First off, a spoiler alert: if you haven’t read this book, you might want to skip this post until you have. Not, mind you, that knowing the plot “spoils” the book. What tension there is about why the girl is gone is dispelled by the book itself probably about half way through, and the careful reader is not at all surprised by the surprise although there will be some very chilling turns of events at the end.

Girl Gone is at its heart a study in disingenuity, unreliable and conflicting narrations, psychopathology, and solipsism, and its pleasures come from being expertly driven from pillar to post betwee them. Two characters, a wife and a husband, share the narrative stage, each presenting his/her version of events, and offering these up to the reader as their versions of the truth of the events that take place. In fact, both narrations want to persuade and be persuasive, but neither, as time goes on, is, and each becomes ever less attractive.

Amy begins the account through a diary. A diary which, we come to find out, is a complete fabrication, created to relate events in order to persuade others of the counter-fiction to actual events. Her counter-fiction is that she was murdered by her husband, and both narrative and physical evidence are created by her to support this “story of her goneness” (each narrator marks the passage of “days gone”). The actuality of her goneness is quite different.

Nick’s narrative wants us to understand his position as the husband who is not responsible for his wife’s disappearance, knows nothing about the tactile evidence of his involvement in her disappearance, and, at the end, comes to understand that his role in her narrative is as her murderer. He too is fast with the truth, fast with a lie, and faster yet in withholding information.

Both would have us believe their counter stories about themselves, both enlist the support of the media, social media, and Web space to offer their versions of what has happened. It is important to note that the selling of these stories to the “general public”: is he a wife murderer? Is he innocent in her disappearance? Is she the paragon of virtue, the “amazing Amy” of the children’s books which her parents wove around her?

In the end, it becomes clear that Amy is in fact a complete psychopath, and a murderer whose story is so convincing and so much in line with what people expect to hear that any counter-narrative seems completely implausible. It is much easier to believe that he killed her for her money than that she framed him for her murder out of vengeance and a mania to control. The telling and selling of their own stories “about what happened” after she reappears is an important stream of authorial knowing.

There is no third perspective, no third-person narration above the fray, no investigation of the “facts” as they are presented. In another, different, and far more traditional book, the views of the police would have a place if not center stage. Here both narrators in the end are left to write their own books/accounts. This is but another way of justifying themselves to the world and to themselves, and that only one story exists in the end, Amy’s, the “Gone Girl”, is a final act of manipulation.

Flynn’s effort has been labelled in some places as a “thriller”. There are aspects that fit that particular genre, but I see it as a play to use that genre to create a truly unsettling, nasty but tasty novel in the moral style of Patricia Highsmith. It is a tour de force in narration, and voices and nearly no slips in the voices of either character. I recommend it highly, and would encourage you to enjoy it as an audio book.