'Gone Girl' doesn't belong on this list

Elizabeth Hand (an author I respect immensely, and who is also married to my all-time favorite author, Richard Grant) has a great article in the Boston Review about "femininjas," fictional female characters who fight back. But in amongst them she lists Amy, from Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl. Hand describes Amy as the "antiheroine" of the novel, and asks "how many women laughed out loud once Actual Amy took over the page, and how many boyfriends and husbands cringed."

(Just to reiterate, if you have not read Gone Girl, you should not continue to read this review. A big part of the delight of reading the book is watching its intricate plot unfold. I'm going straight for the ending.)

Gone Girl probably isn't the best choice for this list of books, except that it is current and popular. The other books Hand cites involve female characters who, for whatever reason, lash out in self-defense. (Hand's dismissal of Steig Larsson's Lisbeth Salander as "a near-anorexic, childlike waif who musters almost superhuman powers" is both accurate and welcome.)

Gone Girl doesn't belong on this list because Amy is not the protagonist. She isn't fighting back against an oppressor. We're meant to think so at first, because that is what Amy (with her own superhuman powers of manipulating evidence) wants us to think.

Amy is certainly not the abused wife that she pretends to be, in order to frame Nick for her disappearance. And she's not the put-upon woman whose husband is boorish, which is what SHE believes that she is. It's clear from the context that Amy is a straight up textbook psychopath. She has no empathy for anyone but herself. It's questionable whether or not she ever really felt genuine love for Nick.

Amy isn't an "antiheroine," any more than Darth Vader, Moriarty or Hannibal Lecter are antiheroes. Amy is a villain. And a wonderful villain she is. Let's not try to water down her role by putting her in the same category as victimized women who enact their revenge. Amy's not a victim of anything but her own narcissism, and deliciously so.

Cover image copyright Gillian Flynn