Gone Girl

 by Gillian Flynn

Crown Publishers, 2012

419 pages     Fiction

What to say about Gone Girl? That I hated the characters! That I couldn't stop reading it! That I didn't peek ahead to the ending--not once! (Probably a new record for me.) I guess that I have to say that I had a love-hate relationship with this book, which I believe is just what Gillian Flynn had in mind.

Amy and Nick Dunne are a couple in their mid thirties and have been married for five years. As the book begins, they have moved from New York to Nick's hometown in Missouri, a place extremely alien to Amy's New York sensibilities. She is the beloved daughter of a pair of psychologist authors who documented their only child's life in a long series of children's books called Amazing Amy. Nick and Amy are a "golden" couple, both extremely good looking, both used to having life on their own terms. Both have just lost their jobs, and the trust fund that Amy has always drawn from is in jeopardy. The novel is the accounting of their lives after they moved to Missouri to take care of Nick's dying mother and rapidly failing father.

The story is told in alternating chapters and in three sections. Nick writes of finding Amy gone from their home on their fifth anniversary and each time he writes, we become more confused about how involved he was with her disappearance. Amy's chapters, in the first section of the book, are diary entries from the time that she met Nick until the fateful anniversary day. As we read her diary entries, we become more confused about who this woman is; the diary entries do not portray the same woman that Nick is describing.

Amy and Nick are very adept at playing mind games with each other, and the game has been pushed way beyond their own best interests and their own ability to rationally understand what they have done. At first, Nick seems to be the sane person because it is very difficult to believe Amy's diary entries. While it appears that Nick may have had something to do with Amy's disappearance, nothing seems to match up. By the time we begin the second section of the book, we are in total confusion and anxious for things to start sorting themselves out. But nothing in Gone Girl is as it seems, and as you turn more and more pages and hate the characters more with every page turn, your mind gets as crazy as Nick and Amy. 

As I was reading, I kept thinking "Who are these people?" There is no touch of reality in their characters. But then you watch a "Real Housewives" episode and suddenly there they are--they could be characters on a reality show. Flynn has done a great job of creating characters out of caricatures, much like the characters on Real Housewives are caricatures. Nick and Amy have invented themselves and each other. We recognize little bits of them in people we know or people we have seen in movies or on television. Nick muses, "It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless automat of characters." How awful it must be to always be plotting, always be trying to remember the last lie, always recreating oneself. The Chicago Tribune reviewer speaks to this point: "Within this single novel, there are many warring stories: The stories Nick and Amy tell about themselves, the stories they tell each other. The stories others tell about them, and the stories they tell about each other. What's at stake is not simply factual truth but something more profound: Who holds the final power to write the story of the life this toxic couple shares.

Gillian Flynn is as good at mind games as Amy and Nick are. For her, as for Amy and Nick it is all pretend--a mind-blowing exercise, so well plotted that you can't put it down.  The New York Times review says,   "It is wily, mercurial, subtly layered and populated by characters so well imagined that they’re hard to part with — even if, as in Amy’s case, they are already departed." Flynn says in an interview that she often had the story line of Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf in mind, and that makes sense. I had the same angry feelings toward Amy and Nick Dunne as I did toward Martha and George.

My sister said that she kept looking at the picture of the author

 to see if the author looked as crazy as the book, but the author's picture shows this lovely looking woman, the wife of a lawyer and the mother of a little boy. Flynn mentioned in an interview that her office is in the basement of her Chicago home, and that as she was writing the book, she would hear her husband moving around upstairs and have to take a deep breath before she went upstairs and be a sane woman in a sane relationship.

Most reviews speak of the power of the novel, but I particularly loved the dissident review on Book Forum. The reviewer calls Gone Girl a "masterpiece of cuckoo clockwork" and while she admired the writing, she hates the characters. Why? "Primarily the characters’ apparently everyday behavior—their motivations and how they view one another. Amy and Nick do not resemble actual people so much as grotesquely smiling masks driven by forces of extreme artifice, and it’s exactly that extreme artificial quality that’s frightening to the point of sickening." She calls it "Jezebel in book form."

