Gone Girl

A new look at Gillian Flynn's cat-and-mouse tale, the novel that sparked a wave of copycat novels and a blockbuster movie.

I’ve now flunked that test twice — surely proof that “Gone Girl” is and remains a really great mystery. Here’s Nick describing the origins of their annual anniversary “treasure hunt”: What I realized after rereading “Gone Girl” on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of its publication was that, as the years passed, the distinctive power of Flynn’s blockbuster had faded for me. In truth, my sour comments on the literary copycats “Gone Girl” has spawned have nothing to do with the original: a macabre, ingenious, psychologically astute cat-and-mouse tour de force of marriage and malevolence. The double helix structure of “Gone Girl” — in which husband and wife Nick and Amy Dunne narrate twisting and turning stories that obsessively dramatize and undermine the details of Amy’s disappearance on the couple’s fifth wedding anniversary — has become canonized into a distinct domestic suspense form of its own. Not since Italian philosopher and semiotician Umberto Eco wrote the surprise bestseller “The Name of the Rose” in 1980 has an entertaining mystery novel so elegantly doubled as a reflection on the instability of truth.