Gone Girl

“And they say marriage is such hard work,” someone ironically concludes in Gone Girl, a novel that employs a typical thriller structure to deconstruct the institution of marriage and, through the conflicts of deeply troubled characters, expose the difficulties of maintaining a long-lasting relationship.

On his fifth wedding anniversary, Nick Dunne receives the news that his wife, Amy Dunne, has disappeared. His living room has been turned upside down, the street door is wide open, and the cat awaits him alone on the stairs. Nick doesn’t have a convincing alibi, and the neighbors’ testimony to the police points that the couple had quarreled the night before: Nick, in other words, is the main suspect.

Gone Girl is narrated in the first person, but Nick is – much like most people in the world, as you know if you’ve met any – totally unreliable: in an emblematic moment, he says, “I’m a big fan of the lie of omission,” and the warning for us couldn’t be clearer. The novel, however, is carefully crafted so that it never openly lies to us, such as making characters think of something that doesn’t withstand a retrospective look. Instead, it chooses to build ambiguous situations that create a sense of paranoia and tension.

At one point, Nick chastises himself for appearing too calm and reflects that he had lied to the police nine times during his interrogation, which raises our suspicion. But at this point, he has already been defined by his lack of empathy and his insistence on appearing like a good guy. That is, his lies could be due to him being guilty, yes, but may also be just a product of his personality. We already know that his sister told him one day, after all, “You’d literally lie, cheat, and steal – hell, kill – to convince people you are a good guy,” which adds one more ambiguous layer: it could be just justifying his lies to the police, or maybe revealing his motivation for the murder of his wife.

The first half of Gone Girl, then, is built on ambiguity, with countless dialogues and self-reflections assuming duplicitous roles in the narrative. In another instant, for example, Nick thinks “The Amy of today was abrasive enough to want to hurt, sometimes,” which shows how, even if he’s not guilty, Nick still has the makings of an abusive husband.

The book is all about behaviors that can destroy a relationship, focusing on how the usual lack of communication (where you expect your partner to be an X-men and read minds) or the aggressive internal disputes (when the best time of day is when you prove to your partner that they were wrong all the time and that you told them so) can infect and corrode a marriage. It shows how many marry an idea instead of a person, loving only the best aspects of their partner, idealizing them.

Although we begin to follow Nick’s point of view, Amy is Gone Girl’s true protagonist, as her arc is intrinsically linked to this theme. Her parents, for example, idealized her from the very beginning of her life, writing a series of books in her honor called “Amazing Amy”, where the title character realizes all of her parents’ dreams – forcing Amy, in a passive-aggressive way, to strive to give her best too: “And yet I can’t fail to notice that whenever I screw something up, Amy does it right: When I finally quit violin at age twelve, Amy was revealed as a prodigy in the next book. (‘Sheesh, violin can be hard work, but hard work is the only way to get better!’)”

Her parents’ strategy, as any sensible human being would expect, had a terrible effect on Amy, making her embody the title of her children’s book, but in a twisted way: she begins to enjoy assuming the image that corresponds to the idealized vision others have of her, sarcastically pretending to match their views, while actually considering herself to be absolutely superior.

This inevitably impacts her vision of marriage. Amy wants more than anything to prove to herself and to the world that hers is better than other people’s – who she often calls “dancing monkeys,” criticizing their constant performance in a marriage – without realizing that her actions bring her down to the same level: Amy’s last decision in the book, for example, is excellent in its irony, showing that she can’t escape the cliché of the desperate wife trying to save her marriage.

Gone Girl alternates between Amy’s point of view – with her diary – and Nick’s during the investigation, creating a parallel between the past and present of their relationship while opposing both characters’ views on the events. It’s not a coincidence that we see a plethora of contradictions, such as when Nick says, “Amy, I don’t get why I need to prove my love to you by remembering the exact same things you do, the exact same way you do. It doesn’t mean I don’t love our life together,” and a passage of Amy’s diary reads, “I like to think I am confident and secure and mature enough to know Nick loves me without him constantly proving it.” The rub of relationships, after all, is that we can never truly know our partners (we can never truly know ourselves – to the delight of every therapist in the world – let alone other people), so if your wife tells you she’s glad you still love each other like in the first days, this doesn’t mean that just two weeks later she won’t break up with you after realizing she actually prefers spending time elsewhere than by your side.

For that to work narratively, Nick and Amy are never characterized in binary terms: both can be terrible and wonderful people at different times, which makes their dynamic more complex, since the whole “I’m right and you’re wrong” so sought by them becomes an ever-changing battle. They’re unpredictable characters, in other words, which makes the contrast between their points of view always fascinating: while Nick’s thoughts on his wife start melancholic (“She said these last words in a childish lilt that I once found fetching”), for example, longing for a feeling that is not there anymore, but gradually move towards aggressive imagery (“My wife was no longer my wife but a razor-wire knot daring me to unloop her”), in Amy’s diary, her husband’s usual passivity and indifference suddenly evolves into an aggressive, erratic behavior.

Nick, however, is not the only suspect: his father had fled the asylum on the same day of Amy’s disappearance and is a violent misogynist; his sister Margo has too close of a relationship with him, suggesting a crime motivated by jealousy; a possessive ex-boyfriend of Amy appears during investigations and immediately raises many red flags; and even Amy herself is repeatedly described as intelligent, disciplined, and capable of planning major acts in advance. The narrative opens up many possibilities for us to conduct our own investigation on the disappearance while using the ambiguity of sentences and situations to make the process more complex and rewarding.

And when the main turning point of the story occurs, the narrative abruptly changes, quickly solving the “what happened?” mystery to move on to the consequences of the revelation. If we were following the counterpoint of ideas between Nick and Amy, now we receive a third view on the events: extremely cynical and perverse, this new perspective is responsible for removing us from our comfort zone, making the tone of the story even more suffocating than before. Like the best twists, it not only turns things on their head but escalates them, raising the stakes as never before.

But the dark atmosphere was already set right from the beginning, as we can see in this in an early description of Nick’s neighborhood that greatly helps building up the suspense: “Driving into our development occasionally makes me shiver, the sheer number of gaping dark houses – homes that have never known inhabitants, or homes that have known owners and seen them ejected, the house standing triumphantly voided, humanless.”

Gone Girl, then, is an excellent suspense novel, with a well-developed mystery and some memorable – if disturbing – characters. Marriage can be difficult, for sure, but one must remain hopeful that it, at least, doesn’t end this way.

June 18, 2025.

Review originally published in Portuguese on September 30, 2014.