Hail to the Hogarth Shakespeare series, where the Bard's works are retold by a number of today's acclaimed novelists. Among those published within the series to date: Margaret Atwood - The Tempest, Jo Nesbø - Macbeth and Anne Tyler - The Taming of the Shrew. Gillian Flynn is on the docket for Hamlet, my absolute favorite Shakespeare play. In order to familiarize myself with Ms. Flynn's writing before I dive into her rendition of Hamlet, I had the pleasure of reading Gone Girl.
Gone Girl is one of the most popular novels on Goodreads (nearly 2 million ratings; over 125,000 reviews) and the 2014 film starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike achieved blockbuster status. Although nearly everyone acknowledges Gone Girl is a page-turner, reviews have been mixed and extreme, judging the book as either very bad or very good.
Leading the list for Gone Girl as bad book we have unlikable, superficial characters, an unending sewer of psycho babble and parodies of the writing style (there's even a parody book - Gone Bitch). Addressing one aspect of the negativity, Gillian Flynn said: "If you are someone who reads books to feel like you have a friend on the page, my book is not going to be the book for you."
A sampling of Gone Girl as good book features: stunning chiller, astounding twists, irresistible characters. Furthermore, Gone Girl was a New York Times Book of the Year. And in her New York Times book review, Janet Maslin raved: "Gone Girl is Ms. Flynn's dazzling breakthrough. It is wily, mercurial, subtly layered and populated by characters so well imagined that they're hard to part with." Likewise, Alison Flood in The Guardian: "Flynn, an extraordinarily good writer, plays her readers with the finesse and delicacy of an expert angler. . . .Thriller of the year. An absolute must read."
Fanfare with toy trumpets and kazoos: you can count me among those judging Gone Girl a very good novel. Although, I must admit, I am partial when novels are written with multiple narrators, or, what I refer to as rotating first person. Gillian Flynn's novel has two alternating narrators: husband Nick and wife Amy. I'm also fond of narrators who are unreliable and thus infuse the story with great suspense. Seen in this way, on a scale of ten, Gone Girl rates a ten.
And that's just for starters. Other aspects I especially enjoyed: 1) the sophisticated layering of character for both Amy and Nick, 2) penetrating insights on the current state of American class, culture and society, and 3) the ways in which the novel incorporates the pervasive influence of mass media. Turning to these one at a time:
AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE
In the very first chapters we hear the voice of Amy but this turns out to be only Diary Amy. Deeper into the story we come across Avenging Amy, Ozark Amy, Nearly True Amy, layer after layer. Amy is exceedingly bright, degrees from both Harvard and Yale where she studied psychology. She was exploited as a child and adolescent, her mother and father made rich via publishing Amazing Amy books that tracked her growing up year by year. Family, friends and society in general expected Amy to be as perfect as her fictional twin. Bad new, folks – she’s only human. Ironically, her soulmate, Nick, whom she married when she was 33, also has a twin, twin sister Margo.
NICK DUNNE
Missouri boy come to New York to pursue his career as magazine journalist. Nick marries Amy when he’s 29 and a few years thereafter loses his job. Hearing from his sister Margo that their mother is sick and needs help, he decides to move back with Amy. Nick’s parents divorced and his abiding memory as a boy is of his women-hating father. Fun fact: Nick tells us Amy read Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle on a Fiji beach during their honeymoon. Too bad Nick didn’t take more interest in Amy's novel: it features a wife who runs away! One of the more appealing parts of the story is watching Nick jolted into the need to transform.
CLASS, CULTURE, SOCIETY
It’s the clash of high life New York City versus unemployed, dopesick, rundown small town Middle America. NYC born and bred Amy’s first words on entering their house in an ugly, deserted development: “Should I remove my soul before I come inside?” And Nick admits that Amy considered being forced to reside in Zeroville (my name for Nick’s sour home town of Carthage) as “a punishing whim on my part, a nasty, selfish twist of the knife.”
