Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
You read a pop-thriller about a husband and wife who have some serious issues under the surface that only start to come out when said wife disappears under suspicious circumstances on their fifth anniversary. Do you?
a. Love it so much because it's like seriously the most amazing novel you've ever read and ohmygod like you have to tell everyone about it!
b. Wrinkle your nose and drop it in the garbage bin. Pop thriller? More like pop trash.
c. Scowl in frustration at the back of the book because, for all its many faults, 90% of the book was pretty enjoyable, but the final conclusion undoes all the good will the rest of the book built up and leaves you feeling cheated.
The answer, of course, is c.
Gone Girl is a tough nut to crack. I don't mean the plot; at about a quarter of the way through, I was pretty sure I knew where we going, and most fans of this kind of book will see through a lot of the setup almost immediately. It's hard to find popular thrillers that don't try to pull of some kind of twist at some point, and any moderately savvy reader will almost certainly have suspicions. That's not damning criticism, though; I think Flynn's work there was as fine as any. Sure, it wasn't unpredictable, as far as twists go, it's one worth exploring, even if it's not hard to see coming.
The problem is that, in the end, Flynn robs us of the payoff. There's no real conclusion, and we're left with a story that just peters out.
Let's start with the most obvious problem first. Amazing Amy, she of the righteous anger and emotional imbalance.
Amazing Amy just doesn't actually come across as that amazing. We're supposed to believe that this woman is capable of so much, but then thinks $10 is totally normal for a gallon of milk? She's supposed to be the master manipulator, capable of the grandest of grand deceptions, capable of repeatedly terrorizing and framing people for crimes they didn't commit (even as a child), because everyone loves her so much, but she doesn't see the betrayal coming at the cabin? Her scheming and manipulating and her coldness... nobody else has noticed these attributes in the forty years she's been floating around? We're told how disturbingly clever and awful she is, and what a master criminal she is, but the ways that she acts just don't justify the reputation. It's unbelievable that she gets away with so much when we see how foolish and unprepared she is in so many other ways. She plans the perfect frame-up, but she gets herself mugged by people she has every reason to be wary of (and, in fact, has repeatedly expressed concern about?). No. The truly weird thing, to me, is that it was so unnecessary. The whole sequence in the cabin seemed to be there to undermine Amy. It reads like it's supposed to show us "She's not as clever as she thinks she is. She's not some superhuman Lex Luthor style supervillain.", but it's really just there to force her to call Desi. But it does undermine her, a fact that Flynn ignores.
Even despite that, I was still mostly on board. The notes, the scavenger hunt of guilt, the twisting the knife with the little props and the set-up: it's great stuff, even if it doesn't hold up under too much scrutiny. Following the trail of clues and seeing Nick squirm is worth it. Oh, sure, her fury is a little over the top, but, by then, we know he's a cheating scumbag, so it's not like he doesn't have a little comeuppance due. Seeing what he would do next to dig the hole deeper, or what the next cog in Amy's unlikely mousetrap would be made for a nice ride.
Speaking of Amy and Nick: I could even get past the utter unlikability of the characters... Nick, who is too handsome, too likable, too passive, too charming (except when he's not). Amazing Amy, who is too beautiful, too clever, too demanding, too alpha, too strong, too in control (except when she's not). Lots of books are about petty unpleasant people, of course, and this one tries to play with the formula by dragging our perceptions back and forth a bit. Sure it ends up being a little contrived at times How often can a chapter end with Nick saying something ominous out of context or seeing something "off-panel" that makes him seem like the Bad Guy
For all the faults, I'd have probably said this was around 3.5 stars... it was engrossing if shallow, and I thought it hummed along pretty well, especially once we got the twist out of the way. But the ending? Ugh.
The ending is just so bad. It's a total cop out. I don't think every story needs to have a happy ending. Hell, for these two characters, there are no happy endings. No matter where it went, these two characters were not going to end up with a happily ever after. But this ending is a cheat. It takes everything that came before and just sort of washes it away. Where's the climax? Where's the payoff? This is Seven if the courier never shows up and John Doe turns and says "Oh, I lied. There was no other victim."
No, no, no. Amy's smug need to get the last word in might have seemed cute, but it's a cheat. The "ignoring the fourth wall" nonsense of it... she knows that she and Nick are telling us, the reader, their stories, now? Really? That's where we're going? It's not half as clever as it might have seemed. Even beyond that, this ending is tremendously unsatisfying. Oh, I get what she's trying to do. Amy is having a baby to "save their marriage." Marriage is a prison. I got it. It's still a cop out. That's not what the story was building to. It needed a real conclusion, not this wimpy "and they lived unhappily ever after" nonsense. It feels more like Flynn couldn't decide whether to let Nick off the hook or to let Amy's plan succeed, so we get this annoying midway point, instead.
So, overall, a very frustrating experience, this. When I closed the book, I just sat and scowled at the back for a few moments, thinking what a cheat it was.
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