In one awkward bit, a character says that the story is like a Noir. She literally has characters discussing Noir. I would believe that, except that Flynn highlights her influences. I would believe that, because Leave Her to Heaven, unlike The Big Sleep or The Third Man, is boring as hell. Now, you may say that Flynn didn’t mean to steal the exact same plot from this not-exactly-obscure old movie. If your book has a twist ending, it’d be great if it wasn’t the same plot as a film from 1945. It’s a Noir-lite, with not enough Vincent Price. The difference is, while The Hunger Games homages and steals from a relatively good book, Leave Her to Heaven was bland and forgettable. In this case, Gone Girl is just a modernized, sexed-up, ultra-violent, hammy version of Leave Her to Heaven.

Sure, Hunger Games did some things that Battle Royale did not do, but it’s still basically the American, YA, Hollywood take on the original Japanese concept. One of the most frustrating things about this novel is how it thinks it is so very original, saying something so daring about marriage and crime and the media. When I say that Gone Girl is a cobbler of other people’s better work, I am not kidding. The entire book feels tired, like it’s a cobbler of various other, better novels, ones which already addressed Flynn’s issues and did so better. I think that it’s not just the Gatsby-isms or the New York obsession that has this problem. It has the supposed “normal guy” from the Midwest, getting involved with a rich, beautiful New York person who may have a secret, and revealing corruption and ruined marriages. In the Jazz Era, Fitzgerald did it first and did it better.Īnd this book does bear more than a passing resemblance to Gatsby. And, before anyone says, “Oh, but this book shows that New York isn’t all it’s cracked up to be! It’s a satire! It shows the dark underbelly of rich, arty New York types! The author just adores Missouri!” then I have one thing to say to you: While the book does address the very real issue of artists and writers being priced out of New York’s ever inflating cost of living, it still does so with such an insular adulation for the culture and beauty of NYC that the message is lost amidst a lot of pandering nonsense. It is so inescapable that even light satirizing of this New York obsession –which I think is at least a part of the novel– is still too New York. Anyone reading literary fiction, and most especially that literary fiction that is really just middle-brow book club fiction, knows that New York is ubiquitous. If the Nobel Prize for literature is hopelessly biased in many ways, I can’t say that it isn’t correct about how myopic the American literary scene is. I cannot express how much I despise the New York writer obsession.

Then they lose their jobs and move to Missouri. Basically, half the book is devoted to Amy and Nick, two preternaturally attractive, rich, New Yorker writers who New York a lot about New Yorking New York and how New York New York New York is. It is also a “meditation” on marriage… or something. Gone Girl is a mystery thriller that is becoming a movie (from the director of Fight Club and Se7en, so we can definitely expect cheerfulness and joy from the screen). I also want to begin by saying that Gone Girl is one of my least favorite reading experiences. I did not know, for instance, that I would be picking up two very different discussions on gender: an often-called misogynist book by a self-proclaimed feminist, and a proclaimed feminist book that is full of pure crazy. I had no idea what either book was about. To be clear, I don’t really ever read thriller novels, at least for many years. I also love David Fincher movies and Japanese horror, so I decided it would be surefire to pick Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and Natsuo Kirino’s Out (which turned out to be bonkers). I wanted to get a couple easy, fun airplane reads.

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