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GONE GIRL
by Gillian Flynn
Crown, June 2012
432 pages
$25.00
ISBN: 030758836X


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As the day of their fifth wedding anniversary dawns, Amy and Nick Dunne appear to their acquaintances as an unusually happy couple. True, they have suffered serious financial reverses in the course of the Great Recession and have been forced to leave New York City and their comfortable middle class, liberal style of life to return to Nick's hometown of Carthage, Missouri, a small, undistinguished, and now economically desperate city on the banks of the Mississippi River. But Amy gallantly tries to make the best of it, caring for Nick's dying mother, doing her best to learn the style of the women who are now her neighbours. Or so it would appear.

The day finds Nick more tense than usual. A charming ritual of Amy's devising marks every anniversary - a treasure hunt, with clues in doggerel, that are to lead Nick to the gift Amy has for him. Nick views this challenge as a kind of examination that he inevitably fails, one that reveals his inadequacies as a spouse.

But when he gets home on this particular anniversary, Amy is gone. There are signs of a struggle, smears of blood, overturned furniture, an open door. She does not return nor is her body found anywhere. Gradually, suspicion turns on Nick, who cannot seem to exhibit the appropriate emotions for a loving husband in his situation. Although there is not a great deal of evidence, there is a lot of publicity and Amy's cause is taken up by a daytime television star who manages to convince the entire nation that Nick is getting away with murder.

The story is told in alternating chapters by two very unreliable narrators, Nick and Amy. Nick's contribution begins on "The Day Of" Amy's disappearance and continue more or less chronologically until the final pages. Amy's is in the form of a diary, beginning in 2005, the year she first met Nick, and chronicles her view of the marriage. It will come as no surprise to learn that each sees things rather differently from the other.

At this point, where this all seems to be going seems fairly predictable. But Gillian Flynn has more than a few tricks up her sleeve and GONE GIRL strikes me as a very ambitious novel indeed. As a suspense novel, it manages to keep the reader off balance the entire way, leaving enormous doubt about what happened and who did it. On the most pressing level it is a dissection of a very difficult marriage, but it is not simply a story of two unusual people bound in a hopelessly flawed relationship. The marriage is only the most dramatic example of the failed dreams and burst illusions that Flynn suggests characterizes contemporary American reality.

Amy's parents (she is an only and indulged child) are a loving couple who have had a huge success with a series of books about "Amazing Amy," books that both are and are not based on the actual Amy and that have achieved a kind of celebrity for the child now woman. These have been so profitable that they were able to provide Amy with a handsome trust fund and nice place to live in Brooklyn. But now they aren't selling and the Elliotts have had to ask Amy for their money back. The Missouri town where Nick and Amy move is nightmarishly apocalyptic in its decline. The pair rent a house in a development that is half-empty due to foreclosures and bad loans. The newly homeless can been seen from time to time sheltering in the vacant houses, peering wildly from a window. The shopping mall is empty of shops and now provides a home for the dispossessed workers of the former Blue Book plant that used to manufacture exam booklets for the nation's schools until computers made them obsolete. Now the laid-off workers roam the mall, waiting for the back pay they were promised and making what living they can selling drugs.

And it's not just the well-named Carthage that's destroyed. On a trip to nearby Hannibal, home to Tom Sawyer, Nick realizes, "We were literally experiencing the end of a way of life, a phrase I'd applied to New Guinea tribesmen and Appalachian glassblowers....Carthage had gone bust; its sister city Hannibal was losing ground to brighter, louder, cartoonier tourist spots. My beloved Mississippi was being eaten in reverse by Asian carp flip-flopping their way up toward Lake Michigan." It is, he thinks, the end of everything.

Nick and Amy's marriage is an individual, personal version of the destroyed larger national dream. The end it reaches, though altogether inevitable, hardly bodes well for the nation.

GONE GIRL is a brilliant example of what the crime genre can aspire to in the hands of a gifted writer. The tricks and turns of the plot will satisfy any reader in search of a tense and puzzling psychological thriller. But if that reader cares to go a step beyond, there is plenty more to think about and worry over besides he said, she said.

§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, June 2012

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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