The idea for this post actually came to me about a week before I sat down to write this, but I wanted to make sure I finished the book before I gave my complete thoughts. The book in question is Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, which is not a book I would normally read but it was one of those audiobooks I decided to listen to specifically because it is outside my normal wheelhouse. I’m sure it got recommended to me by Audible because I also listened to The Girl on the Train after it got a bunch of accolades. I’m glad Gone Girl ended up being a lot better than that book was, but it did bring up a major gripe I have with certain works of literature.
This post is going to be half-review and half-deeper analysis about why the book ultimately failed for me.
I mentioned in a post a few weeks ago that I might be on the verge of quitting on my first piece of media this year, and that was this book. The first few hours of listening were rough, I just couldn’t get into the characters, the writing, or the performances by the two readers. I do appreciate that, since the book is told through alternating viewpoints of the two main characters, Nick and Amy, they got different readers to voice each character, but at the beginning both of them came across as cloying and artificial. Having gotten through the rest of the book I understand why, but it didn’t make it any easier to get through.
But I stuck it out for the five hours I said I would, and by that time there was enough mystery building up that I did want to see where it was going. And when the big twist happened in the middle, I definitely wanted to finish it out. Unfortunately it’s one of those books where the second act is the peak, and the third act ends up being unsatisfying as it limps across the finish line. I don’t want to get any more specific than that because I’m not one to give spoilers for no reason.
In the end, I don’t regret listening to it, but I could’ve done without it. Both of the main characters are awful people and where they end up is not satisfying for me. I could be more elaborate on exactly why, but again, spoilers. I will say that though the readers started out as an annoyance, they were really good by the end and they brought a lot to the emotional beats of the story.
What ultimately came out of this book is something that I’ve noticed before but hadn’t thought about in a while, so I think it’s worth mentioning here as to why I can never fully get into books like this.
I hate unreliable narrators.
You might be saying, “wow, hate is a pretty strong word,” or something like that. And it’s true, I reserve that word for very few things. I keep it for things that truly make me angry, not for annoyances, but for things that this world would be better off without. Time after time, when I read something that’s told by an unreliable narrator (and in this book there’s two of them!), I get angry. And not just angry at the character for being dishonest, but also at the author for using such a lazy way of telling their story.
I get angry at the character because once I find out that they are unreliable in the way they tell their side of the story, I immediately know that the character is an awful person. By definition, people who are dishonest all the time are awful people. It’s one thing to have a character who lies a bunch to other characters, but it’s another to also lie to the reader. Granted, a lot of the dishonesty in this story isn’t actual lying, it’s more being dishonest through omission of details, but there is also just straight up lying. Even more frustrating than that, Nick or Amy will lie to someone else, admit to the reader that it was a lie, but then provide nothing else. It’s hard to get on a character’s side when you don’t know what they are hiding until much later.
But you could say that’s the whole point. The mystery is built because none of the people telling the story are telling you everything, you need to be held in suspense. Well, that’s where I get angry at the author because it’s an artificial way to create suspense. Keeping details away is necessary for mysteries of course, but it really only works well (for me) if the reader is learning them at the same time as the characters. If the character knows some stuff and waits until they are forced to divulge it to the reader, that is just frustrating. Case in point, the whole first half of the story all you really want to know is if Nick had anything to do with Amy’s disappearance or not. But because Nick is an unreliable jerk, you don’t get a straight answer about anything, which is exactly why the other characters in the story turn on him. As a reader, I don’t blame them because he does the same thing to me. And when you step back a little bit, you realize that there is no reason for it be written that way, it is artificially created. Nick could have been honest the entire time and he still would’ve ended up in the position he does, and I probably would’ve felt sorry for him. Instead I simply don’t care about what happens to him, I just want to know if he did it or not.
Of course whenever I think about the concept of the unreliable narrator, I always come back to The Catcher in the Rye, which is famous for that very reason. And I freaking hate that book too. I totally get that it just means the book wasn’t written for me, there are plenty of other people who understand and empathize with those stories. It does make me wonder a little bit about those people though, that you would feel for someone who is clearly an awful person. The thing is, it’s totally fine to have awful, dishonest people in stories, they create tension. But when you read a story, those people need to have foils, and you need to believe that the foils are keeping things in balance. When the story is told by the awful person, you can’t really believe that the foils are keeping balance because you can’t trust the narrator.
Anyway, I don’t know how much more I can say about that. The only reason I didn’t end out hating Gone Girl as a whole is because the unreliable narrator thing isn’t used the entire time. Once you get halfway through to the twist, most of it falls away and the characters are more direct and don’t contradict each other. At the end of the book, I can’t help but feel like the story would’ve been much more compelling if it had just been told from a different perspective. It would’ve necessitated a different ending of course, but as I already said before, it could’ve used one.