Girl Gone

The other good-read I discovered in a NYT's review is Girl Gone by Gillian Flynn (maybe I should do a year of just Irish surnamed authors?).  I've already put Flynn's other two murder mysteries on reserve at the library.

The two main characters in this story are Nick and Amy Dunne, a 21st century over-exaggerated George and Martha from Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe.  Actually, this could be a story about how they become undone.

The structure is a big part of the story.  I failed to notice the big black almost bland pages that separated the book into three sections.  I was plowing along as the girl was gone and her husband is investigated as the only subject of her disappearance/kidnapping/death.  Half way into the book, it seems like the story is over and then I noticed part two.  In that section, although Flynn continues to alternate chapters from the male and female perspective, it is Amy whose psychological profile and posing comes more clearly into focus.  Now she is more like Delmar's own sociopath.  Now Nick really wants to kill her.

But it is the third part that makes this book more than a clever mystery or thriller.  It is here that Flynn obliquely articulates her over-theme:  are we all actors and actresses in the tragi-comedy of love?  Was Amy, like most young women today, assuming a popular persona or type to be attractive to eligible males?  Did she assume another societally-imposed role as happy young wife?  At what point in a relationship do such veneers begin to crack?  How easy is it for two people to live together without falling into typecasting?  Amy's parents play out the older saccharine version of a happily ever after couple but their entire life has been dedicated to profiting off a fabrication of an ideal girl, the children's series of Amazing Amy, were Amy always triumphs.  So with this upbringing, Amy becomes the author of her own life and any and all nonconforming subplots are summarily ended.

Similarly, Amy comes to realize that Desi, her boyfriend from college, cannot be her savior because he too is in "character" and has prescripted (no pun intended) what their relationship had to be: ..."I look at Desi with outright disgust now.  Sometimes I feel my skin must be hot with repulsion and with the effort to keep that repulsion hidden ... The manipulation, the purring persuasion, the delicate bullying.  A man who finds guilt erotic.  And if he doesn't get his way, he'll pull his little levers and set his punishment in motion."  Wait a minute, is Amy looking in a mirror or projecting?

However, Nick is equally programmed to assume postures and dialogue that has leeched into his personality from popular culture.  As he is investigated by the police, he thinks in the interrogation room:  ..."I've literally seen it all, and the worst thing ... is the second hand experience is always better.  The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can't anymore.  I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet.  If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say ... It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters." 

Part three shows the couple being "catastrophically romantic."  Where they are quasi-comfortable in their Punch and Judy hostage taking marriage.

I think Flynn's forte is not the plot twists and turns but the entire idea that if "real" people are less than real, how can an author possibly make her protagonists believable!  She does so, unforgettably so.