Gone Girl (book review)

Are you bored, dear reader? I hope you like a madcap and fiendish ride, because “Gone Girl” offers it in spades. This, author Gillian Flynn’s third novel (Sharp Objects, Dark Places), is a psychological thriller that illustrates the extremes in human thought and behavior that most of us are too frightened to contemplate.

It begins with a disappearance, one that possesses the accouterments of a kidnapping and murder. Nick Dunne, the husband, is ambivalent about his wife Amy’s vanishing – their marriage has been imploding the last few years and he has been looking for a way out. But when he stumbles upon the clues to a scavenger hunt that Amy has made a tradition of their anniversaries, old affections bubble to the surface. In over his head, Nick rides a fine line between love and hate while the police search for a possible corpse and decide on him as the prime suspect.

The rampant psychopathy Flynn introduces later on is unsettling and all too real. People like this exist and take prisoners every day, their inscrutable charm and seeming brilliance the shiny hook catching every hungry and gullible fish in the pond. The iniquity of her characters is complemented by her warped thought processes; her occasional stream-of-consciousness style tangents are the crack in the human psyche, the darkness and depravity within spilling onto the pages. Both Nick and Amy’s voices are frank and immodest, sometimes downright vulgar. The reader will come to loathe both of them for being long on corruption and short on principles.

The mystery/thriller part of Flynn’s story is well-plotted, the trail of deception winding and wheeling its way on a steady pace from beginning to end. But it isn’t a “taut” thriller in the literal sense - it would need about 50 or more pages shaved off to merit that adjective. Though Flynn is an exceptional writer, some of her passages are a bit much, one in particular featuring Amy describing a “Cool Girl” persona lengthy and rambling. She also takes her time building momentum. The novel has a sluggish start, the first of its three parts laying the track for a crazy train that goes at lightning speed through Part 2 and then derails toward the end. How it all wraps up takes some suspension of disbelief and the last few pages are limp and unsatisfactory. The denouement is open-ended and has no palpable resolution, giving it potential to affect a reader’s overall verdict. I was torn on whether to award this book 2 or 3 stars for that very reason. I think people feel cheated by it because Flynn spends the entirety of the novel building an appetite for retribution only to yank that dangling carrot away just as a bite of it seems imminent.

In short, “Gone Girl” failed to meet my expectations. But Flynn is brilliant. She is sharp, cynical, delightfully unpredictable, and one-of-a-kind. The scope of her imagination and her unique voice still put her at the top of my list of favorite authors. Proceed her work with caution - it is nervy and disquieting, with many more dark places yet to be explored.