Book Review: Gillian Flynn – “Gone Girl”

After I have been so blown away by this book of Gillian Flynn a few weeks back, I decided to do a small review of it. Don’t read it if you haven’t read the book yet and/or plan on doing it somewhere in the future.

Nick Dunne is a douchebag. Sounds harsh, but it’s true. He’s the typical middle-aged man: married for 5 years straight, and after all the magic slowly faded over the years, he shows how much he really cares now. Every year his wife, Amy, does a small treasure hunt for him with little poems about the past year of their marriage – probably to keep it fresh and romantic, I guess. Fact is: Nick couldn’t care less. He never understands the hints to the next part of the treasure hunt that Amy gives him (on that, I can’t blame him – I mean: who understands little, somehow encrypted poems that could mean anything?!), and for that matter, he doesn’t care, because for him, at the end of the hunt there is some “prize” waiting for him that he doesn’t care about as much as his wife does.

Amy, on the other hand, is like the picture perfect wife. She supports Nick with everything he does – she even left New York, where she grew up, where she has built up her entire life, just so her husband can move back to his hometown to take care of his sick mother. Although she feels misplaced and lonely and unhappy at times, she does everything to show Nick her neverending love and support; she isn’t that kind of wife that expects her husband to treat her like a princess – instead, she tries everything to please her prince.

Then one day, everything changes. On their 5th anniversary, Amy disappears. Out of the blue. No one knows where to, how or why. Nothing makes sense to Nick, who believes that his wife never had any enemies, and everyone who knew Amy can’t say anything bad about her. The more time passes, the longer Amy is gone, the more evidence shows up that incriminate Nick to be the one who made her disappear. His behaviour doesn’t only leave the two detectives in charge in complete suspicion, but also neighbours, Amy’s family and even Nick’s own sister, Margo. Then it turns out that he has an affair with a younger woman, a former college student of his, for over a year and has already given up on his marriage, which displays in weird facial expressions and actions during the most inappropriate moments – like a press conference where he is supposed to beg for his wife’s return, ending it with a cruel smirk on his lips. And just when you think that it can’t get any worse for him, just when you already see him in jail with one foot, the story makes a turn that changes everything.

When it turns out that Amy played with Nick from the get go, I sat there, for a moment completely taken aback, mouth gaping open. When she tells the reader that the lovely Amy that was displayed for the 1st half of the book is only a fiction, it doesn’t make sense at all. The more she reveals her REAL diary to the world, the more cracks in her perfect little life appear. She had never been a wanted child, not as people might think. Her mother had a lot of miscarriages, and her parents’ initial wish of having a baby girl – that they named Amy – was the reason Amy Elliott Dunne was on this planet – at least in Amy’s eyes. She never forgave her parents to make her the second choice, to use her and her life for their own book series called “Amazing Amy” that helped them become quite wealthy . Her hatred for her parents resulted of the burden her parents put her on: always being “amazing”, being everyone’s darling, being the perfect daughter. That burden has turned her into a cold-hearted, calculating woman with two faces that has no other feelings but pity and condescension for others – including her husband, who, in her eyes, is nothing but a loser who seems to be willing to be a marionette in the hands of his wife without even noticing it. And finding out that her husband is cheating on her with a younger woman probably didn’t help much with that.

The more you get through the book, the more pity you feel for Nick. Yes, I was on the “Nick Dunne is such an asshole, he doesn’t even deserve Amy, let alone ANY woman, what a jerk!” front at first, because, hands down: I am a woman. To read about a man not caring about the little romantic and nice things she tries to keep their marriage and love fresh, a man who has stopped loving his wife a long time ago and just doesn’t have the balls to pack his things and leave, to give her the chance to find someone who deserves her, who makes her happy…that was against all you normally see in Hollywood movies. And against all that – despite my saying that I am not a romantic and never want to marry and have kids (ask anyone who knows me, I’m a helpless “anti-marriage-kids-house-tree-dog” person) – I kind of believed in, in a very narrow space in my heart. I know myself how it feels to be rejected when you think the other person feels the same for you, and it’s just not right. Somehow I think it’s a woman’s right to despise every man who is like that. And maybe send him to hell.  Nick gave up on his life with Amy a long time ago, so in some way people might say they understand her reasons, why she set him up with all her lies just to see him suffer, to have him going to jail, or worse – on death row for her murder. Because that was her actual plan: leading the police and everyone in her life to Nick as the perpetrator, and then – hello, big finale – killing herself.

It’s kind of shocking to hear a person talking about having long planned to kill herself as if she was talking about the weather. It’s also very interesting to read how someone is capable of sort of making her life nothing but a play, where the ones they love are their marionettes – simply because they don’t have the measure of that person at all. Amy has perfected this. By the middle of the book, you’ll hate HER instead of Nick. Because she’s a right bitch. You want to go to her, close your hands around her neck and strangle her until her lips have turned black. And then, you want to hug Nick, to stroke his head and tell him that everything’s going to be okay, that he’s not a bad person.

As you might see, I absolutely loved the psychological twist in this book that Gillian Flynn sends you onto. She makes you hate one character so much from the get go, and when you think you feel the hatred for that one boiling up inside of you, she opens the hidden door in her story and slams it right into your face. You’re left sitting there with a black eye, asking yourself how you couldn’t see that one coming, how you could be so blind. And I have to admit, there haven’t been a lot of writers who made me feel that way about a book. There are actually really few writers who impress me so much with their style that I feel the constant need to talk about it and read their stories over and over again. Plus, I always hated books that are written in the first person, but Gillian Flynn manages it to make me like it, with the constant switch between the storylines of Nick and Amy, present and past; throughout the entire book she never fails to keep it fresh. The reader feels the constant need to read the next chapter, because they want to know what happens – which made it absolutely impossible for me to put the book away for more than a few hours (which were only during work, where I obviously can’t read). All this left me in complete awe.

My resumé: Go read “Gone Girl” – if I haven’t deprived you now of it, due to basically revealing the entire storyline to you on here (you were warned). But as you also might have noticed: I have not revealed the end of the book. I think everyone should see that one for themselves. Because although, in some way, it was not what I expected, a bit disappointing, maybe, but then again, a genius last masterpiece to the puzzle that is “Gone Girl”. It’s worth every moment you spend reading it, every time you give it in your free-time. Gillian Flynn is massively talented, and I hope to read alot more books of her like that.