This 2012 novel is worth studying. By potential mystery writers. For its structure. For its twists and turns. For its shifts of reader sympathy from one character to another. For its psychological manipulation of two characters who are in major conflict. And for a resolution that resolves that conflict in one way, but perhaps not in another.
This is the story of Nick Dunne and Amy Elliott. The author, however, makes them tools of her structure, rather than normal, sympathetic characters. With the result that, from the moment they are introduced, I was unable to like either one and/or even to identify with either one. For they seemed too clever, too artificial, too sure of themselves. And it soon became clear why. For each is pretending to be what he or she is not. Nick becomes someone else in order to please Amy, and Amy hides her true character in order to turn Nick into a perfect spouse.
To complicate matters, Amy is a spoiled daughter of a famous couple who have written a series of children’s novels that feature a smart little girl named Amy. Meanwhile, Nick leads a pedestrian life. He owns a bar with his twin sister, Margo. And he is an unassuming writer who is ignored by others, except for brief moments when his emotions click on. As they do when he meets Amy. But after their sudden marriage such moments grow infrequent, and the two become a mismatched pair. Not least because they both lie. A lot. They even lie to us.
In any event, when Amy suddenly vanishes on their fifth anniversary, I was little interested in what had happened to her. What interested me was not the fate of either of these characters but what the author was going to do with this situation she had devised. Particularly when everyone suspects that Nick had killed his wife, and Nick discovers that Amy has set him up for exactly that. Indeed, in the guise of the author, she has been setting up the reader as well. For she is not the love-struck woman she has pretended to be in her diary that we have been reading, a wife who is becoming concerned about the conduct of her husband.
No, she is a manipulative woman who, when she discovers that Nick is having an affair, has decided that he is not worthy of her. And as any spoiled brat would do, she seeks revenge. In fact, the author builds this entire novel around her elaborate plot to destroy her husband.
But while the revelation of Nick’s affair is a major plot twist, even greater is the explanation of the seven-year diary that Amy has kept, a diary that suggests Nick has (mis)treated her during their marriage. And when this reader discovered that the story of her diary was not what he had understood it to be, I was ready to throw this book against the nearest wall. But it was such a clever twist, and this novel has become so famous, that I read on. I wanted to see how clever, how manipulative, the novelist herself was going to be.
And I will admit that further twists and turns kept me going. Especially when Nick begins to figure out Amy’s cleverness, and decides he is going to match her manipulative skills. Which prompts him to be deceptive too, to lie, in order to avoid both the media and the police. Now, we are reading about two liars. Two deliberate, desperate liars. And when Amy becomes alerted to her husband’s lying efforts, she ups the ante to counteract his strategy. And so they maneuver back and forth until the end, with cops and reporters and the media hovering nearby, with both of them still trying to control their now dark relationship, and first one, and then the other, getting the advantage over their mate.
In fact, as I approached the end of this novel, I began wondering who was going to come out on top. And would the fact that the author is a woman influence the outcome? In other words, I was still more fascinated by how she was structuring of this novel than by the outcome of the plot. Much less the fate of Nick and Amy themselves.
Tana French sums up this novel accurately when she writes: “Nick and Amy manipulate each other with savage, merciless, and often darkly witty dexterity. This is…about how the happy surface normality and the underlying darkness can become too closely interwoven to separate.” She also calls the novel “wonderful and terrifying,” and with this I do not agree. I could not get close enough to either of these characters to feel the emotional connection that she did.
In sum, this is an intricately crafted mystery novel that features a married couple who are trying to manipulate each other for their own ends. But it is the author who is crafting the greater manipulation. And she does it at the expense of her characters. She does offer intricate psychological observations about the reasons behind their conduct, but these emerge more as tools to explain the conduct she has devised for these characters, rather than as revelations that betray what is truly behind these characters’ devious conduct.
To sum up, I was too turned off by the characterizations of these two people, Amy and Nick, at the start of this novel, to become involved emotionally with them, much less be interested in their fate. And as a result, this work does not prompt me to turn to other novels by this author, as intricately crafted as past and future work may be. (March, 2019)
A LITERARY CAVALCADE 