The Washington Post reports that as many as 70 percent of married men cheat on their wives, while the Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that only 14 percent of violent crimes are committed by women. Men cheat, but women don’t kill.
Gillian Flynn entangles the typical with the atypical, the believable with the unbelievable, in her 2012 crime novel, “Gone Girl.” A movie rendition of the book debuts in theaters Friday.
“The truth is, women are not given enough credit for how mean, and how feral, they can be,” Flynn told the Chicago Tribune last week.
She’s right. Women aren’t used to seeing themselves as purely evil characters. Even if we blast Carrie Underwood’s “Before He Cheats” after a bitter break-up, we will probably settle for a carton of Ben and Jerry’s and exposing our unfaithful partner on Facebook and Yik Yak.
The book took only a month to make it to number one on the the New York Times best-seller list and it stayed at first place for eight weeks. It has sold over six million copies.
This wild success has readers, critics, and publishers asking the same question: “What made this book so popular?” Simply put, it tackles an ever present problem — what to do with a cheating man — with a convention-destroying twist.
The book begins in the present with husband Nick Dunne, a clueless fool, searching for his missing wife Amy. Interspersed are Amy’s perfectly rom-com journal entries from the past. They meet, he’s charming, she falls in love — and then things start spiraling downward. Go no further, unless you want to ruin the movie for yourself: spoilers ahead.
The Amy of her journal is altogether likeable. She gives up her wealth, urban life, and standard of living for a self-absorbed, angry, put-off husband. She tries to be the “cool girlfriend,” the southern wife, and the supportive daughter-in-law every man desires.
But the Nick of Amy’s diary and the one who narrates half the book don’t match up. When he finally confesses his professor-student affair, he loses his charm. The rest of the novel spins from Nick’s dirty secret.
From here, “Gone Girl” could have become a conventional tale of the wronged woman and her quest for justice — the plot of a typical Lifetime channel movie. Yet Amy is the quintessential “unreliable narrator.” As Flynn unveils Amy’s sordid past, we learn that Nick may be a cheater, but that his wife is a sociopath. This puts Nick’s infidelity in a different light — a serious affront to marriage, no doubt, but also somehow more understandable. Nick doesn’t like his wife, but neither do we.
When we find out Amy has lied to us, little is left for us to like about her. In the last pages we see murderous and manipulative Amy has enslaved Nick, forcing him to raise her baby and never turn her in to the police. Flynn doesn’t let him escape.
Justice doesn’t rule.
Does Nick’s punishment actually fit the crime? Is cheating on your wife worth a lifetime of living in fear of her? Perhaps if Amy hadn’t murdered her doting ex-lover Desi, you could see her as insane, but not evil. Her past actions, however, and self-absorbed nature negate any goodness she previously had.
Flynn’s carefully-crafted cleverness keeps readers devouring pages. By the time we make it to the end, we, like Nick, can’t escape. Even if seeing Nick trapped by an evil wife makes us sick, there is no way to put the book down before we cringe at Amy’s last word.
The book’s moral compass is questionable, but Flynn is remarkable. With disturbing brilliance, she allows women to live vicariously through Amy. We get the sweet revenge on our cheating ex-lover we never could have plotted. But we never have to battle through the ethics of Amy’s decision. We wonder if we could be a criminal mastermind like Amy, and then pass “Gone Girl” on to a friend telling them it’s fiendishly clever.
Flynn doesn’t let us moralize until it’s too late. She created a thriller without a clear protagonist or antagonist that manages to spin the story of an estranged marriage into a merciless tale of meticulous planning and devious plot twists, all while satiating the vindictive, feral side of womankind: There should be no mercy for the cheating man.
