This review will contain spoilers, so don’t read it if you intend to read the book. 

Gone Girl has won high praise and has been a best-seller.  It is true that it is memorable in the way that it derails the reader’s expectations.  The plot starts out with a married couple, transplanted from Manhattan to small-town Missouri, celebrating their fifth wedding anniversary.  Husband Nick tells the story in the present while we see Amy’s diary entries from selected days, from the time she first met Nick to the time close to the present when she writes about she is scared for her life because of Nick’s anger and disappointment with his life.  Both of them have lost their jobs, and they have moved from the city to look after his parents.  His mother got cancer and his mother has Alzheimer’s.  Amy used to be rich because she had a trust fund, but her parents asked for their money back.  What little she had left she gave to Nick so that he could start a new bar with his sister.  He spends a lot of his time at that bar, avoiding Amy.  Then on their fifth anniversary, Amy disappears.  It looks like she has been abducted.  Soon, Nick is the main suspect.  All the evidence points to him.  But there is no body, and so it will be hard to prove that he actually killed Amy.

In the first part of the book, the reader is trying to work out what is going on, and whether Nick really did it.  Both Amy and Nick seem like unhappy and self-absorbed people, and maybe Nick is hiding something from the reader.  However, it turns out that it Amy who has been deceptive.  She has made elaborate plans to frame Nick for her murder, and they are turning out very well.  She set up an intricate trap for him, and he falls right into it.  They police play a cat and mouse game with him, but he knows from the start that at least one of the detectives thinks he did it.  Nick is smart and he works hard to keep his freedom, but he has made many mistakes, and his future does not look good. 

Through this depiction of an unhappy marriage, a scheming wife and a failing, selfish husband, we get a depiction of the pressures on marriage.  We can read this book as just the story of two people, or we can read it as an analysis of the sorry state of modern marriage and the failings of men and women.  The book is more fun as an innocuous gothic thriller, but it falls into so many stereotypes of the unhinged psychotic wife who will stop at nothing to get what she wants that it feels to be making some kind of statement.  These are the kinds of fears about women that John Waters mocked in his 1994 movie Serial Mom.  The AC Club has a list of movies about vengeful women: Fatal Attraction is at the top of the list, obviously, and is followed by 21 others.  The movie of this novel, due out in October 2014, can be added to such lists.  I was hoping that somehow Flynn would find a way to go beyond the usual hackneyed portrayals of controlling possessive women, but she stays firmly within the usual framework, even if Amy manages to hide her true nature better than most at the start. 

© 2014 Christian Perring

Christian Perring, Professor of Philosophy, Dowling College, New York