Gone Girl

Gone Girl, a thriller by Gillian Flynn, is very popular. I was reading it while on a train, and the woman sitting next to me asked me how I liked it, even though I was reading it on a Kindle. I told her it was unusual because it had two unreliable narrators, which I thought was kind of sophisticated for train chatter. She said she read it in five days, but it took me more than a few weeks (to be fair, I juggle four books at the same time). Why, despite it's crackling prose and intriguing set-up, did it not hit me on a gut level?

The novel concerns the Dunnes, a married couple living in a small town on the Missouri River. In a kind of Green Acres situation, the wife, Amy, is a New York girl who is pulled by her husband to his home town to take care of his ailing parents. She is the inspiration for a popular children's character in books written by her parents, which she has always resented. The husband, Nick, is a former writer who was sacked during the recession. This hit home: "New York was packed with writers, real writers, because there were magazines, real magazines, loads of them. This was back when the Internet was still some exotic pet kept in the corner of the publishing world--throw some kibble at it, watch it dance on its little leash, oh quite cute, it definitely won't kill us in the night. Think about it: a time when newly graduated college kids could come to New York and get paid to write. We had no clue that we were embarking on careers that would vanish within a decade."

Amy goes missing on their fifth anniversary. The chapters of the first half of the book alternate between Nick's description of the events after he finds her missing and the diary entries of Amy before she went missing. It's clear that both of them are hiding or misrepresenting things. Nick tells us he's lying, while Amy's entries are clearly askew, and it is easily evident that we shouldn't trust them.

So, the first half concerns us wondering, did Nick kill his wife? The second half I can't discuss here, because there's a big reveal halfway through and the rest of the book is wondering whether the perpetrator, for lack of a better word, will get caught. This sounds ingenious, and some of it is, because this perpetrator has an evil genius mind, but it just didn't grab me. Maybe because the husband and wife are both self-absorbed and clueless, and one wants to take a shower after reading their innermost thoughts.

I should add that the ending, which is leading toward a conclusion that is wide open, is a let down. Call me a philistine, but I wanted some sort of resolution, but instead there is a kind of status quo that might be psychologically correct, but sucks for an ending.

But I did enjoy Flynn's cracker-jack writing. Here's one of Amy's best observations: "Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she's hosting the world's culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2."

Frankly, I'd like to see Flynn, who was the TV critic for Entertainment Weekly, break out of the thriller racket (this is her third) and use her talents to write a book about men and women that aren't involved in a crime--you know, literature.