The once thriving mall is shut down and is now occupied by an army of homeless, hopeless, unemployed men and women addicted to drugs such as oxycontin. Nick’s reflection during his search of the mall one night: “Carthage had a bigger drug epidemic that I ever knew: The cops had been here just yesterday, and already the druggies had resettled, like determined flies. As we made our way through the piles of humans, an obese woman shushed up to us on an electric scooter. Her face was pimply and wet with sweat, her teeth catlike.”
Amy’s father Rand tells Nick: “When Amy talked about moving back here, back along the Ole Mississippi River, with you, I pictured . . . green, farmland, apple trees, and those great old red barns. I have to tell you, it’s really quite ugly here. I can’t think of a single thing of beauty in this whole town.”
Ugly, ugly, ugly – the more I read, the more I was surprised Amy lasted two whole years before her exit. The main story, of course, is Amy and Nick, but Gone Girl also makes a bold statement on the sorry condition of American economics and society. In this way, similar to Colin Harrison’s You Belong To Me, Gillian Flynn’s novel could be used as a supplemental text for a course in sociology.
MASS MEDIA
Following Nick’s reporting Amy’s disappearance, a barrage of reporters, cameras and microphones converge on the scene. Instantly, Nick and everyone else involved in the case, including the police, not only have a flesh-and-blood identity but also a public media identity – and, in many way, the media identity is of primary importance.
Initially Nick comes off as an insensitive, unfeeling lout. When more facts in the case surface, the media portray him as a murderer who has been unfaithful to his wife. Realizing he could face serious jail time and even the death sentence, Nick hires savvy Big Apple lawyer Tanner Bolt.
As Tanner explains, “The media has saturated the legal environment. With the Internet, Facebook, YouTube, there’s no such thing as an unbiased jury anymore. . . . So why not use it – control the story.” Why not, indeed. With the help of Tanner’s coaching and leaning on his past experience as a journalist, the TV audience will be treated to a new Nick Dunne.
And Nick can see what happens when someone doesn’t have the capacity to work the media to their own advantage. Jacqueline Collins, mother of the man cast as the bad guy, doesn’t stand a chance insisting on her son’s innocence when interviewed on national TV. “She always started off steady, but her mother’s love worked against her. She soon came across as a grieving woman desperate to believe the best of her son, and the more the hosts pitied her, the more she snapped and snarled, and the more unsympathetic she became. She got written off quickly.”
Meanwhile, three guesses who can REALLY work the media to their advantage. Make that one guess – Amy. Brilliant, clever, beautiful, exceptionally well-spoken, forever camera ready and, oh so manipulative, by using the media Amy has finally outpaced fictional Amazing Amy in being truly amazing.
AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE, THE LAST WORD
Amy gets the last word in Gone Girl and she gets the last word here.
It is now 2018 and Amy and Nick are back living on the top floor of a spanking new Brooklyn condo overlooking the Manhattan skyline. Of course they are wealthy following the return of Amy's trust fund money and the successful launch of her book Amazing. And more good news: not only do they have a bright, lively little boy but also an even brighter little girl. Amy continues to write. As does Nick, who has published his first novel, a love story which is now on the best seller list. Nick wasn't surprised - after all, he has a brilliant, amazing editor.
Does this sound like the improbable combination of Lady Macbeth and a happily ever after fairy tale? You bet it does. Thank you, Gillian!
"I have a book deal: I am officially in control of our story. It feels wonderfully symbolic. Isn't that what every marriage is, anyway? Just a lengthy game of he-said, she-said? Well, she is saying, and the world will listen, and Nick will have to smile and agree. I will write him the way I want him to be: romantic and thoughtful and very very repentant - about the credit cards and the purchases and the woodshed. If I can't get him to say it out loud, he'll say it in my book. Then he'll come on tour with me and smile and smile." - Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl
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