Gone Girl: Hash it, bash it, defend it, spoilers allowed

Finished Gone Girl this morning, and I can say it was ultimately both an unpleasant and page-turning experience.

My overall response is that I have just been mind-f***ed by Amy writing as Gillian Flynn.

I can parse this out more later if anyone wants to take up this topic.

But Question One for me: Is there any way to write about a sociopath from a first-person POV and not make the reader feel like a manipulated victim? Is there any value in having felt this way about a character?

I have the audiobook in my TBR pile so I'm going to stay out of this thread until I read it. I'm looking forward to coming back when I'm done.

>1 nohrt4me2: You ask a really good question. I can only recall reading one such book that accomplished this well, which was The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester. I think this is a very difficult challenge for a writer to set for herself, and I don't think Gone Girl succeeded.

Why is the book so popular though? Is it because people do like to feel manipulated? I don't, I hate it, but only when it's very obvious to me what's going on. When the writer is manipulating me very well, I don't notice so much until it's over and then I can't help but admire it.

I really didn't like either of the main characters at all, and I know that Flynn is part of a debate right now about "likable" characters, but there has to be something that gives me a way into the book. Even if I could not have liked them, I wish I could have at least admired one of them -- in the same way one admires but does not like Hannibal Lecter, for instance. I just kept thinking that their story was really the ultimate example of "first world problems" and there was absolutely no reason why I should care about it.

I thought that it was cleverly manipulative in the extreme. It was like a roller coaster and a lot of fun to read. That being said, it was gimmicky and shallow.

It was a new recipe as opposed to the ordinary cookbook sort of mystery. I generally avoid the mystery, suspense, and thriller genres because they are all so predictable. (the protagonist always gets beat up when he gets "too close to the truth"- good grief) Gone Girl was not predicable, and for that reason it was fun, but other than admiring the author's inventiveness and craft, there was no particularly lasting literary value there for me anyway.

Hmmm. The comparison with Hannibal is interesting. Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley comes to mind, too.

I admired Amy's inventiveness, plotting, her stamina for the long game. In some ways, I even thought her husband and parents deserved some come-uppance, however over-the-top it was clearly going to be. And I found myself rooting for her when Jeff and Greta robbed her and when Desi had her locked up.

But there is no catharsis in this book--the ending makes sure of that--so you ultimately find yourself dragging Amy around in your head without any way to exorcise her.

Again trying to put something that may be a very personal response into words.

I felt something similar with Rachel Cusk's In the Fold, but not to this degree.

A man on another list said he hated the book because it was so man bashing. I thought that if anything it was misogynistic, but it's not. As you say,nohrt4me2, the main character is a sociopath, they come in either sex. Her husband was unlikable so maybe that's what he was getting at. The husband had no psychological reason for being a jerk, he just was. I've recommended the book to several people specifically because it is so manipulative and couldn't better represent just what a psychopath does. I've done it again, confused psychopath with sociopath. I checked here: http://www.diffen.com/difference/Psychopath_vs_Sociopath and it seems Amy is a psychopath. She certainly is able to set long term goals and refrain from acting impulsively in order to achieve them.
The more I talk about this book, the more I like it. It gives opportunity to experience psychopathology first hand without being damaged by it. That shows quite a talent.
As for the fact that it revolves around first world issues, well, I'm lucky enough to have been born into a first world country, and I think there are stories here worth telling. The old "grow where you're planted" idea. I like reading about other cultures, but I like reading about my own as well. Of course, I'm not rich and famous like the people in the book, but I recognize them and somewhat understand their world.

>6 Citizenjoyce: Joyce, thanks for correcting the socio-/psychopath definitions. I tend to conflate them.

I think a chief strength of the book is that, while the husband and Amy's parents are very flawed (there is something awful about their "Amazing Amy" books), none of them deserves what Amy has planned for them.

I thought that that the character of Officer Rhonda Boney might have been the reader's "guide" provided the sympathetic POV, but as Nick gets sucked into Amy's she and Go (another sympathetic character) become more marginalized and sort of fade out in the wake of the weird symbiosis that forms between Amy and Nick.

And that was another thing I wasn't sure about: Nick talks about becoming as "mad" (i.e., crazy) as Amy at one point. He does seem to go from just being a run-of-the-mill self-involved jerk to becoming a psychopath.

Can psychopaths be created? Amy seems to have been born that way, and science seems to suggest that there may be physiological differences between the brains of psychopaths and "normal" people, though (as I understand it), it's not as easy as looking at a brain scan.

Thanks to all for posting here. Please keep comments coming. I found the book fascinating and upsetting, and the conversation is interesting and helpful!

>6 Citizenjoyce: I may have to reread the book with this in mind! Thanks for your insights.

As for first-world problems, I meant that I found Nick and Amy very whiny at the beginning, very "woe is me." I was not inclined to be sympathetic, that's all.

I think I have a whole lobe of my brain devoted to "woe is me."