As much as it is reminiscent of Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf, you haven't read this novel before. That is why it will be one of my favorite books of the year.

 The Chicago Tribune Review::http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-07-28/features/ct-prj-0603-gone-girl-20120728_1_nick-person-investigation-printers-row

The New York Times Review: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/30/books/gone-girl-by-gillian-flynn.html?_r=0

The Book Forum review: http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/2003/12173

The Girl on the Train

by Paula Hawkins

Riverhead Books   2015

336 Pages      Mystery/Thriller

Rachel's life is a mess. She's divorced, jobless, alcoholic. She gets on the train every morning from her London suburb and wanders the city until work hours are over, when she returns  to the flat she shares with a friend. She can't bear to tell her friend that she has no job. One of the daily train stops is opposite the house that she shared with her husband Tom, who now lives there with his new wife Anna and their baby. Every day she stares at the house where she feels her life disintegrated. She also stares at a neighboring house and fantasizes about the young couple that lives there—creating an entire life scenario for them. When the young wife, Megan, disappears, Rachel realizes that she has important information that must be shared . 

Rachel, however, is not the only unreliable narrator of the enfolding story. Anna tells the story from her point of view, as does Megan. They are not the only unreliable people involved in the story: Rachel's ex-husband Tom as well as Megan's husband Scott may also be unreliable witnesses to the unfolding events. To tell any more of the plot would spoil the fun. 

The emphasis of the The Girl on the Train is on the mysteries that surround the people that we think we know, even our spouses.  The reviewer in the Boston Globe says that "Hawkins emphasizes the parallels among these three ostensibly different women, and close the book with the knowledge that they share—as we might—unexpected affinities with people they pass by each day, those who they see but will never truly know." 

Rachel interjects herself into the lives of the people at that train stop in ways that most people would not do, nor would they think of doing. That doesn't keep the majority of us from fantasizing a bit about what it would be like to live in some other place or some other house or with some other person.  Does that make us unreliable witnesses to the events of our own lives?

On a subway ride in New York City several years ago, I sat next to a young couple who were making out rather voraciously. Frankly, it was pretty disgusting. The man on the other side of the couple couldn't stand it anymore and complained loudly to the young man, who jumped up and yelled threateningly into the face of the complainer. When he finally calmed down, he sat back down and ranted on and on under his breath, until the complaining passenger got off the train. What was fascinating to me was not this scene, which was definitely a bit scary, but the reaction of the woman who was sitting opposite me. She was about my age and must have recognized that I was a tourist. She watched me intently through the entire incident, trying to decipher my reaction to the unfolding scene. She was trying to look at the world through my eyes. What is reality, and what is our perception of reality?

I was reminded of a beautiful mansion on the lake shore in Duluth, my home city. Every time I walked by it as a girl, I pretended that I lived there. The lawn, the gardens, the porches looking over the lake—magnificent.  Then, one night, the owner was murdered by her son-in-law on the main stairway in the house.  Suddenly, the house became a tourist attraction, and the beautiful fantasy became an ugly reality. 

Everyone has compared The Girl on the Train with Gone Girl. I think that they are similar only because of the unreliable narrators. I enjoyed them both, although I think that Gone Girl twisted up my mind a bit more than The Girl on the Train. Read them and see what you think.

The New York Times did a very interesting article about the author, Paula Hawkins.

The Shelf Awareness review which calls The Girl on the Train an "intricate, multilayered psychological suspense debut."

The Boston Globe review.

The Trap

By Melanie Raabe

Translated by Imogen Taylor

Grand Central     2015

329 pages     Thriller

It is a family gathering at the beach with two preschool grandchildren. The water continues to beckon, the children are running around, and Grandma is trying to read. I began a spiritual book about the Buddhist way to financial freedom—too dense; then tried The Nordic Theory of Everything—great book but couldn’t concentrate in the sun and the wind; so I moved on to The Trap. BINGO! I sat on the porch all day, and just before bedtime, I closed the book. Totally engrossed!

