DH: Recently my streaming service made the first season of I Love Lucy available and I caught a few episodes of primitive 1950’s TV, valuable because primitive. In the opening, defining episode, first broadcast on November 5th 1951, Lucy is reading a page-turning mystery.
Lucy is very impressionable. She is startled by random noises and knee-jerks her book out of her open bedroom window a couple of times.
Lucy has no business reading a book where someone is murdered because now she thinks her husband Ricky is trying to kill her. First by strangulation with her scarf and then by poison. Lucy shouldn’t be so suspicious. Shouldn’t every husband administer knockout drops to his wife when she becomes overly excited?
Throughout the iconic series, Lucy is often suspicious of her husband. She is always wrong. Ricky often suspects Lucy of getting herself into some crazy scheme. He is always right.
I assumed that the premise of America’s first breakout sitcom reflected the insecure position of women in a conformist 1950’s marriage. Or the insecure fear of women in the buttoned-down pre-lib 1950’s.
Fast forward to the 1990’s and we’re examining the marriage of Amy (Lucy) and Nick in Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. Fifty years later, it seems that little has changed but the technology. I feel like I’m watching an episode of I Love Lucy with a wicked spin on it. Amy is gone girl and not just because she splits. Amy is gone the way Lucy is gone. She’s nuts. Only in the 21st century that makes her psycho bitch, not a heartwarming 50’s television character that her husband, very considerately, has to sedate.
Amy can’t be sedated and that’s why we have this brilliant novel. If you think my comparison to I Love Lucy is too much of a stretch, there’s a key character in the plot named Desi. (After Desi Arnaz, Lucille Ball’s husband, in case you don’t know.) Desi is a forgiving, nurturing guy who thinks that Amy needs to be protected by a responsible man. Readers of Gone Girl know what happens to him!
Okay Three Guys, what did you think of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl? Does it say anything interesting about marriage? Let’s not leave the husband out of this discussion. What did you think of Nick?
JR: This isn’t a real mystery, it’s a novel about the countless ways two people can deceive each other. Marriage is just the age-old, antiquated armature that Flynn hangs on Nick and Amy, like last year’s fashion. I got into this novel with the best intentions of liking it, and to be honest, it held my attention, and had a stronger resonating quality than anything I’ve read in years.
Amy and Nick share with us the wonderfully organic and whimsical beginning of their relationship, their years in NYC, and Amy’s realization that she’s a pawn in her parents children’s books, getting played, but paid handsomely.
The Amazing Amy books are a wonderful piece of skywriting on Flynn’s part, and these little moments blow in and out of the book. The years leading up to the disappearance which is the central theme of this novel are so precisely woven together that I can only imagine how wonderfully fantastically intricate Flynn’s flowchart on her office wall must have been.
I always remind myself that other people can’t be trusted, and you can’t underestimate them, because they will surprise you. The precise moment I loved this book is when Nick told me he was lying. Flynn blasts ahead and keeps Nick on a short leash as the evidence of Amy’s disappearance quickly points to him. Then it gets worse, and worse still. Nick lies and he does it with such convincing flair, professing his innocence, as Flynn piles more bad shit on top of him. Then of course there is the pure as the driven snow Amy, who through her diary entries confesses the horrors of being married to Nick. This isn’t a new idea, but it certainly is effective in a New York Times bestselling novel. It goes to show you that books don’t have to follow that little path lined with white stones. Flynn does some fairly spectacular things with these two characters, and slowly extracts the air from their lives. She does it with characters, not story, she throws two scorpions in a box and shuts the lid. I would be spoiling this book if I said more about the “plot” if you want to call it that. I will say this, Flynn drops little breadcrumbs into this book that are meaningless until the end, and that’s exactly what you’re supposed to do with any novel. Flynn makes it look easy.
JC: No, this is not a mystery, not after the first section anyway. By then we know what’s a crime and what isn’t. That transition from Part One to Part Two is pretty spectacular.It’s a paradigm shift from what Amy’s journals tell us, and what is the case. Then, as JR says, she does it again with Nick’s confession. It’s good writing, great planning, and it reveals little by little the discrepancies that damn Nick.
Now, DH, I don’t know how much you can say about the institution of marriage based on the relationship between a sociopath and a weak-willed pretty boy. However, one of the great distinctions between Nick and Amy are just how well she knows him and how well she can predict his every reaction, while he literally knows nothing about her. She’s become such a master at becoming “cool girl” or “preppy girl” or whoever else that he only knows the role she has played throughout their courtship and early marriage. When she decides she’s not going to fake it anymore, it’s like being married to a stranger.
She’s a great character, Amy, but I’m not as sympathetic to her as JR sounds, in spite of the mindfuck of a childhood unable to meet the expectations of the book series based on and named for her. As an adult, she has clearly defined views on how women degrade themselves vis-a-vis their partners, yet she does so willingly to get Nick (or any other man she has wanted). She is self-possessed, yet can’t see the deep hypocrisy of her own deception. Her perverse sense of justice for even trivial transgressions extends to those around her, but stops at her own nose.
DH: I was surprised that both JR and JC doubt that Gone Girl has much to do with marriage. I think marriage is the decisive theme of the book. Gillian’s plot doesn’t make any sense unless Nick and Amy are married.
