“We weren’t ourselves when we fell in love, and when we became ourselves – surprise! – we were poison. We complete each other in the nastiest, ugliest possible way.”
A lot of the reviews I read about Gone Girl boiled down to: this book was really well written but I still hated everything about it. I can see that. Nick and Amy, the married main characters of the story, are both horrible, despicable people. Really. I’ve rarely hated a character as much as I hated these two. Amy Dunne would give Joffery Baratheon a run for his money.
I also hate to say too much about the book because I really don’t want to spoil anything. I’m glad I went into it knowing almost nothing: a woman goes missing, her husband is blamed. I had heard there was some big twist in the novel, but I never expected what actually happened.
I really, really liked it though. For once thing, the writing is superb. It’s meticulously plotted — every little detail about these two is included, just before everything is shaken up and the truth is revealed. Amy may have been a noxious bitch, but she was also clever and funny and fascinating. Nick, too, turns out to be so much more than the bumbling husband he initially appears to be.
Bottom line: I could not put this book down. I read the whole thing — some four hundred pages — in two nights. Whether or not you like the characters and like the ending is irrelevant in my opinion. Flynn tells a compelling story of a bitter marriage between two lying, duplicitous people and remains true to it to the end.
