The word “marriage” occurs about a hundred times in Gillian Flynn’s novel “Gone Girl”; there are sixty instances of “husband.” “Wife” maxes out the Kindle search feature at a hundred instances in the first hundred and forty-seven pages—that’s just thirty-seven per cent of the book. If there is some way of searching the remaining sixty-three per cent, I haven’t figured it out. I feel certain that she’s there, this “wife,” many more times—but I can’t find her. As sometimes happens, the limitations of the medium amplify the message: wives are people who disappear.
“Gone Girl” has sold over eight and a half million copies—a number sure to rise in the wake of the film adaptation, which topped the box office last weekend. The plot centers on the failed marriage of the beautiful, accomplished magazine writer Amy Elliott (whose childhood was immortalized by her parents in a creepy children’s book series, “Amazing Amy”) and Nick Dunne, a handsome aspiring novelist from Missouri. Their conjugal happiness is first interrupted by the financial crisis: Nick and Amy lose their magazine jobs, sell their brownstone, and buy a house in Missouri, where Nick can attend to his dying mother. The mother duly dies. The couple is haunted by Nick’s foul-mouthed, demented father, who periodically escapes from his care facility and runs around town shouting vile things at women. Nick uses the last of Amy’s trust fund to open a bar. He may or may not be having an affair. They may or may not be trying to have a baby. On the morning of the couple’s fifth wedding anniversary, Amy disappears in what looks like an abduction, and a nationwide manhunt begins.
Parallels may be drawn between “Gone Girl” and Lionel Shriver’s 2003 best-seller “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” which was adapted into a movie in 2011. Shriver’s novel tells the story of a woman whose husband talks her into having children; parenthood, he feels, is the only possible answer to the big existential questions. But she, through some horrific transference, passes her spiritual emptiness to her son, who eventually perpetrates a school massacre.
The central characters in both “Gone Girl” and “We Need to Talk About Kevin” are smart, acerbic New York women—successful writers, amazing cooks, lovers of European culture—who are somehow unable to find happiness with their apparent male counterparts. (This parade of weird, milquetoast intellectuals is best summed up in the character of the billionaire, Proust-reciting Scrabble buff played, in the “Gone Girl” adaptation, by Neil Patrick Harris.) Both women marry salt-of-the-earth, all-American types, manly men who know how to fuck a woman’s brains out and then take her to see the fence that Tom Sawyer whitewashed. Both are relocated by their strong, manly husbands from fantastic Manhattan apartments to suburban McMansions, where they are given to understand that the time has come to set aside frivolous pursuits and have children.
Both books restage marriage as a violent crime—an abduction. An independent, expressive single woman is taken from New York; her beautiful body is disfigured, or threatened with disfigurement; and her accomplishments are systematically taken away or negated, rendered worthless by comparison to that all-trumping colossus of meaning, childbirth. (Clearly, many women find happiness in much this way; but, equally clearly, many of them don’t and can’t.) These narratives speak less to the specific challenges of having a sociopath for a child or a spouse than to the pathology of the unstated assumptions that we all pass along and receive. They speak to the revelation lying in wait for women when they hit the ages of marriageability and childbirth: that their carefully created and manicured identities were never the point; the point was for it all to be sacrificed to children and to men.
But perhaps “Gone Girl” ’s greatest insight is that the men aren’t mere brutish exploiters. Where a more simplistic narrative would posit that every loss for women is a gain for men, Flynn shows again and again that nobody is a winner—everyone is a dupe. Girls are set up for a horrific disappointment, but boys are set up to be horrifically disappointing. Boys are taught to protect, but how do you protect someone who has the same basic rights as you do, and from whom you are also demanding a huge sacrifice? How do you protect someone who is too good for you—not too pure or too lofty but actually better than you at day trading, running marathons, and looking like a million bucks? (...)
Before a TV interview, Nick, the most hated man in America, is instructed, “You have to admit you’re a jerk and that everything was all your fault.” “So, like, what men are supposed to do in general,” he replies. This line got a lot of rueful laughs at the screening I attended. “Gone Girl” is as much about the near impossibility of being a good husband as it is about the anguish of being a good wife. The bat-shit preposterousness of the marital “accord” ultimately reached by Nick and Amy is an indictment of the state of marriage, and of heterosexual relations more broadly.
