What Book to Read?

Gone Girl (2012) is the third novel by Gillian Flynn, though the first one I’ve read. It’s a mystery story, which is well written, with characters that are interesting, and some social comment that is relevant, and underneath the dark humour, thoughtful. I’ll be looking out for the two earlier ones.

On the day of their fifth wedding anniversary, Nick arrives home to find his wife Amy has disappeared. It looks like there has been some kind of struggle. Has she been kidnapped? Or, is it, as the police conclude as the evidence piles up against him, that Nick has killed her, and tried to make it look like a kidnapping? The story, which is told by both Nick and Amy, is divided into three sections. In the first, Nick’s account of what happens after Amy’s disappearance is interleaved with Amy’s diary, which covers their original meeting in New York, their marriage, and their move to the town of North Carthage, Missouri. The second and third sections are told alternately by Nick and Amy. Right from the start, Nick admits that he isn’t telling the police the truth: ‘I’m a big fan of the lie of omission,’ he tells the reader. But what about Amy? The picture she presents of herself in her diary is very different from that presented by Nick. They both seem like unreliable narrators – on steroids. It’s a very clever story.

I like the way Flynn writes; it is modern American vernacular. It’s not ‘literary’ in any traditional sense, but it is vibrant and authentic. ‘But isn’t that the point of every relationship,’ Amy asks, ‘to be known by someone else, to be understood? He gets me. She gets me. Isn’t that the simple magic phrase?’ Nick and Amy are well developed characters. Amy’s parents used her as their inspiration for a series of popular children’s books entitled Amazing Amy; she feels they have stolen her identity, a form of ‘passive-aggressiveness towards their child’. Nick’s view is that she ‘needed to be Amazing Amy all the time.’ He also suffers from his upbringing: ‘The good stuff in me I got from my mom. I can joke, I can laugh, I can tease … I can operate in sunlight basically – but I can’t deal with angry or tearful women. I feel my father’s rage rise up in me in the ugliest way.’ Their relationship is however a bit over the top. I take it that this is because Flynn is satirising marriage in present day America, rather than as some critics have suggested, depicting what might be an actual marriage. Admittedly I have trouble with satire, not always recognising it – or perhaps seeing it where it isn’t intended – but here, the darkly humorous writing seems to indicate satire rather than straight-faced realism.

On the other hand, I take the setting of North Carthage, Missouri, to be totally realistic. This is small town middle America post the Global Financial Crisis. A combination of the GFC and the impact of the Internet meant that both Nick and Amy lost their jobs as writers in New York, and in part prompted the move back to Nick’s home town. It once hosted a giant shopping mall which employed nearly everyone in the town. The mall is now derelict, home only to the homeless. At night it was ‘suburbia, post-comet, post-zombie, post-humanity. A set of muddy shopping-cart tracks looped crazily along the white flooring. A racoon chewed on a dog treat in the entry to a women’s bathroom, his eyes flashing like dimes.’ Nearby towns are similarly dilapidated, with ‘a series of shuttered businesses – ruined community banks and defunct movie houses’. People sell their blood to make a few dollars. Am I wrong, and this is over the top and meant as satire? I don’t know what Flynn intended, but it is eerily similar to the description that Joe Bageant gives of poverty among the poor white population of his home town, Winchester, Virginia in Deer Hunting With Jesus.

This sense that Gone Girl is a novel saying something about post-GFC America goes deeper than just the setting. Most mystery stories, like most crime stories, are conservative in that the resolution of the mystery or crime returns society to an equilibrium upset by crime. But here there is no equilibrium, no moral compass restored. Nick and Amy have no moral compass. Nick’s twin sister Margot does, but hers is a subordinate role throughout the story, and cannot carry enough weight to anchor Nick and Amy. Nick knows he is hollow; ‘It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person,’ he says, ‘just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters … It’s gotten to the point where it seems like nothing matters, because I’m not a real person, and neither is anyone else.’ Just like the mall, Nick and Amy are ‘post-humanity’.

You can read an interesting interview here with Flynn, in which she discusses her view of feminism, but be warned that the discussion gives important clues to what happens in the story. She also says, surprisingly given the cleverness of the plot, that she doesn’t fully chart her stories from the beginning, instead ‘pursuing numerous dead-ends’. Perhaps the twin sister was a dead end; she’s really the only lose end in the book.

You can read more about Gillian Flynn here.