I'm a basher. I figured out the twist in the very beginning of the book & found the characters completely unlikeable. But I heard the movie was very good. I might check it out when it makes its way to cable TV (but not Pay-Per-View.)

>10 MsNick: I figured out she was framing him pretty quickly, also, but for me the work wasn't about plot so much as the interplay of cruelty and control between the two characters and how sick it would get.

What I found particularly upsetting was the fact that the book ends just before their baby is born, something that made the book even more chilling than Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a more skillful look at a very sick marriage.

Praying people need to pray for that baby. I don't think that's a book I could read.

I just finished reading this book (and also just joined LibraryThing) so I'm going to be SUPER late to this: but I mostly really liked the book! The thing that I found most interesting was that the book didn't end with Amy being caught, or with Nick besting her, or something like that. Instead, it almost ended slowly and painfully, like it wasn't even really an ending. I felt like the real climax of the book was Nick (and the reader) finding out the Real Amy, or maybe when Amy came back.

Also they're both terrible, I agree.

Glad you weighed in, meghanas. It's never to late to offer your opinion. At least, that's been the guiding principle of my life ...

>13 meghanas: Yes, it ended then it ended again. I haven't read anything else by her. This book was such a big surprise, I wonder if I would be expecting the same sort of surprise in anything else she wrote, which would ruin the surprise. Someone told me he thought there would be a sequel. I hope not. These two pretty much deserved each other, a sequel involving the child would be overwhelmingly depressng.

I feel the same way about them deserving each other! I'd like to read her other books, but I expect they'll be different.

Re: ending and ending again: there's the one line where Nick describes Amy and himself as "one drawn out, frightening climax," or something to that effect (I probably missed an adjective!), and that's how I felt about the book. The entire second half, from our discovery of Amy's duplicitous nature to the actual ending, felt like someone had their hand around my stomach.

I don't know how I thought the book would end, but I expect it was something along the lines of Nick killing Amy or Amy killing Nick or them killing each other. I thought that if it ended unresolved, it would be Nick going to prison with us knowing he was "innocent" (of murder, but still a bad person). But it didn't end like that, at all. It was just such a strange, almost domestic ending. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, and it...never really did. That's why I think a sequel wouldn't work, because the whole point of the book is how unresolved it is. A sequel, for me, would by definition add unwanted resolution.

Anybody see the movie? I thought if followed the book pretty well, though Ben Affleck seemed much more the victim.

I liked the movie very much. I talked to a man I knew who had read the book and was on his way to the movie and told me he was sure the movie wouldn't end the way the book did. He didn't think American people would accept evil maternity. I think I kept my face convincingly neutral as I told him I hoped he'd like it.

I saw the movie last weekend and actually enjoyed it more than the book. It helped that my husband had no idea what would happen so I got to experience his reactions vicariously. I too thought Nick was treated more sympathetically in the movie. The cop was still my favorite character.

I finally saw the movie last night, and found it lacking. The script was okay, but don't think that watching it visually could do justice to the twisted minds of both main characters. In particular, Ben Affleck is probably just not a good enough actor to carry it off. You didn't get all of the complicated emotions that Nick had in the book, and he never seemed like the self centered bastard we ultimately learned him to be in the book.

I also watched it with someone who had not read the book, and he thought that the murder came out of the blue. He really didn't think the Amy character could believably commit that violence based on her characterization thus far in the movie, and he also did not find her motivation credible.

I liked the movie but also found Affleck to be weak.

I didn't see the movie, but I've heard from a lot of people that it was more centered on Nick, so it seemed more sympathetic toward him? Does that sounds like what happened to you guys? I trust the people who I heard it from, but I don't want to pass too much judgment on something I haven't had a chance to see for myself yet.

If that's the case, though, I'm a little disappointed, because the point of the book (in my opinion) is that both the characters are terrible, but in different ways. My sister was talking to me about the book, and basically said that Amy is terrible in a sort of unusual way, while Nick isn't. Amy's very intelligent, and her moral compass is way skewed. You don't see her coming, because she's not like your average bad person. Nick is a very ordinary bad person though: he's a misogynist, and he's self-absorbed. He always blames his misogyny on his father, because he wants to be liked for being self-aware, but he's...still a misogynist. And that, unfortunately, is very common. Not that there aren't interesting things about him, like how he eventually reacts to Amy, and still loves her in his own weird way. But what makes him awful is his misogyny, which isn't special.

Thoughts?

>22 meghanas: I would say that the movie was more sympathetic to Nick than the book. I never got the sense in the movie of him as an unreliable narrator, which I certainly did in the book. I did not like him in either version, though, but I think the movie toned down the ickiness of his affair and also his complete self-absorption/narcissism. His sister also didn't seem quite so damaged in the movie, IMO.

Ah, that makes sense. Yeah, I think that toning down any of Nick's ickiness is kind of problematic, because it makes him seem like a victim, when imo the point of the book is that they've ruined each other.