“Gone Girl” has sold over eight and a half million copies—a number sure to rise in the wake of the film adaptation, which topped the box office last weekend. The plot centers on the failed marriage of the beautiful, accomplished magazine writer Amy Elliott (whose childhood was immortalized by her parents in a creepy children’s book series, “Amazing Amy”) and Nick Dunne, a handsome aspiring novelist from Missouri. Their conjugal happiness is first interrupted by the financial crisis: Nick and Amy lose their magazine jobs, sell their brownstone, and buy a house in Missouri, where Nick can attend to his dying mother. The mother duly dies. The couple is haunted by Nick’s foul-mouthed, demented father, who periodically escapes from his care facility and runs around town shouting vile things at women. Nick uses the last of Amy’s trust fund to open a bar. He may or may not be having an affair. They may or may not be trying to have a baby. On the morning of the couple’s fifth wedding anniversary, Amy disappears in what looks like an abduction, and a nationwide manhunt begins.Parallels may be drawn between “Gone Girl” and Lionel Shriver’s 2003 best-seller “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” which was adapted into a movie in 2011. Shriver’s novel tells the story of a woman whose husband talks her into having children; parenthood, he feels, is the only possible answer to the big existential questions. But she, through some horrific transference, passes her spiritual emptiness to her son, who eventually perpetrates a school massacre.
The central characters in both “Gone Girl” and “We Need to Talk About Kevin” are smart, acerbic New York women—successful writers, amazing cooks, lovers of European culture—who are somehow unable to find happiness with their apparent male counterparts. (This parade of weird, milquetoast intellectuals is best summed up in the character of the billionaire, Proust-reciting Scrabble buff played, in the “Gone Girl” adaptation, by Neil Patrick Harris.) Both women marry salt-of-the-earth, all-American types, manly men who know how to fuck a woman’s brains out and then take her to see the fence that Tom Sawyer whitewashed. Both are relocated by their strong, manly husbands from fantastic Manhattan apartments to suburban McMansions, where they are given to understand that the time has come to set aside frivolous pursuits and have children.
Both books restage marriage as a violent crime—an abduction. An independent, expressive single woman is taken from New York; her beautiful body is disfigured, or threatened with disfigurement; and her accomplishments are systematically taken away or negated, rendered worthless by comparison to that all-trumping colossus of meaning, childbirth. (Clearly, many women find happiness in much this way; but, equally clearly, many of them don’t and can’t.) These narratives speak less to the specific challenges of having a sociopath for a child or a spouse than to the pathology of the unstated assumptions that we all pass along and receive. They speak to the revelation lying in wait for women when they hit the ages of marriageability and childbirth: that their carefully created and manicured identities were never the point; the point was for it all to be sacrificed to children and to men.
But perhaps “Gone Girl” ’s greatest insight is that the men aren’t mere brutish exploiters. Where a more simplistic narrative would posit that every loss for women is a gain for men, Flynn shows again and again that nobody is a winner—everyone is a dupe. Girls are set up for a horrific disappointment, but boys are set up to be horrifically disappointing. Boys are taught to protect, but how do you protect someone who has the same basic rights as you do, and from whom you are also demanding a huge sacrifice? How do you protect someone who is too good for you—not too pure or too lofty but actually better than you at day trading, running marathons, and looking like a million bucks? (...)
Before a TV interview, Nick, the most hated man in America, is instructed, “You have to admit you’re a jerk and that everything was all your fault.” “So, like, what men are supposed to do in general,” he replies. This line got a lot of rueful laughs at the screening I attended. “Gone Girl” is as much about the near impossibility of being a good husband as it is about the anguish of being a good wife. The bat-shit preposterousness of the marital “accord” ultimately reached by Nick and Amy is an indictment of the state of marriage, and of heterosexual relations more broadly.
by Elif Batuman, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: 20th Century Fox
