Gone Girl

“And they say marriage is such hard work,” a character ironically reflects in a certain scene in Gone Girl. Gillian Flynn uses here a typical suspense structure to deconstruct the institution of marriage and, through the conflicts of deeply troubled characters, expose the difficulties of maintaining a long-lasting relationship.

On his fifth wedding anniversary, Nick Dunne receives the news that his wife, Amy Dunne, has disappeared. His living room was turned upside down, the street door is wide open and the cat waits for him alone on the stairs. Nick doesn’t have a convincing alibi, and the neighbors’ testimony to the police said the couple had quarreled the night before, which makes him the main suspect.

Gone Girl is narrated in the first person. Given the nature of the book, Flynn abuses the concept of the “unreliable narrator” to create an atmosphere of paranoia and tension. In an emblematic moment, Nick says: “I’m a big fan of the lie of omission,” and the warning for the reader couldn’t be clearer.

Flynn, however, is careful not to lie during the story. In crafting narratives of this kind, a careless author can end up making a common mistake: with the sole purpose of misleading the reader, they make innocent characters think of something suspicious and the guilty ones never reflect on their crimes, creating a dishonest narrative that, although serves its purpose at the moment, just needs a retrospective look to fall apart. To get around this problem, Flynn makes use of ambiguous situations to build suspense and keep the mystery alive without deceiving the reader.

At one point, Nick rebukes himself for appearing too calm and still reflects that he had lied to the police nine times during his interrogation, which raises the reader’s suspicion. But the character has already been characterized by his good looks, his lack of empathy, and his insistence on appearing like a good guy. That is, his lies could be due to him being guilty or due to his personality. Soon after revealing this information, Nick also reflects on the day his sister told him, “You’d literally lie, cheat, and steal – hell, kill – to convince people you are a good guy.” It is important to understand how the dual function of this accusation sustains the mystery: on the one hand, she might simply be justifying his lies, but on the other, she might be revealing his motivation for the murder of his wife.

The first half of Gone Girl is built on ambiguity, with countless dialogues and self-reflections assuming various roles in the narrative. In another instant, for example, Nick thinks “The Amy of today was abrasive enough to want to hurt, sometimes,” revealing how, even if he’s not guilty, Nick still has the makings of an abusive husband.

The book criticizes the kinds of behavior that can destroy a marriage. The story shows how the usual lack of communication and the aggressive internal disputes about who is right and who is not (when the best time of the day is when you prove to your partner that they were wrong all the time and that you told them so) can infect and corrode a relationship. It shows how many marry an idea instead of a person, loving only the best aspects of their partner, idealizing them.

Although the reader begins to follow Nick’s point of view, Amy is Gone Girl’s true protagonist, since her character arc is intrinsically linked to this problem. Her parents, for example, idealized her from the very beginning of her life, writing a series of books in her honor called “Amazing Amy”, in which the title character realizes all of her parents’ dreams – forcing Amy, in a passive-aggressive way, to strive to give her best too: “And yet I can’t fail to notice that whenever I screw something up, Amy does it right: When I finally quit violin at age twelve, Amy was revealed as a prodigy in the next book. (‘Sheesh, violin can be hard work, but hard work is the only way to get better!’)”

Her parents’ strategy, as one would expect, had a terrible effect on Amy, making her embody the title of her child book – but in a twisted way. She has fun by assuming the image that corresponds to the idealized vision that other people have of her. At the same time, she considers herself absolutely perfect and superior to everyone – leading to an intensely arrogant view of the world.

This is inevitably reflected in her vision of marriage. Amy wants more than anything to prove to herself that her relationship is better than other people’s – who she calls “dancing monkeys” – without realizing that her actions bring her down to the same level: her last decision in the book, for example, is excellent in its irony, showing that she can’t escape the cliché of the desperate wife trying to save her marriage.

The narrative alternates between Amy’s point of view – with her diary – and Nick’s during the investigation, creating a parallel between the past and present of their relationship, while opposing the characters’ view on events. This can be observed in the contradiction between Nick’s dialogue during his chapter (“Amy, I don’t get why I need to prove my love to you by remembering the exact same things you do, the exact same way you do. It doesn’t mean I don’t love our life together”) and a passage of Amy’s diary (“I like to think I am confident and secure and mature enough to know Nick loves me without him constantly proving it”).

The author is also brilliant in accentuating the disagreement between the characters. In Nick’s chapters, his feelings towards his wife start melancholic (“She said these last words in a childish lilt that I once found fetching”) but eventually move towards aggressive imagery (“My wife was no longer my wife but a razor-wire knot daring me to unloop her”). Meanwhile, in Amy’s point of view, her husband’s usual passivity and indifference sudden evolve into erratic and violent behavior.

But the mystery at the beginning of Gone Girl is not just about whether Nick is guilty or not. He is the main suspect for his wife’s disappearance, but several clues are positioned to indicate another conclusion: his insane father, who hates women, had fled the asylum on the same day; his sister Margo has too close of a relationship with him, suggesting a crime motivated by jealousy; a possessive ex-boyfriend of Amy appears during investigations and raises suspicions; even Amy herself could have orchestrated everything, since she is repeatedly described as intelligent, disciplined and capable of planning major acts in advance. Flynn opens up many possibilities for the reader to conduct their own investigation while using the ambiguity of sentences and situations to make that investigation more complex and rewarding.

The description of the environments also helps to build up the suspense. The dark atmosphere of the story, for example, is already present in an early description of Nick’s neighborhood: “Driving into our development occasionally makes me shiver, the sheer number of gaping dark houses – homes that have never known inhabitants, or homes that have known owners and seen them ejected, the house standing triumphantly voided, humanless.”

It is equally important to realize how the two main characters are never classified in a binary way. Both can be terrible and wonderful persons at different times, which makes their dynamic more complex. The result is a deeper analysis of their relationship, where the question of “who’s right and who’s wrong” so sought by the characters turns into an ever-changing battle.

However, when the main turning point of the story occurs, the narrative changes, quickly solving the “what happened?” mystery to move on to the consequences of the revelation. The twist is very important for the book because it intensifies the development of its core theme: if we were following the counterpoint of ideas between only Nick and Amy, now we receive a third view on the events. Extremely cynical and perverse, this new perspective is responsible for removing us from our comfort zone, making the tone of the story even more suffocating.

Gone Girl only falters during the last moments of the third act, which can feel a little anticlimactic due to some characters simply “giving up”. In addition, there are still some small plot holes in the story, such as Nick managing to hire, amidst serious financial problems, a famous lawyer, whose commission reaches a hundred thousand dollars.

Despite these small mistakes, Gone Girl is an excellent suspense novel, with a well-developed mystery and some memorable – if disturbing – characters. Marriage can be difficult, for sure, but one must remain hopeful that it doesn’t end this way.

November 27, 2019.

Review originally published in Portuguese on September 30, 2014.