassing old friends of Amy's and hiding evidence.
Now, in the hands of a good writer, this could go one of two ways. Nick could continue to be flawed, but could start to show some positive traits; he could cooperate with the police, at the very least. Or, alternatively, you could create a world in which Nick, an asshole, is not the worst person in the relationship.
Guess which one is going to happen.
Because Gone Girl, it turns out, isn't actually a thriller at all. It's a horror. I married a psychopath. Amy, perfect, loveable Amy, turns out to have faked her own death to punish Nick, which I think is supposed to be bad, but by this point I'm quite happy to see Nick get a hard time. Until it turns out that no, Amy is going to go on with enough until Nick is convicted of her murder so she can see him executed, because he cheated on her.
It should be noted that you'll have probably called this sequence of events at about the time it's revealed that Nick has had a mistress for the last year or so. Amy is written, in both narratives, as too perfect, and Nick as too much of a baddy, for the plot not to undo itself by reversing our preconceptions.
Our two protagonists people Who to root for? Do you cheer on the guy who straight-up drove his wife to the point of supervillainy, or the woman who decides that murdering her irritating husband is less embarassing than filing for divorce.
Trying to reboot Nick's character at this point requires some Lazarusian levels of personality resurrection. He isn't easy to redeem, so Flynn decides to just not bother. Instead, we get in a final sequence in which a full blown psychopath who has spent years setting up the perfect crime comes home, because Nick asks her to and she got kind of bored and made some bad decisions whilst hiding out, or something. Oh, also she killed someone else, but they can't pin that on her because the books finishing now and so he sticks around and she gets pregnant to keep him there.
Jeez, these two deserve one another, if only so that only two people are unhappy instead of four.
Also Try:
The Prince, Machiavelli
A Song of Ice and Fire (but just the Joffrey bits), George R. R. Martin
Silence of the Lambs, Robert Harris
Lamb to the Slaughter, Roald Dahl
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