Gillian Flynn - Gone Girl

Just in case any of you are wondering: no baby yet. We are a week overdue. Surely it can't be much longer. I am so uncomfortable. Mama needs her body back!

In other news, I took the name for this blog from one of two book clubs I now belong to - the 'original' one, which I have had the privilege of belonging to for several years now: The Bibliofillies. We are a group of 30-something women, most now married, most with children of some description. I like this group of people enormously and enjoy our discussions, even if they happen less frequently than they used to (we are all so much busier now), and even (perhaps especially) when we are diverted from book discussion to gossip and debate of all sorts. Really I think a book club is a good excuse for a group of friends to meet up every once in a while, with the added bonus of indulging in a shared interest. We could just as well be a recipe-sharing group, or a knitting group. But for us, books are what bring us together.

I recently recommended Gone Girl to the 'Fillies, and when they took it on I felt the pressure of some responsibility upon me, and picked it up for a re-read. I wanted to have it fresh in my mind for our meeting last weekend. But I didn't mind the re-read. Gone Girl is that rare find, a book you can read again just months later and get new things from it the second time around.

It is, as the name suggests, a book that has at its core a missing woman. Nick Dunne's beautiful wife Amy is missing by chapter two - this is no spoiler. The state of the Dunnes' living room provides evidence of a violent altercation and the police immediately suspect foul play. As 'the husband', Nick is of course the first and primary suspect, and as the case unfolds, every new clue seems only to confirm his guilt. One would assume, then, that the heart of this book is a mystery - but that is only partly true.

The novel is incredibly clever and highly original. It is told in interchanging chapters, half of them narrated by Nick and half by Amy, through a diary she has left behind, which tells the story of Nick and Amy from when they first met up until her disappearance. Thus we are exposed to both sides of a story, comprising opposing views of a marriage and its internal workings, which would normally be private, known only to the people involved in the relationship. We learn that Amy is the dazzling, urbanite daughter of two psychology professors who have made a wealthy living from writing a series of children's books entitled 'Amazing Amy', based loosely on their daughter, and Nick is a small-town boy from Carthage, Missouri, who meets Amy whilst working in New York City as a journalist. After the demise of print media causes both Nick and Amy to lose their jobs, Nick successfully persuades a reluctant Amy to move with him back to his home-town, where she is slowly suffocating in suburbia.

The narrators are each so persuasive that I found my sympathies and suspicions shifting along with each alternating narrative. For much of the book, I was absolutely convinced of one interpretation, which had me intensely disliking one character and admiring another. Then, in the second half of the book, my view changed dramatically, at which stage I was so dumbfounded by the genius of Flynn's writing and plotting that I became absolutely desperate to speak to people about it - hence the book club recommendation.

That Flynn has pulled this off, writing a story which tells so convincingly two completely opposing views of the same marriage and the same incident, in which each perspective reads as utterly believable, is quite extraordinary.

Unfortunately it is difficult to review the book in any greater detail without revealing spoilers, and it's such a good read that I am loathe to turn anybody off by divulging too much and thereby ruining any aspect of it. So I will leave this vague, but say that interestingly, during the course of our book club discussion, it became clear that whilst this novel is ostensibly about a crime, what all of us really took away from it was the fascinating and complex portrayal Flynn had given of a marriage. Nick and Amy are extreme characters, in some ways, but the ups and downs of their relationship will be familiar to many readers. The bigger question explored here is the nature of intimacy - whether love is a kismet connection that happens to you, or whether it is something that is created through effort, even pretence. Whether it is ever truly possible to know another person.

Overall assessment: 4.5 out of 5. I should add that I find it difficult to award this rating here when I have handed out straight 4/5s to St Aubyn and Egan, who are on many levels far better writers. I suppose it is fair to say that I rate this within its genre. Gone Girl is not high literature, but it is so much more than one would usually expect from genre fiction, and it is difficult to fault Flynn for her plotting or her characterisation. It's a great read that I would highly recommend to anyone who is not uppity about literature. This is also a great book club pick - much to discuss and it will appeal to a wide spectrum of readers.

Pros / favourite part(s): The novel works on so many levels, but what is perhaps most surprising is the strength of Flynn's writing. It is not lyrical or poetic, but it is pointed and emotionally charged, and Flynn is able to raise bigger societal questions without impeding the page-turning nature of the narrative.

On marriage: “‘What are you thinking, Amy? The question I’ve asked most often during our marriage, if not out loud, if not to the person who could answer. I suppose these questions stormcloud over every marriage: What are you thinking? How are you feeling? Who are you? What have we done to each other? What will we do?’”

On the state of today's society: "Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative... We were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on the attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can't recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn't immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A fucking commercial. You know the awful singsong of the blasé: Seeeen it. I've literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can't anymore. I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet... It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless automat of characters... I would have done anything to feel real again."

Cons: I know many readers were disappointed by the ending. Obviously I keen to avoid giving anything away. There are parts towards the end where I felt the narrative perhaps dragged on longer than it needed to. But I do understood why Flynn chose to end the book as she did. If you view this as a mystery novel, or crime fiction, the ending may be disappointing. But if you view this as a treatise on marriage, it is a fascinating finish, more thought-provoking than any of the more obvious alternatives.