I once had a boyfriend who could be consoled after any argument by ostentatious compliments — praise so overblown it was obviously not entirely sincere. He could see through the trick, but it was somehow enough that I put the effort into sustaining it. It proved he was important to me.
This is the magic of some lies, and some of the liars who tell them. We willingly conspire in our own deception because of the way it makes us feel, and the comfort it brings. It’s even used as the inspirational finale of the Christmas classic Miracle on 34th Street. “Which is worse: a lie that draws a smile or a truth that draws a tear?”. In the last decade, we’ve decided, quite firmly, to choose the lie. After all, who wants what Al Gore described as “inconvenient truth” when you can willingly suspend your disbelief and go along with promises of the moon and the stars, delivered yesterday and paid for by someone else?
My book of the decade is one that offers us a masterclass in the performative lying to which we are becoming accustomed: Gone Girl. I’m about to spoil the ending of this and several other novels of the last decade, so if you prefer your thrillers thrilling, and your plot twists fully twisted, skip to the end.
Gone Girl is the story of a woman — Amy — who appears to have been murdered by her husband — Nick. The first half alternates between her husband’s account of her disappearance and entries from her diary. The diary tells the story of a woman abused and manipulated by a dangerous man. We feel, as we read, that her diary entries are showing us the real story, behind his professed innocence, and we suspect him more and more.
It’s half way through the book that we discover the diary is faked. She’d spent months planning her own disappearance and laying a trail of evidence in the pages of her journal that would implicate her husband. It was a plot to destroy him.
It’s a good novel. An enjoyable thriller. It’s clever in its use of domestic abuse as a theme: we increasingly understand that marriages which appear happy on the outside can mask almost anything that happens behind closed doors. The twists turn us into credulous fools; your desire to ‘believe the victim’ makes you a victim, too.
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