Finally Heard: "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn

Finally Heard: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, 2012, overdrive.com download.

I read Flynn's first two books and enjoyed them. I especially liked the Kansas one, Dark Places, and emailed her saying as much. At that time she had not published Gone Girl and had the time to actually respond to fan mail.

I enjoyed this book too but do not quite understand the massive popularity and success it achieved. The book certainly hit the zeitgest though and left us with girl this and girl that. I mentioned to my wife I was finally listening to this and she said the hated the novel. She was specific in saying the actually hated the book because she did not find any of the characters likeable.

Crime novelists have discussed the topic of likeability plenty of times and how those unlikeable people can be one of the points of a story. Well, tell my wife that and she'll let you know her opinion. She also disliked Dark Places because Flynn wrote about Salina's suburbs. Salina has no suburbs. I was more willing to go along with Flynn's artistic license.

Anyhoo. Spoilers await.

Nick and Amy live in fictional North Carthage, MO along the Mississippi and not far from Hannibal. Nick is a native of Carthage and met New Yorker Amy when he was a journalist in NYC. They married and after they both lost their writing jobs they moved back to MO to assist with Nick's cancer stricken mother and Alzheimer's father.

One morning Amy disappears. The house has signs of a struggle. Nick calls the police. Amy is a Pretty Blond In Danger and hits the news. [I mentioned to my wife the other day that if anything happened to her at least she'd fall in that category and hit the news. She did not appreciate that observation.] Nick gets sympathy and help but falls under suspicion of the police.

The story is told through the journal entries of both characters. Bother characters are selfish. Both characters are lying. Halfway through Flynn has a big reveal that Amy's diary entries in the first half of the novel were all faked. Amy spent a year setting up Nick for a murder wrap. x

Amy's entries paint Nick as a woman hating jerk. A baby hating jerk. An abusive jerk. A jerky jerk. Nick, on the other side, admits to us he lied several times to the police. Nick has been stepping out on Amy with another woman for a year now. He has paid little attention to Amy - a nutbag sociopath. Amy tightly strings Nick up with clues and evidence and Nick is arrested. Amy returns home only when she runs out of money and the old friend she relied on turns out to be a good back-up plan. That back-up plan lets Amy set up the friend as a bad guy kidnapper to take the fall for a fake abduction.

Things happen and you wonder if Amy will get away with things or if Nick will be declared the innocent victim of a vindictive nut. The real fun is in Flynn using the characters to cover so many different topics of family, marriage, hate and revenge, sex roles, sociopathy, and sexism. Amy writes about things I never realized - even minor facts like how women despise the word "panties". Good, I don't like the word either.

I think the novel dragged things out for too long but Flynn wrote a good ending. She has murderous Amy pregnant and Nick forced to stay with her or Amy will abort the child.