Book Reviews: Gone Girl, a Psychological Thriller

Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn

I picked up this book, variously described as a crime thriller or a psychological thriller (which I think is more accurate), not knowing much about its content. I’d attended a webinar in which the teacher mentioned it as a brilliant example of how plot twists generate that page-turning, can’t-put-it-down addiction. On the strength of the recommendation, I decided to check it out without reading the book description.

To the outside world, Nick and Amy Dunne appear to be a perfect married couple, crazy in love with each other, generous, and understanding. When Amy goes missing on their fifth wedding anniversary, Nick is understandably distraught. The police are sympathetic, as are Nick’s sister and Amy’s bestselling-novelist parents. That is, until the clues don’t add up and Nick becomes the prime suspect in the emerging murder investigation.

I borrowed the audiobook edition from my public library and listened to it as I went about daily chores—not vacuuming, that’s too loud! This version alternated narrators, a man reading the part of Nick Dunne and a woman portraying Amy Elliott-Dunne. The sections are fairly short, and switch times (past/present) as well as points of view. As if the mystery of Amy’s disappearance wasn’t enough to generate mystery and tension, the gradually evolving portrait of these two people nailed it. Nothing was as it first appeared, not the disappearance and the clues discovered by the police, not the history of this couple…and not the characters themselves.

Unreliable narrators are tricky to write because they work best when the author plays fair with the reader, misleading but never outright deceiving. All the clues as to what is really going must be there, even if the narrator character puts them together in the wrong way. It’s especially challenging if the story is told in first person (in the case of Gone Girl, alternating two first-person viewpoints) because the reader needs to know things the character doesn’t. Daphne Du Maurier’s novel, Rebecca, is a great example, in which the self-effacing, nameless second wife entirely misunderstands the nature of her husband’s relationship with his first wife, the eponymous Rebecca. In fact, she fabricates what Rebecca was really like from her own insecurities. In Gone Girl, both Nick and Amy see the other through the lens of their own psychological pathologies.

The plot and its gradually unveiling of the dark truths beneath the “perfect couple” is fueled by Amy’s implacable anger and hunger for revenge. While not unknown, that’s not a common central motivating drive for a novel. I was struck by this quote from the author, Gillian Flynn:

“I certainly think that the acknowledgment of female anger as a viable emotion, as something that should be dealt with and acknowledged and appreciated and women feeling that way was one of the reasons that so many people connected to Gone Girl.”

The book was a best-seller, as it richly deserves to be. It’s a great case study in how to keep reader engagement through skyrocketing tension and unexpected plot turns.