Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn: Book review
April 30th, 2013 by Sam Downing
Gone Girl is one of those everyone-is-talking-about-this-so-I-guess-I’ll-check-it-out-too books. Happily, it’s not one of those crazy-popular books you read with one hand turning the pages and the other batting away the unholy stench of shit reeking from the pages. This is a bestselling thriller that is actually pretty thrilling! Which doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its problems.
Spoilers (of the utterly-plot-ruining-so-watch-out variety) follow.
This much you know from the blurb on the back of the book: Golden boy Nick Dunne meets golden girl Amy Elliott. They hit it off. They wed. Then everyone goes sour: Nick loses his sweet job as an entertainment writer for an Entertainment Weekly-type magazine*, Amy’s trust fund is wiped out by her flaky parents’ financial mismanagement, the two move back to Nick’s decaying-middle-American-shithole hometown, their marriage starts to break down. On their fifth wedding anniversary, Amy disappears from their home. The crime scene suggests a violent struggle. The police immediately suspect Nick – the husband is always guilty, right? – except we know he didn’t do it. So what has happened to Amy?
(*Author Gillian Flynn was also formerly an entertainment writer for Entertainment Weekly. Which is probably just a crazy coincidence.)
Last chance to back out if you don’t want any spoilers. And this really is one of those stories you should experience spoiler free.
Halfway through her novel, Flynn completely upends it. Amy hasn’t been killed by some violent, mysterious man. She’s staged her disappearance as an Old Testament God-level revenge against Nick for cheating on her with a younger women. On the one hand, it’s fiendishly clever: Gone Girl immediately becomes something much more compelling, much fresher than the “missing woman” story we’ve been led to believe it is.
On the other hand… something about the twist flattens the story into two dimensions, and it’s less compelling. Suddenly, Nick’s increasingly misogynist feelings towards Amy (and our increasingly complicated feelings towards him) are brushed aside – hey, the reason he hates his wife is because she really is an actual literal psychopath. Hey, of course Nick is the good guy again, because even though he cheated on Amy, she really is lying, manipulative, hate-filled* and through-and-through horrible. Which is kind of a shame, because in its first half the book frequently cuts to the heart of what it is to be in a relationship with devastating clarity, the kind of clarity usually reserved for those times when you wake up at 3 a.m. and remember your death is coldly inevitable, only to turn Nick and Amy’s marriage into more conventional cat-and-mouse spy-versus-spy stuff.
(*Seriously, there is a lot of woman-on-woman use of the C-word in here.)
That said, Flynn mostly succeeds in keeping the momentum up in the second half of the book, as Nick starts plotting to get Amy back and Amy starts plotting to outmanoeuvre Nick’s plots and Nick starts plotting to outmanoeuvre Amy’s plots to outmanoeuvre Nick’s plots… and so on and so on. It whips up and up and around itself until it all finally collapses in the last few ludicrous pages, as the plot fizzles out with a whimper – Amy (who’s also an actual literal murderer by this point in addition to being an actual literal psychopath) manipulates Nick into taking her back and falls pregnant with his artificially inseminated kid, and Nick accepts because he relishes her mindgames and wants to protect his unborn kid… or something.
I bet most people will finish Gone Girl with a “Seriously – WTF was that dumb ending” expression. But it’s a pretty entertaining ride getting to said dumb ending. Any writer who can get you to keep turning the page even as your scoffing eyebrow creeps ever higher up your forehead has pulled off a pretty good trick.
Spoilers follow.)
I read
The third book, The Tiger in the Well, is about such a fate. While the first two books are about Sally rising above the sexist goons of the time, in Tiger those goons are actively seeking to crush her. A powerful and mysterious force conspires to take from Sally everything that she’s built up – her business, her home, her family – but not by killing her. Her shadowy enemy is taking away everything by twisting the law, which didn’t give much of shit about women back then, especially unmarried ones with children.
The Tin Princess departs from the first three books (if the differently arranged title didn’t clue you in). For starters, Sally hardly features at all. The focus is on Jim; Adelaide, a street urchin last seen in Ruby; and Becky, who’s recruited as Adelaide’s maid after she suddenly marries the prince of the tiny European kingdom Razkavia and becomes its princess.
iPhones screens are fine for reading Agatha Christies and Dan Browns and Stieg Larssons – page turners. They’re no good very bad for reading anything that demands actual attention. Anything that has long, dialogue-free paragraphs. Anything that has lots of charts and tables and diagrams. A book like, say, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel.
Look: Life of Pi‘s vision of God – this benign lodestar of kindness and love, free of dogma and hatred – is lovely. If I were into religion or spirituality, I’d be into that (probably because it’s so harmless. Anyone could accept Pi’s God without really having to put in any effort). But it’s rooted in the assumption that without faith you can’t have wonder, that nothing is wonderful unless it can be explained by the guiding hand of God. Which… no. Emphatic no. If Pi survived purely by chance, or by his own skill, by something that can’t be dismissed as merely “some deity did it” – that is wonderful.
Quartet is not trying knock you down with any weighty themes, or seed an aggressive fear of ageing in your heart. (If you want an aggressive fear of ageing seeded in your heart, watch Amour. Oof.) It just wants to let you know: Hey, isn’t an appreciation of art a nice thing to have, at any age? And isn’t it kind of nice to grow old if you’re surrounded by loved ones and doing the things you love?
What a captivating, enthralling, terrific book! The Ruby in the Smoke is the kind of adventure I’d tentatively describe as “ripping”. (But not if it makes me sound like a dick?) As I read this I crossly thought: “Why wasn’t a book like this around when I was a child?! What a rip!” Later on I discovered it was published in 1986, when I was a (very small, still-several-years-from-learning-to-read) child: “… oh.” At least I got to enjoy it as 


I was near the end City of Lost Souls while I waiting for a coffee at my local place and one of the waitresses asked me what I was reading. I told her it was trashy teen fantasy. “Oh,” she said, “like Twilight?” “Well… kind of,” I replied, “but it has a better plot.” But then I thought about it and added: “It’s still the kind of thing I should be ashamed of reading, though.”
Buried in the acknowledgements in the back of Black Heart is what might be the key to Holly Black‘s success. She writes (slight paraphrasing): “I have to thank my husband, who once again let me read the whole book to him out loud.”

