Holy mind blow! For once I am okay with a book having an abrupt, unresolved ending. Truthfully I just wanted to be done with it. Gone Girl is about the disappearance of Nick Dunne's wife, Amy, on their fifth wedding anniversary. All signs point to foul play, maybe even murder.
**Warning Major Spoilers!**
The first part of the book is told from Nick's perspective with some of Amy's diary entries sprinkled in between. I wasn't sure what to think of Nick. He lies to the cops, why? He can't believe the things people say about his wife, she has a best friend? She has been nice to the neighbors? He portrays Amy as distant, cold and resentful. On the flip side Any's diary entries show the opposite. Nick is secretive, unappreciative, angry and even scary.
Part two starts off with a bombshell.. Amy is alive! She is hiding out in a little motel. Turns out she is framing Nick as a way of punishing him for his ongoing affair with a younger woman. Now the tables have turned. Amy is psychotic and Nick is simply a man who fell in love with the wrong woman under false pretenses. By this time my heart is hurting for Nick and I am worried about how he will prove he is being framed.
Once Nick figures this out he takes action. He does interviews admitting he did wrong by having an affair and that he loves Amy so much and wants her to come home. He promises he can be the man she needs him to be if only she would let him try. Amy falls for it. She makes her way home but kills a man (Desi a childhood sweetheart that is a bit obsessed with Amy) in the process all to make her story of kidnapping all the more believable. Amy convinces Desi to help her hoping for money but winds up trapped in his lake house until she kills him and escapes.
I was routing for Nick. Although the police have closed the case, with the help of one detective and his twin sister the truth has to come out. Right, right? Well Nick gives up when Amy surprises him with a pregnancy (she used his frozen sperm without his knowledge).
I have mixed feelings about this book. Towards the end it affected my own mood until I finished the book and I didn't like that. Everything sort of crashed for me when it turns out Nick has his own issues and is reluctant to get rid of Amy after everything she put him through. And it was a bit unbelievable that Amy had every single detail covered. Well except for two things. She covered herself in case Jeff and the girl (can't remember her name) from the motel came forward (Desi kept her in a room somewhere but she doesn't remember where) but what about the owner? Surely she is credible enough to be believed if she came forward and say she saw Amy on her own everyday. And what about Desi's mom? I was under the impression that they lived together, couldn't she testify that Desi didn't start spending all his free time at the lake house until weeks after Amy's disappearance?
This book just bugged me. There was no light at the end of the tunnel and that is fine, I don't just read happy books but there was no hope at all. Any loose end you could think of that might help Nick out was covered by Amy so completely it really was unbelievable.
Quote:
“We were the first human beings who would never see see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can't recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn't immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A commercial. You know the awful singsong of blase: Seeeen it. I've literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality really can't anymore. 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 scripted. 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.”
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