Gone Girl: A Novel

This book has been sitting at the top of the NY Times Bestseller list for a while, and since it was in my Kindle library and my wife and daughter read it, and recommended it, I took it on – and I wish I had not taken the time. On the one hand, this has been reviewed on Amazon more than 7,000 times and it has an average rating of 4 out of 5 stars. I did find a couple of 1 star Amazon reviews that I could agree with. First, I think it primarily plays to women, presenting the leading woman Amy Elliott Dunne as someone most women could or would like to identify with. She was 32 years old at the beginning, independently wealthy, and wondering why she had not yet found the right man to love her. There’s a romantic hook for the reader. Living in NYNY, she unexpectedly met a Missouri guy, Nick Dunne, who is handsome, personable, doing well in his career as a writer, and their chemistry is incredible. They marry, and the story really begins with Amy’s disappearance on their fifth anniversary.

The author takes us back and forth from one chapter to the next, from the alternate positions of Amy and Nick, a technique that I liked. The actual crimes are revealed late in the book, unlike so many crime stories that start out with the crime that must then be solved. This book is all about character development, and that’s where it fell short. The apparently normal Amy and Nick were anything but normal, and Amy turned out to be an incredible psychopath. I find it unbelievable that a woman with her psychopathology did not reveal any evidence of her dysfunction for the first couple years of the relationship. The author suggests that after having the best sex life in the world, that by their third year together, Amy was beginning to get moody, and then life intruded when both lost their jobs and Nick’s parents in Missouri went into simultaneous decline. By the end of their fifth year, after having moved to small town Missouri, they were hardly talking to each other, and then Amy’s bizarre plot to free herself of Nick was revealed. His response to his wife's disappearance was weird.

I found myself not believing that Amy could be real, and I’m pretty good at suspending reality as I read a lot of novels that I find overreaching but still enjoyable. And is it really possible that any husband who once discovered the extent of his wife’s deepest problems and ultimate crimes would choose to stay in a marriage? The peripheral characters like Amy’s parents and her best friend in Missouri were simply too shallow and too one-dimensional.

At the 91% mark, I was so disgusted with the whole plot and unbelievable characters that I put it down and asked my daughter about the conclusion. I have no interest in finishing this. I would give it 0 our of 5 stars, if we used such a rating system. In the Amazon reviews, there did seem to be universal disappointment in Flynn’s ending for this story, so how did it still get 4/5 by its readers. Oh, well. To each his own, and I’m not in agreement with the significant praise this book has received.

For one thing, it brings to mind the authors that I do like who have never received the recognition at the same level as Gillian Flynn, authors like Charlie Stella, Frank Tallis, Josh Bazell, and others. I guess, each to his own, and I have no intention of picking up another Flynn book.