Will's Reading List

Gillian Flynn's third novel is her best; gritty, but not as depressing as Dark Places, and more suspenseful, more readable.  If not wholly believable at times, it is rich with conflict and Flynn's trademark characters. What's especially interesting about the success of the novel is what it says in conjunction with its time. Earlier in 2014, the Census Bureau released statistics that a majority of Americans were currently unmarried.  Most of us are single now.  And if this book is an indication, we don't have much faith in the concept.  In marriage, we lose ourselves -- not simply independence, but our very identity.  We lie because marriage demands we lie.  We are false because the union is false.  If this is true, even in our imagination, no wonder then that we are in love with a novel that plumbs the lie so fully.  We are changed by the fact that we have sewn our lives to another, and like any implant, the body fights both rejection and attachment; adjustment and revulsion  We are horrified by what we think marriage asks us to give up: our selfish independence, and the false ideas we carry about ourselves. Gone Girl is a terrific novel.  It knows us better than we know ourselves.