This ‘Girl’ keeps you guessing
Since her days as a former television critic for Entertainment Weekly, Gillian Flynn has shown herself to be enjoyably adept at shaping suspense in two fem-noir novels, “Sharp Objects” and “Dark Places.” In “Gone Girl,” she’s quite outdone herself with a tale of marital strife so deliciously devious that it moves the finish line on “The War of the Roses.”
Actually, “Gone Girl” pops with such cultural resonance as to make the reference to “Roses” seem dated, though you can wish Kathleen Turner were young enough to sylph about as Amy Dunne, the not-so-loved and possibly late wife of hapless Nick.
The two began life together as a golden couple, she far more golden than he. In couple currency, Nick had cachet as a good looking magazine writer in Manhattan. But she was better looking, had money and was widely desired. Still, she married him. Nick always had a problem figuring out why.
Hard times land on them with blunt force. Both lose their jobs, and their need to economize relocates them to the hardscrabble, small town on the Mississippi that Nick grew up in. Housed in a McMansion in a failing development, Nick expects Amy will exude disdain for anyone and anything her eyes fall on. She’s like that.
It’s seeing her for what she is that causes Nick to fall out of love with her. Oh, and there’s that affair he has with a student, but that’s a revelation for later in a novel studded with disclosures and guided by purposeful misdirection.
Let’s begin as the novel does, on the day of their fifth anniversary when Nick comes home and finds Amy gone. Boy, is he screwed.
In a media society informed by Nancy Grace, when a wife goes missing, the husband murdered her. There’s no need for a body to arrive at a verdict. Which, for a nation increasingly devoted to hating Nick, is a good thing since Amy A never shows up u dead. But we do hear her voice raised from f the pages of her diary.
Such a good girl she is, or was as the case may be. Devoted to t Nick’s terminallyill mother, though Nick knew nothing about that. Nor did Nick know that Amy had a best friend, a frazzled mother of small children, the kind of woman Amy would loathe particularly since she didn’t want kids. Another thing Nick didn’t know? Amy was pregnant.
As the narrative shifts between “he thought” and “she wrote,” Flynn delivers a wickedly clever cultural commentary as well as a complex and driven mystery. Nick seems a good guy, until he doesn’t. Amy is a bitch until a close to saintly version emerges.
Then there’s the big question. Is she even dead?
What fun this novel is.