Update 50 - Gone Girl: No One's the Good Guy

Spoiler Heavy:

I was on a weird reading stretch for the past couple weeks. I finished the first draft of a book I was writing, and started going through books on my list to pass the time. I ripped through a bunch of Jack Ketchum, the Silmarillion, and ended up on Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, which has been sitting on my home desk for the better part of a year. The book was a fascinating back and forth between a couple stuck in a loveless marriage, centered around the event of wife Amy’s disappearance and the framing of her husband Nick as the culprit.

The dynamic between Nick and Amy is both consciously and unconsciously transactional. Both people in the relationship need something from the other, and need the delivery to be as perfect in real life as it is in their head. The repression of these needs results in Nick cheating. Amy’s rebuttal is not a legal one, but the release of her own pent up frustrations through framing her husband for her murder and disappearance.

The book is compelling largely because of the mystery surrounding Amy’s disappearance. In looking for his wife, Nick finds his belief in the possibility that he his being manipulated deepening as he talks to people from Amy’s past. If Amy feels betrayed, she destroys the other person until she is satisfied. Nick’s infidelity, in the wake of Amy funding his bar and moving across the country for him, is a betrayal so beyond her conception, that Amy goes full sociopath mode in her revenge plot.

Nick is contemptable and is punished. Amy is robbed at one point, but suffers no real consequences by the end. It is, she is, unnerving. There is a knee-jerk reaction when faced with two equally bad choices, to try and balance them out. For all Nick’s conceit, sneaking, whining, and cheating, I find him more contemptable. Amy, on the other hand, came across as terrifying, inhuman, and evil.

Fantastic, almost epistolary writing. 10/10, would recommend.