The tagline of The Trap is “I know who killed my sister. I wrote this book for him.” Linda Conrads (the pen name for Linda Michaelis) is a famous German author of literary fiction. Unfortunately, her sister Anna was murdered twelve years ago, and Linda, in her grief, becomes housebound and a recluse. She only sees her gardener, her assistant, and her publisher. She is totally isolated by her phobias, her choices, and her writing. There are no author readings and no interviews. She is a mystery in Germany. (This, by the way, is too much of an allusion to Elena Ferrante, the mysterious Italian author.) Then one night, while watching television, she sees a news reporter who looks like her fleeting memory of the man that she saw leaving the scene of her sister’s murder. She is sure that this is the same man, and the news reporter is her sister’s murderer.

The story is told in the first person by Linda, who proves to be a totally unreliable narrator. Interspersed throughout Linda’s narration are selected chapters from the thriller she is writing to expose the murderer. The plot builds as the book is written and Linda builds her case against the murderer. A couple of times I found myself gasping as danger lurked for Linda; the scariest moment was when the news reporter/murder suspect comes to her house to conduct the first interview Linda has given in years.

The concept of The Trap is original, but the concept is frankly more thrilling than its execution. I am a little tired of the unreliable narrator concept, ala Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train. Perhaps this plot device has run its course, particularly with me. I do think that Gone Girl is the most intricately woven of the three, although I imagine that The Girl on the Train and The Trap will probably also make good movies. I agreed with the review by the Reaction to Reading blogger who says, “I’m not the world’s biggest fan of the unreliable narrator device but I can be swept along by it in the right circumstances. Sadly, I think it’s particularly poorly executed here as Linda’s unreliability is all too obvious and I never felt at all invested in whether or not she was actually telling the truth.”

I was intrigued with the idea of the protagonist as a recluse. It is totally understandable that someone would become unstable after seeing her sister murdered, but as Linda muses, “Eleven years is a long time. When I wake up at night and stare at my bedroom ceiling, I sometimes wonder whether I’ve dreamt the world out there. Maybe this world isn’t really my world; maybe it’s the only one there is.” If Linda hadn’t seen the murderer on television, how long would this self-imposed exile have lasted? How crazy would she have gotten? How many more stories could have come from her imagination without any interaction with the outside world?  

The Trap was a great sun and sand diversion, but it is not literature. Like many mystery novels that are just too “pat” in their construction, I found the characters a little boring and the plot a little too “constructed” to be even slightly believable. As a beach read, however, it was delightful. 

An interview with Melanie Raabe. 

Hausfrau: Why I Quit Reading It

by Jill Alexander Essbaum

Random House     2015

336 pages     Fiction

The Shortlist

The buzz about Hausfrau began pouring in, and I suddenly remembered that I had a copy in my stack of advanced reader copies. Eager to see what the buzz was all about, I began reading. I became more and more distraught. What is this about? Why is it suddenly so popular? Who could possibly like this woman? So I stopped reading it. Now for me, that is a major change. I tend to plow through books, and try to understand the book from the author's perspective. What is the author trying to tell us? In this case, I just quit. And as you can tell from this posting, I am feeling a lot of guilt over quitting the book.

In the midst of this decision, I got into a discussion with a friend about what makes a good protagonist? Especially a woman protagonist? Do you have to like a protagonist? Certainly I hadn't liked Rachel from The Girl on the Train. I hadn't liked Hazel in Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League. I hadn't liked Amy Dunne in Gone Girl or Annie in A Small Indiscretion--all books I had completed in the last few months. 

I read the review in Shelf Awareness. The reviewer says: "In Anna Benz, Essbaum has created a genuine, complex woman whose journey--no matter how dark it may be--reveals truths as only great literature can. She may have her roots in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina or Flaubert's Emma Bovary or Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, but she is a thoroughly modern and distinct character." OK, I thought, what truths is Anna revealing that I am not understanding. So, I picked the book up again.

But then I turned to the review in The New York Times. That reviewer felt that the author was intending to show the "loathsomeness that we hide behind the bland and drab."  I get that. But the New York Times reviewer also helped me to decide to quit when she said, "A few notes to book clubs: If you really must put yourselves through this thing, good luck finding the hot parts. . . .And if you turn out to have a member who feels everything that Anna says and does is marvelous, do feel justified in getting a replacement member." Ah! Finally someone feels like I do about this book. Our book club tried to read Madame Bovary, and not one of the ten members finished the book. 

