Weekly Reader: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn; A Brilliant Thriller About The Dissolution of A Marriage

Weekly Reader: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn: A Brilliant Thriller About The Dissolution of A Marriage
By Julie Sara Porter,
Bookworm Reviews

Spoilers: I can not review this book without revealing the plot so I won't even try to avoid the plot. I will just reiterate that this review contains MAJOR SPOILERS!!!

Gone Girl is one of those books that is a constant match between opposing forces. They scheme and strive to best each other like a chess match between arch enemies. However, far from an Avengers movie or Jason Bourne novel where the protagonists take on villains and enemy spies, the antagonists are a husband and wife.

Nick and Amy Elliot Dunne had a passionate romantic whirlwind marriage. They lived successful lives in Manhattan where Nick was a magazine journalist and Amy was a personality quiz writer who also lived off her fame as the inspiration for her parent's series of YA novels, Amazing Amy. They celebrated their anniversary with elaborate gifts and treasure hunts leading to the location of gifts. They appeared happy and in love...to everyone but Nick and Amy.

The cracks in their marriage begin to show when the recession began and the Internet made their jobs redundant. Also the failing health of Nick's parents sent the couple packing to Nick's childhood home of North Carthage, Missouri. The two then lived a marriage marked by deceit, dull complacency, and snide backhanded compliments until one day Amy turns up missing.

Gillian Flynn brilliantly used the points of view from both Nick and Amy in alternating chapters  wher Nick says one thing that Amy contradicts and vice versa. Nick recalls their first date in which he found his future bride beautiful, captivating, and charming while Amy laughs that he fell for the persona that she dubbed "The Cool Girl."

The alternating view points also work by shifting the Reader's sympathies. Flynn skillfully withholds information so we never know the full story until we receive it. One minute we feel sorry for the couple and the next they fill us with loathing.

Nick begins the book as a grief-stricken husband who is trying to find his wife and challenges  accusations that he murdered Amy. Then the Reader learns he has a mistress and is not as overly upset about his wife's disappearance as he let on.

Amy's narration is even more artful and sophisticated. Her early chapters are diary entries that show an intelligent sardonic woman who is naive, bored, and fearful of her husband's emotional nature. Then later chapters reveal that the diary was planted by a more cold-blooded calculating Amy who enjoys putting on her husband and the Reader.

Gone Girl reads like one of those news events like a celebrity divorce or a public trial. Our sympathies shift from one side as we back one person. Then we hear more evidence and we shift back to the other side. Flynn captures that confusion rather well by making both her narrators unreliable.

Even after Nick and Amy are reunited, they still live a life of forced happiness and awareness of the depths of their deception. Their hatred for each other will continue until it will one day explode. What was feared will be true as Nick and Amy lie in wait for a murder that will someday happen.