Gone Girl
Critique • Quotes • At the movies
First editionFirst publication
2012
Literary form
Novel
Genres
Crime, mystery, thriller
Writing language
English
Author's country
United States
Length
Approx. 146,000 words
Going, going, gone flat
Around the turn of the twenty-first century, we had a spate of bestsellers with "girl" in the titles: Girl, Interrupted (1993), Girl with a Pearl Earring (1999), The Other Boleyn Girl (2001), The Windup Girl (2009), Gone Girl (2012), The Girl on the Train (2015), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005) and its similarly named sequels, among others.
Why this trend? Because booksellers were targeting their growing female demographic?
But it's notable most of the titular characters of these publications are adults. In real life these women might be upset to be called girls.
At least one of the so-titled books though seems to be purposely taking up this infantalization of women as its themes. In Gillian Flynn's psychological thriller Gone Girl, Amy has grown up alongside a fictional version of herself in a popular series of children's books written by her psychologist parents. The idealized "Amazing Amy" of the kids' stories matures perfectly, honing every character-building facility the flesh-and-blood Amy leaves undeveloped. Yet the public continues to conflate and admire them both, which Amy both resents and uses to manipulate others.
Cool girls and manchildren
In the alternating chapters of Gone Girl that she narrates, Amy also talks of the pressure young women feel to please men by being "cool girls", willing to meet the males' needs while palling along with them in their boyish pastimes. Men, you see, are also depicted as immature creatures (though I don't recall them being called "boys"). Chief man child is Amy's husband Nick who, thanks to her money, owns a bar with his sister and has his own unresolved family issues.
Nick narrates the other half of Gone Girl, presenting current events from his point of view as Amy disappears and he is suspected for the murder or kidnapping. His childish lack of both self-awareness and sensing of how others see him can be annoying. The guy makes one impulsive blunder after another, the kind that any reader of crime stories could warn him against. His naively bad decisions tighten the frame around himself. As for the real villain of the piece....
Well, we don't want to give away the several plot twists that drive Gone Girl, but suffice it to say the story falls into the category of what I think of as the infallible villain. While Nick is royally screwing himself with the police, media, relatives and community, the mysterious person pulling the strings behind the scene has superhumanly planned for every single eventuality and responds to every difficulty with the perfect move to further implicate Nick and prevent themselves being revealed.
These narrative turns are at first mildly implausible and disbelief can be suspended with the understanding of the kind of novel this is. But their outlandishness grows throughout the second half of the novel until the final unlikely scenes threaten to alienate the most devout thriller readers.
Worse, this growing implausibility—not to mention the breathless, on-the-nose style of writing—serves to diminish the characters' believability and to undercut the the novel's themes of gender relations. Everyone (except Nick's sister who doesn't get enough time) is a fraud. In the end we risk feeling trapped in an inexplicably unreal existence, like the characters of Gone Girls.
Gone Girl does have its reader-friendly features though. It's incredibly well plotted. Particularly brilliant is how Flynn positions Amy's diary entries to misdirect and mystify. Saying more about this would spoil some of its effect, but it's very clever.
Efficient use of of short chapters, cliffhangers and unreliable narrators keep the suspense going through most of Gone Girl. It may not be the most accurate depiction of a crime and investigation but many a reader will fly past the anomalies to get to the juicy stuff of fiction. For the most part, this thriller thrills.
— Eric
Critique • Quotes • At the movies