Where I think the problem for me lies in the fact that I had recently read too many books with too many self-indulgent women as protagonists. "Anna was a good wife, mostly." Hazel felt so sorry for herself and her life situation that she drank to excess and drove recklessly with her children in the car. Annie felt that she had to explain her life's mistakes to her son, and Rachel couldn't live her own life so she inserted herself into the lives of others. Amy, the queen of self-indulgence, was so self absorbed that she created a whole other persona that set out to destroy her husband. 

I am watching a young friend pull herself together after a series of bad life decisions. She is beginning to see herself as a whole person for the first time. I hear her saying to herself, "I am better than this." Does she descend to self-indulgence on occasion. Of course she does. Do I eat ice cream sometimes—last night as a matter of fact. I think that the difference is in intent. Anna in Hausfrau has no intent of abandoning her self-indulgence. She wallows in it. 

So, dear readers, it is OK to quit reading Hausfrau. Read Life from Scratch where a beautiful young housewife finds a cure for a bad life circumstance in cooking or Kristin in Station Eleven, who resiliently tramps on through a dystopian landscape. Read about empowered women not self-indulgent women.

The Review in Shelf Awareness.

The review in The New York Times.

The Woman in Cabin 10

by Ruth Ware

Scout Press     2016

340 pages     Thriller

It was a dark, very cold and snowy January day when I began The Woman in Cabin 10. I was all wrapped up in a blanket, the fire was blazing, and I was determined to put life at bay and read something totally absorbing. This was the perfect choice. What was good about The Woman in Cabin 10 was that I couldn't put the book down. It isn't great literature, but it sure did keep my heart pumping and my blood warm.  I had similar hopes when I read Ware's previous book, In A Dark, Dark Wood—and I was similarly underwhelmed, except to say that the setting is just as atmospheric in The Woman in Cabin 10 as it was In A Dark, Dark Wood. This time, however, the setting is a small cruise ship in the North Sea. 

Laura Blacklock (Lo to her friends) is a travel writer and is lucky enough to score a trip on the maiden voyage of the small ship, Aurora, to view the Northern Lights, to visit the Norwegian fjords, and the city of Trondheim. There are only ten cabins, and all but cabin 10 are filled with travel writers, photographers, and potential investors for the ship's owner, British Lord  Richard Bullmer. 

Before the voyage began, Lo experienced a robbery in her apartment; the most scary part of the robbery was that she was locked in her room for several hours. This event throws her completely off balance, so she enters the cruise ship sleepless, hung over, and anxious. We learn right away that she is an unreliable reporter, that she has a drinking problem and is dependent on anxiety medication. Almost immediately she is rattled again when she thinks that she hears a scream and someone being thrown overboard in Cabin 10, right next door to her room. Of course, no one believes her. It is a classic murder mystery setup, but in Lo's case, she cannot cease pursuing what she thinks happened, even when she is warned to stop searching for answers. Add to this the claustrophobia and the constant nausea coming from the lurching small ship, and you have a prescription for a very tense ride.

One reader suggested that the book involves a lot of gaslighting. I didn't know what that term meant, but apparently it refers to when a hysterical woman is manipulated into thinking that her own memory, perception and sanity can't be trusted. No matter how much the people on the boat try to gaslight Lo, she persists, and solves the crime. The last 50 pages or so are very tense, but the solution is a bit underwhelming and slightly disappointing. 

One of the problems I have had recently is finding anything to like about the women protagonists in mysteries that seem to be very popular. Certainly, I didn't like Rachel in The Girl on the Train, and Amy in Gone Girl, and I really didn't like the women In a Dark, Dark Wood. Now, here is another one with a truly unlikable protagonist. But, apparently they make great characters in movies, since all of these books have been made into movies. Probably The Woman in Cabin 10 will show up on the big screen as well. Ah well. So much for my opinion. 

Ruth Ware website.