“Mercilessly entertaining.” --Vanity Fair
“An ingenious and viperish thriller . . . twisted and wild.” --Entertainment Weekly
“Will give you the creeps and keep you on the edge until the last page.” --People
First there was Gone Girl the bestselling book, now there is Gone Girl the hit movie, so I decided to see what all the buzz was about. Having just finished the novel, I’m halfway through the phenomenon, and while I’m generally not one for murder mysteries, I have to say Gone Girl is one of those rare books whose cover blurbs provide an honest description of what’s inside.
The story begins with the morning of the disappearance of
Amy Dunne as told by her husband Nick Dunne. Nick is--as countless reviewers have
noted--an unreliable narrator. He leaves out what he was doing at the precise time
his wife disappeared, he’s lying to the police, and he knows more than he’s
telling you. Other chapters are from Amy’s viewpoint through diary entries
starting a few years earlier.
And she isn’t reliable
either.
The main question on every reader’s mind is “Did Nick kill
his wife or didn’t he?” and chapters pass, chapters told from his viewpoint, without an answer to that question. He’s
suspicious as hell and the evidence mounts, but . . . could there be another
explanation? This all leads to the Gone Girl Twist that
has shocked many a reader:
The device is flawlessly executed by author Gillian Flynn.
She gets her hooks in with the first chapter and then tugs you along. It’s been
a long time since I’ve read a book this engaging--comparisons to Stephen King’s Bag of Bones and Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full come to mind. The writing
was so good that Gillian Flynn’s photo on the back cover irritated me: No one
should get to be this talented! And sell loads of books! And get rich! And be pretty,
too!
Well, Gillian Flynn does.
The device in the first half of Gone Girl is, however, not without its weakness. Flynn has to take
you inside the head of Nick Dunne but pick and choose with care what she
reveals. Like many formal devices, it’s borderline gimmick and once you notice
it, it stands out and doesn’t quite make sense. After all, Nick knows from the
start whether he’s guilty or innocent, so why doesn’t he ever think it in
so many words?
Because the author is preparing a surprise and doesn’t want
to ruin it.
I’m reminded of The Sixth
Sense. At the end of the film, we find out that Bruce Willis’s character
was a ghost the whole time. To pull this off, screenwriter and director M.
Night Shyamalan has carefully orchestrated the drama so that Willis appears to
interact with other people but actually only interacts with the kid who sees
dead people. Once you notice this, you realize it makes no sense internally to
the movie. (Surely Willis would have noticed something sooner . . . “Hey, why
doesn’t anybody but that one kid talk
to me? What happened to my biological functions? I used to always pee in the middle of the night!”) It only makes sense outside
the film, as a trick played by a director on an audience.
As such, authorial hocus-pocus can be a distraction that jerks
the reader out of the world of a work of fiction. It might not, however, if the
work has more going for it--characters you care about, a gripping plot, fascinating
subtexts, etc.--and Gone Girl
certainly does. Even after the main twist, Flynn keeps you guessing on a number
of fronts up until, yes, the very last page. As an author, she has as many
tricks as do the characters of her book.
You can view Gone Girl
as about marriage, or feminism, or rape, or the media, or the law, or the
economy, or American life today--and this kind of critique is showing up online
now that the movie is out--but like many a good author of thrillers, Flynn is
more concerned with character and plot. Any deeper themes lie underneath, lending
weight to what is above all just one hell of a yarn.
I usually post my “Best of” series in December, but Gone Girl was good enough that I can go
ahead and declare it one of The
Gleaming Sword’s Best Books of 2014.
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