JUL - Gone Girl

July review for Eclectic Reader's Challenge 2015: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, 2012. [Epistolary Fiction category (sort of)]

Before you say anything, I realize that Gone Girl does not technically fit the "epistolary fiction" genre, per se. I was traded this book by one of my derby wives (I traded her In The Woods by Tana French which she is obsessed with now) and because I was so woefully behind in my blog posts, I decided I would make it fit for epistolary fiction. To recap, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn is about Amy and Nick Dunne, celebrating their fifth wedding anniversary when Amy goes missing. As the search and subsequent investigation continues, Nick looks less and less like the concerned husband and more and more like he has something to hide. As events unfold, readers are called upon to question the story itself as points of view change and sympathies radically alter, with the police closing in and the media trying Nick before he is even suspected legally of anything at all. Flynn masterfully depicts the minds of a married couple who have grown apart, become strangers, and calls into question how well anyone really knows the people they love. *~~Please note that this post will undoubtedly contain spoilers because I absolutely cannot discuss what I want to discuss without giving major things away so YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. ~~*

One of the first papers I wrote in college was for a class called Reading for Life, and it dealt with The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. For anyone who hasn't read this text, it is a collection of war stories recounted by a remarkably unreliable narrator who often questions the difference between the truth versus Truth (with a capital T), admitting in later stories that earlier ones were entirely concocted. I think this distinction permeates the entirety of Gone Girl and there is no better example than Amy's diary. For the first section of the book, Part One: Boy Loses Girl, we receive Nick's point of view in the present, with the time delineated as how many "days gone," alternated with chapters in Amy's point of view which comes to us through past diary entries that correspond to certain aspects of the present. It is not until later, in Part Two: Boy Meets Girl, that we get Amy's present-tense story, in which we learn she is in fact alive (gasp!) and the diary is a complete fabrication, as is her disappearance. In short, she faked her own vanishing and planted a trail that sort of pointed to her loving husband, complete with a falsified version of past events that paints him as distant, quick-tempered, and borderline abusive. It is in these hours that we as readers begin to glimpse the intricacies--and veritable psychoses--of Amy's mind. I will readily admit that a part of me was elated that Amy was alright and savvy enough to get herself out of a bad situation--strong female characters, and all that--but Flynn does a beautiful job of forcing you to reconsider each of your preconceived notions built up with every passing page. As Amy goes deeper and deeper into her ruse, allowing us to see her machinations, the sheer cold-bloodedness and calculating detestation becomes apparent, and I at least felt myself growing increasingly uncomfortable with my former affiliation with Amazing Amy. I think that this questioning is an essential mechanism in the truth vs. Truth dichotomy, as it demands a re-evaluation of the character from different perspectives which facilitates a blurring of the two definitions. The truth that the police are seeking as to Amy's disappearance and The Truth that Amy constructs line up for a time, but Amy is clearly the puppeteer of capital T, and she demonstrates her power with her return to Nick's side and her editing of the real world. How important is What Really Happened versus someone's chosen truth? Does the difference really matter? I would postulate that both are equally important in terms of understanding a person and their worldview, but one does not necessarily have to be denigrated at the expense of another. Obviously this belief would fall short in terms of a definitive case in the eyes of the police, but the operative narrative here is not that someone is punished, not in the end. In the end, everyone is just fucked up in different ways and some people are better at redirecting their energy into a facade, a veneer of personality or social acceptability.

I chose to discuss Gone Girl in terms of epistolary fiction because of the Truth aspect, and also due to the entirely purpose-driven nature of anything epistolary. In straight-up epistolary fiction, we as readers are given only what is contained within the letters or diary entries or what have you, and these can be taken at face value or viewed as constructions of personality, but I believe Gone Girl is interesting because of its wholly unorthodox take on the subject. The inclusion of diary entries of a woman who is purportedly missing, entries that very clearly paint a certain picture of her husband, juxtaposed with the later revelation that they are entirely confabulated, creates an interesting comparison, a lovely and brutal questioning of the very idea of character. I will end on this quote from Amy, discussing the husks of selves she has worn over the years, in an attempt to rationalize her behavior:

   “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. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script.
   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. 
   And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don't have genuine souls.
   It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I'm not a real person and neither is anyone else.
   I would have done anything to feel real again.” ― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

At the end of this book, I had no idea what real even meant for these characters. Is there a real and a Real? These are questions I haven't quite answered myself, but thanks for sticking around through my musings to see if I got anywhere this month.