Book review: Gone Girl

The American writer Gillian Flynn’s thriller novel ‘Gone Girl’ was published in June 2012 and soon became a New York Times Best-Seller, also number one for eight weeks.

Gone Girl has received very positive reviews and has been such a huge success that it has a film adaptation, which was released on 3^rd October 2014, starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike.

In Hungary both the novel and the film got titled ‘Holtodiglan’.

By reading Gone Girl we get to know Nick and Amy Dunne and their marriage full of problems: they both lie to each other when meeting first; they try to seem more sympathetic. As they spend more and more time together, their real (and absolutely different) personalities get to the surface.

After losing their jobs as journalists (due to downsizings), the less and less happy couple moves from New York City to Nick’s small hometown North Carthage, Missouri in order to take care of the man’s dying mother.

The New York-born, wealthy Amy can’t find her place in North Carthage and can’t get used to life in a boring town blighted by unsold houses and failed businesses. Furthermore, Nick, with his twin sister, Margo, opens a bar using the money of his wife.

Amy, without any friends is far not satisfied with their (or her?) life and Nick is totally careless for his wife’s feeling: their married life is getting ruined.

On their fifth wedding anniversary – when the plot of the novel starts – Amy goes missing. After an investigation Nick becomes a prime suspect in the disappearance for several reasons: he used her wife’s money to start his business, increased her life insurance, and seems continuously unemotional on camera and in the news. Nick denies all the prosecutions but…

The first part of the novel is about whether Nick is involved in the case of Amy or not: this half of the book is told in first person by both Nick (in the present) and Amy (by her diary, from the first time they met in the past). These two stories are completely different. Amy’s description of Nick makes him seem more aggressive than he says he is in his story – so it raises the question: Can we trust in Nick’s point of view? Is he really innocent?

However, in the second half we realize that both narrators are totally unreliable: they don’t give us all the information we would expect. An exciting and also terrifying hunt starts for finding and getting Amy back and for clearing Nick of being a murderer. In this part we finally learn what kind of characters they really are and what they are capable of – Gone Girl keeps unexpected and nearly shocking surprises.

Reviewers have also favoured its psychological dimension and how well Gillian Flynn has presented the process of an unconsidered marriage (and also the members) becoming completely destroyed and miserable: according to the book's publisher, by the end of its first year in publication, Gone Girl had sold over two million copies in print and digital editions.

For me, personally, the start of Nick and Amy Dunne’s story was a bit boring, however, the huge turn in the middle of the novel absolutely compensated me. In my opinion, Gillian Flynn deservedly became a well-known writer all over the world: her book gives the reader an exciting, interesting, fantastic, but also surprising, shocking and staggering experience.

Gone Girl is the kind of story that can’t get out of your mind!