Gone Girl

Wow. That was just so much better than I had anticipated. You hear "best seller," you hear "major motion picture," you hear "missing wife mystery," you see - and this one kills me to admit - that it's written by a woman, and already you're dismissing this as "chick lit," as some kind of glorified beach rag. A sexy whodunnit enjoyed by the same people who liked Fifty Shades of Grey. And look, my book standards aren't ridiculously high, as any blog reader can attest, but either I was dead wrong about what type of book Gone Girl was, or I myself am the same type of person I just lightly mocked in my last sentence, because, yeah, man, I really, really liked this book. It's spoiler-free bullet time!

• One easy metric for judging how much you're enjoying a book is, of course, how often you're reading it and how quickly you can get through it. I started this yesterday morning, tacked on a bit more throughout the day, put a solid dent into things last night, squeezed some more in this morning before work, and tackled the remainder on my couch tonight. It was 157,000 words long - half a Song of Ice and Fire installment - and I finished it in two days. I've adored the Song of Ice and Fire series, but never finished any of those books in four days' time. I called Lolita the best book I read in 2014, and it took me four or five days to get through its 112,000 words. Now, granted, A Song of Ice and Fire has twenty-odd concurrent plot lines and like a thousand named characters in it (for real though) and Lolita is a very challenging read loaded with double entendres and witty quips worth reading twice. Gone Girl has two major characters and a small slew of supporting ones and it's an all-around easy read. Still, the numbers are what they are, and an eighty-thousand word per day pace on my part is a sure sign of a very addicting book.
• As you know if you've so much as seen a trailer for the film adaptation, Gone Girl is about a woman (Amy) who disappears one day and the ensuing police investigation, largely focusing on her husband (Nick). The state of their marriage prior to her disappearance hasn't been great. The way the book is framed, chapters alternate between Nick's present day point of view and Amy's diary entries from the past. It works incredibly well, and it's easy to empathize with each character and understand their frustrations with one another.
• The book is really only a mystery for its first half. The truth about what's happened to Amy is revealed right in the middle of the story, but rather than wrapping things up with a neat little bow, it only adds new layers of intrigue for how Nick's story will end up. To say more would be to spoil something big, even though it's the type of twist you could probably sort of guess. I did have a hunch about it, I'll admit, but only among three or four other "hey, what if..." theories that turned out to be way off base.
• Character sympathies shift and wane throughout the book. At times I loved Amy and at times I despised her. I was always a little ambivalent toward Nick, who only kind of oscillated between victim and asshole. This is absolutely the reaction Gillian Flynn wanted when she wrote her novel the way she did. And it is absolutely essential to the themes at play here, for me to feel so strongly about one character and so much less so about another.
• The twist in the middle is huge, and will always be what the book is remembered for, years from now, but it's the twist at the very end, so powerful that it divided readers into "loved it" and "hated it" camps, where Gone Girl was its most powerful and frightening. (Yeah, stick me in the "loved it" camp. I was screaming, "No! No! No!" in my head during that final chapter as much as anyone, I'm sure - but I'm incredibly satisfied about it.)
• Just want to throw this out there, but I saw a lot of myself in Nick, for better or worse, yet none of my wife in Amy, at either her best or her worst. This could entirely be an issue of improper self-assessment. Marissa, you've read the book - care to weigh in?
• This wasn't the deepest book I've read, and it won't go down as an all time character study or be taught in classes or anything like that, but what it lacked in depth it made up for in breadth. Among the many themes and subjects found in Gone Girl are:
  • Unreliable narrators
  • The importance of public perception in the new age of trial by media
  • Gender stereotypes
  • What it means to be a good spouse
  • Taking control and shaping your own life into a customizable story
  • The perceived gap between city people and simple country folk
  • Entitlement and privilege
  • Trust and communication within a marriage
  • Manipulation and seduction
  • Long cons
  • Misogyny and feminism
  • Revenge

And once we've reached dual-tier bulleted lists, I think it's time to call it a day. For real though, you should all read this book. I can't wait to see the movie.