As David Fincher’s adaptation, featuring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike, hits theaters today (Gone Girl distributed by Twentieth Century Fox), Nice Premium revisits *Les apparences*, the incredible bestseller by Gillian Flynn. Released in 2010, this story of disappearance rhymes with manipulation, flirts with madness, and takes the reader on a journey of deception.
Amy and Nick are in love, they’re beautiful, they’re young, they live in New York, and they are wealthy. Then they lose their jobs and the financial crisis catches up with them. Amy and Nick are forced to move to Missouri, to Nick’s hometown of Carthage.
On their fifth wedding anniversary, Amy disappears.
With this fairly simple premise, Gillian Flynn crafts a twisted story full of twists and turns, a story where betrayals between spouses, lies, and concealments are the norm.
In *Les apparences*, the author not only tells a well-crafted thriller but also paints a portrait of a society in crisis and offers a brutal and uncompromising analysis of marriage. Relationships and reactions are dissected, showing how different their interpretations can be. You will never read a novel where the psychology of the characters is so intensely described, developed, and pushes both the heroes and the readers to their limits.
Anchoring the story in the realistic daily life of an unemployed couple is a brilliant idea, allowing for immediate identification.
The novel is divided into three parts, with the narrative alternating between Nick’s point of view (*The Day Of*) and Amy’s (*Diary*). Written in the first person, these chapters reveal all sides of the characters: you become attached to Nick, you want to save Amy, you love one then the other, you hate one then the other. No couple has ever been so disturbing.
The precise and sharp writing of Gillian Flynn perfects the work and, despite some small slow parts in the middle of the novel, draws the reader ever deeper into marital perversion.