But it’s a marriage held together by Amy’s insanity rather than any positive relation. I liked JC’s point very much about Amy’s lack of self-awareness. Amy’s lack of self-insight is her only vulnerable point. Nick realizes this perhaps too late.
But it’s also the source of her strength. Despite Amy’s conviction that it’s all about her, she doesn’t know who she is. Her personality is like a black hole that the people around her fall into. But at the heart of her ego she’s a void. She’s an empty can of beer.
There’s a difference between sensing someone else’s identity and understanding how they operate. Taking the liberty of explaining to the guys what I think marriage is, it’s all about sensing someone else’s identity. Marriage is where the point blank of your attention span is supposed to be. Amy can’t appreciate persons, she can only manipulate them.
Here’s a scene I loved. Amy wants to spy on Nick’s young mistress, Andie. Andie is naive but not inappropriately for her age. By the time Amy was two years old, you get the impression that she already surpassed Andie ( and the rest of us) in street smarts.
To spy on Andie, Amy invents a false identity on Facebook and friends her. Andie allows the friending even though she has no idea who Amy is. That’s funny. Amy uses the name Madeleine Elster. If you’re film fan you should know that name.
Madeleine Elster is the woman that Kim Novak impersonates in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. So to assume a false identity on Facebook, Amy names herself after a character who assumes a false identity in a film. And that character plays a woman who, in turn, thinks she’s someone else. Amy is so cool.
Amy always tells it the way it is. At least, she thinks so. Amy is always dishing out the dirt on the other characters, playing the bitch we are sometimes tempted to be. Great character but I never want to meet her. In writing fiction, discovering a great character is pure gold.
As for all the skilled flow chart plotting that impressed the guys, I got bored with it about halfway through the book. There was too much of it with Gillian as a writer seeming almost as obsessive as the character she created. I thought it was the part of Gone Girl that was pure mass market. Gone Girl is an odd mix of serious art, classic camp and commercial sludge. I loved it as a guilty pleasure, with considerably more pleasure than guilt.
JR: DH your point of view on sludge is permitted, as it is your point of view. Gillian is trucking in a kind of mass market appeal on purpose. She hammers the edges of the minor character with cliches because she knows a certain kind of people are floating around in the atmosphere surrounded by distractions and she needs to keep them moored with significant cliches. Desi, the salivating weirdo who lives with his mother. The cops are wild little moments of television. The girlfriend: She. Is. So. Overcooked. All of this is on purpose. These are the modern window dressings that sell books.
Nick, he’s a poor bastard that never really thought past what he was going to have for lunch. His greatest achievement? Bedding Amy. After that, he’s a phony, someone who claims to be an intellectual and can talk with you about something you really like, but with wobbly hyperbole. I meet someone once that said they loved Richard Ford, and then I asked if they had read The Sportswriter, and they said no, but “would love to”. Nick likes to be an adult, married, but has no training. His development arrested when he married Amy. He likes the benefits of adulthood, but can’t handle the responsibilities. To say Amy is crazy is a total insult because she is so very smart. Pretend your parents wrote a series of childrens books about you, and then reaped the profits, and you became a worldwide sensation before you were 11 years old. The world of Amy that you would create inside of the one that was created about you would be so incredible, I don’t think you’d know what to do. People stalk you because you are this “thing” to them. It gets internalized and her imagination is where she’s safest, and operating in a kind of fantasy world, authored by Richard Yates. There are plenty of stories that I read where I’m sucked in, but not this one. Characters got me. I would follow Nick and Amy for a long time, even to another book. These are great characters, because they serve me, and surprise me. Even Nick, who I think could become kind of Tom Ripley if given the chance.
DH: JR is to be commended on his astute analysis. But someone can be crazy and also smart. Indeed, it’s a cliche of pop culture that someone can be crazy because they are excessively smart. Like I said, it’s a cliche…which one might be tempted to apply to Amy. Nick was interesting to me on account on of his non-disclosures. As JR rightly points out, the indirect hints and direct statements that slowly pile up that Nick is lying are one of the highlights of the book. Gillian plays with the readers perception of who might really be guilty …and of what exactly. But aside from that feature of the novel, I didn’t find Nick especially interesting, just interesting enough. I think it’s essential for the role that his character plays in the story that Nick not be that interesting. And no one can outthink Amy! That can’t be conceived of in this story, which has the quality of being rich and weird.
JC: It’s about marriage, DH, and the plot flows from that, but I think the relevant aspect of that is the self-awareness, and lack thereof of the characters, as we mentioned. Does that tell us anything about marriage that anyone who has been in a lengthy relationship doesn’t already know? Well, they should know it.
I think JR is right about Nick. He’s been able to cruise on looks and personality all his life, until he gets canned from his job. He’s smart enough to pass his normal half-truths and work a room, but not smart, and certainly no match for Amy in any way. The only right decision he makes is to give her what she wants.
I’m not with you on Amy, though. She’s clearly brilliant, but that, as DH says, doesn’t preclude any sociopathology, which is just as obviously present. She was a minor celebrity, and you are right about her internalized self-value and self-righteousness, but don’t forget that all those stalking situations are debunked. She lured those people in, manipulated them and then performed experimental frame jobs on them – working up to the big one. The only thing of which she is a victim is her parents’ psychological abuse.
I’d read more about both of them – a novel about subsequent events would be gruesome fun.
