Book: Gone girl
Oct. 4th, 2013 06:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livAuthor: Gillian Flynn
Details: (c) Gillian Flynn 2012; Pub Phoenix 2013; ISBN 978-0-7538-2766-6
Verdict: Gone girl is in some ways an effective thriller but not as clever as it thinks it is.
Reasons for reading it: There's been a lot of buzz about it, and reviews I've read seem strongly divided on whether it's terrible or great, so I was intrigued.
How it came into my hands: The bookshelf of take-me-home books in the staff room at work.
Gone girl is very readable. It successfully delivers unpleasant characters who nevertheless engaged my attention. It's exciting and I cared about the unfolding of the plot, even though I did predict some of the twists. The excitement comes from writing with a lot of forward motion and a fairly original take on some of the expected thriller tropes, but the predictability comes from the fact that Flynn simply can not resist lampshading the clever things she's about to do. The unreliable narrators keep dropping little asides to the reader about being liars or the things they're not telling you or the experience of being a writer and controlling how much information you reveal.
The first half or so of the book makes a fairly decent portrait of a bad marriage, but I am kind of tired of books about middle class urban Americans struggling in bad marriages, and GG doesn't really stand out above the crowd. It's also very much the kind of bad marriage where the problems stem from poor communication and that awful gender essentialist trope which led some comedian or other to define marriage as a war between stupid and evil. The second half of the book when the skullduggery plot gets going is certainly more original, but the action is spoiled by too much intrusion of cleverly framed Moral Dilemmas, making this feel like the adult equivalent of those awful preachy teenage problem books. Also, I just didn't buy the dilemmas as dilemmas. There are repeated twists in GG which can be summarized as, well you thought character A was treating character B badly, but guess what? Character B was treating characters C & D even worse! But wait, maybe that's ok because characters C and D were also being horrible to character A... To my mind, cheating on your spouse is still wrong even if your spouse is obnoxious. Framing people for crimes they didn't commit is still morally wrong even if the framee has also done some unpalatable things. So I never really felt that any of the reveals changed my opinions of the characters or the situation, even though Flynn puts into her characters' voices repeated demands of the readers along the lines of "I bet you feel differently now!"
I also found Nick a lot more plausible as a character than Amy. It wasn't a case of feeling horribly shocked that the character whose viewpoint I'd been seeing turned out to be flawed, because it was perfectly obvious that Nick is a fairly unpleasant person, albeit a reasonably well drawn unpleasant person. But he makes sense, as a very insecure middle-aged man who drifts into becoming a bully and misogynist because he can't face his insecurities. Amy comes across as a complete sexist cliché, as well as being outrageously extreme, and I just couldn't believe in her. It's not like the kind of book where the female characters are just scenery so that the narrative can talk about the men; Amy is obviously meant to be a fully realized character, with at least half the book coming from her first person viewpoint. But she's spoiled and naggy and insincere and she throws around fake pregnancies and false rape accusations at the drop of a hat whenever things aren't going her way. It feels as if the book is trying to say something about gender roles, but it's very muddled and the thriller plot means that most of the feminist commentary is undermined whereas most of the sexist and anti-feminist commentary is somewhat vindicated.
The ending is pretty horrifying even though some of the threatened dangers have been averted; Flynn manages to come up with a scenario that's alomst worse than a revenge-tragedy style pile of bodies which is where it looks as if the book might be heading. Although I personally disliked the book, it certainly does have some strengths and I can see why it's such an opinion-divider.
Details: (c) Gillian Flynn 2012; Pub Phoenix 2013; ISBN 978-0-7538-2766-6
Verdict: Gone girl is in some ways an effective thriller but not as clever as it thinks it is.
Reasons for reading it: There's been a lot of buzz about it, and reviews I've read seem strongly divided on whether it's terrible or great, so I was intrigued.
How it came into my hands: The bookshelf of take-me-home books in the staff room at work.
Gone girl is very readable. It successfully delivers unpleasant characters who nevertheless engaged my attention. It's exciting and I cared about the unfolding of the plot, even though I did predict some of the twists. The excitement comes from writing with a lot of forward motion and a fairly original take on some of the expected thriller tropes, but the predictability comes from the fact that Flynn simply can not resist lampshading the clever things she's about to do. The unreliable narrators keep dropping little asides to the reader about being liars or the things they're not telling you or the experience of being a writer and controlling how much information you reveal.
The first half or so of the book makes a fairly decent portrait of a bad marriage, but I am kind of tired of books about middle class urban Americans struggling in bad marriages, and GG doesn't really stand out above the crowd. It's also very much the kind of bad marriage where the problems stem from poor communication and that awful gender essentialist trope which led some comedian or other to define marriage as a war between stupid and evil. The second half of the book when the skullduggery plot gets going is certainly more original, but the action is spoiled by too much intrusion of cleverly framed Moral Dilemmas, making this feel like the adult equivalent of those awful preachy teenage problem books. Also, I just didn't buy the dilemmas as dilemmas. There are repeated twists in GG which can be summarized as, well you thought character A was treating character B badly, but guess what? Character B was treating characters C & D even worse! But wait, maybe that's ok because characters C and D were also being horrible to character A... To my mind, cheating on your spouse is still wrong even if your spouse is obnoxious. Framing people for crimes they didn't commit is still morally wrong even if the framee has also done some unpalatable things. So I never really felt that any of the reveals changed my opinions of the characters or the situation, even though Flynn puts into her characters' voices repeated demands of the readers along the lines of "I bet you feel differently now!"
I also found Nick a lot more plausible as a character than Amy. It wasn't a case of feeling horribly shocked that the character whose viewpoint I'd been seeing turned out to be flawed, because it was perfectly obvious that Nick is a fairly unpleasant person, albeit a reasonably well drawn unpleasant person. But he makes sense, as a very insecure middle-aged man who drifts into becoming a bully and misogynist because he can't face his insecurities. Amy comes across as a complete sexist cliché, as well as being outrageously extreme, and I just couldn't believe in her. It's not like the kind of book where the female characters are just scenery so that the narrative can talk about the men; Amy is obviously meant to be a fully realized character, with at least half the book coming from her first person viewpoint. But she's spoiled and naggy and insincere and she throws around fake pregnancies and false rape accusations at the drop of a hat whenever things aren't going her way. It feels as if the book is trying to say something about gender roles, but it's very muddled and the thriller plot means that most of the feminist commentary is undermined whereas most of the sexist and anti-feminist commentary is somewhat vindicated.
The ending is pretty horrifying even though some of the threatened dangers have been averted; Flynn manages to come up with a scenario that's alomst worse than a revenge-tragedy style pile of bodies which is where it looks as if the book might be heading. Although I personally disliked the book, it certainly does have some strengths and I can see why it's such an opinion-divider.
