Review of Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch

*Full disclosure* I must admit that I’m approaching this novel and this review from a bit of a contrarian position. This is because Donna Tartt’s latest novel, The Goldfinch, got such glowing, adulatory reviews before it was even released, that, I, suspicious-minded cynic that I am, smelled conspiracy.  

I will say this in defense of my own fairness, however: I wanted to love it. Donna Tartt’s first novel, The Secret History, is one of my all time favorite novels. It is one of the few books that I reread every year or so, not because I ought to, but, like a guilty pleasure, because I need to. I miss it. I long to be again in the company of those magnetic, dazzling characters, for whose friendship and approval the reader pines nearly as much as the main character, Richard. I miss that ivy-trellised old college that conjures all of the beauty and nobility of both the green-glades of Vermont and the airy, white temples of ancient Greece. And I would have given anything for Donna Tartt to produce a new book that achieves that same affect of complete enraptured absorption. That’s a tall order, I know, but I really believed she could do it. Unfortunately, in my opinion, The Goldfinch doesn’t come close.

If someone else had written The Goldfinch, a different novelist, without such an impressive achievement in her past, I’d say it was a very good novel. If it was a first novel, I’d be dully impressed. But the high school English teacher in me stubbornly insists that the same work that may get an underachiever an A will get a star pupil a B-. Sometimes you judge in terms of potential.

So, why not the A? Why aren’t I joining in on the general accolade showering with everyone else? Well, I think there were some very big choices Donna Tartt made in her novel that simply didn’t pan out.

First. As everyone recognizes when it’s pulled off really well, a writer taking on the voice and perspective of a character completely at odds with his or her own is difficult. That’s why Wally Lamb received such a to-do with She’s Come Undone. It was just downright creepy how authentically he maintained the voice of an adolescent woman over the course of several hundred pages. Nicole Krauss, likewise, channels an elderly Jewish man so convincingly in her charming novel, The History of Love, that one suspects she walks around at home exclaiming Oye! Who ate all the Gefilte fish? When it’s done well, you completely forget that the author is a balding, middle-aged man instead of an overweight teenage girl, or a pretty brunette rather than a lonely, heart-diseased, old immigrant. In fact, when it’s done well, you forget all together that the author is anyone other than the character speaking. Throughout the entire 784-page span of The Goldfinch, I never, for a moment, forgot that it was Donna Tartt writing from the perspective of an adolescent boy. You could certainly tell that she had done her homework. She demonstrated assiduous familiarity with World of War craft, the military tactics of high school bullies, and Manga porn, but at the center of all the accurate details and believably juvenile, profanity-studded dialogue there yawned a chasm where no amount of youth culture could fill the space that plain old character ought.

This could be for two reasons that I see. One reason might be that the world inhabited by the twelve-to-eighteen-year-old boy is just not a terrifically appealing one. Most of us, particularly the “high-minded” readers of “literature,” (sniff, sniff) would probably rather spend as little time as possible in the contemporary, video gaming, Dorito-snacking, gel-spiked world of the American adolescent male. It’s not an alluring literary milieu, and my personal opinion is that Donna Tartt’s tale does little to bolster its appeal. I am an adult female, however, and am willing to grant the possibility that a male reader might have a very different, more nostalgic experience reading this novel than I. In fact, I would be very curious to see the difference in this novel’s reception among males and females.

I think there is another less subjective problem, though, besides my snooty discrimination against youth of the opposite sex, and that problem is in Theo’s character, particularly that, in my opinion, he has very little of it. Theo is in the line of other famed, literary passive observers: Nick in The Great Gatsby, Watson in Sherlock Holmes, and even Richard in The Secret History. The novel chronicles his movement from the company of one vibrant, charismatic character to another: his mother, Pippa, Hobie, Boris, and even his father. Yet, he, himself, is incredibly bland, nondescript. He is a chameleon, taking on the traits, interests and behaviors of the dynamic characters around him, and shedding them just as quickly. What’s more, he spends most of the novel being acted upon by those vibrant characters, but doing little himself. When he does act, it is usually at the prompting, or even forcing, of another character. Even the central conflict of the entire novel is quickly and tidily taken care of by another, more interesting character, the same character who created a great deal of the conflict in the first place.

Does this story even need Theo? Well, yes, but only on a very mechanical level. He functions as little more than the hub around which a pageant of more charming, secondary characters converge. That, I think, is why my interest in the novel had a choppy, start-and-stop feel. The novel dragged a bit (and was particularly poorly edited as well) during the first couple hundred pages, as Theo grapples alone with the death of his mother, while watching a great deal of television (as a side note, it makes one wonder if contemporary life is simply less worthy of literary depiction because who wants to read about someone watching TV?). It picks up for a spirited jaunt in Las Vegas, where we are rescued from the tedium of Theo’s lonely introspection by the arrival of Boris, indisputably, the most interesting character of the novel, and the intrigues of Theo’s alcoholic, gambling father. When Theo absconds from Vegas in the dead of night, we are full of high hopes for further adventure, but no, it’s back to the old, somber, introspective, grind with shuffling, melancholy Theo at the helm once more.

I liked Theo. I sympathized with Theo. I wished him well, but upon turning the last page and closing the cover, having shared such a long odyssey together, I didn’t do what any author striving to write a truly magnificent bildungroman hopes I will. I didn’t miss him.

If a Tree Falls in a Forest...Being Great versus Being Famous

Some people deserve their fame: Shakespeare, Toni Morrison, Van Gogh. Some don’t: Snookie, Honey boo-boo, Danielle Steele. Some deserve fame and don’t have it: There are probably countless examples, but of course, I don’t know any, except Theresa Williams.

There’s a little book, called The Secret of Hurricanes, published in 2002. This book is written with all the poetry and humanity of Marilyn Robinson’s Gilead, and all the violence, heartbreak and brutal truth of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, yet it has received no Pulitzer prize; Oprah has not held the hand of its author, gushed her praises and then sent forth multitudes of women to buy and read the book. In fact, its cover is clean of any little symbol of earthly acclaim, no Booker Prize, no Pen/Faulkner award, no New York Times bestseller, not even a stinking little Barnes and Noble Book club pick. It could easily merit a Pulitzer, but instead it got nothing. Why? Why do some writers get fame and prizes and others, who have demonstrated equal or even more talent go unnoticed? Well, the answers are obvious: better connections, better agents or publishing houses, or even just dumb ole, right-place-right-time, luck.

Maybe it’s an American thing, maybe it’s a youth thing, but I have this unquestioned assumption that accomplishment automatically equals recognition, that if I were to write a brilliant, breathtaking novel, a true opus, that immediately the clarion call would go out, the laurel branches and fine robes would appear, and an honorary doctorate from Harvard would just be a matter of course. Yet, it is entirely possible, and I dare say more likely than not, that absolutely nothing would happen. As an artist, I think it’s important to face this possibility, to ask myself, do I want to be a great writer or do I want to be a famous writer?

I think it’s ok to for an artist to admit that she would be wounded to have her best ignored. Van Gogh felt immense pain at the rejection of his work. In some ways, I think it weighed on him so heavily that it slowly, slowly killed him. And it’s not just about fame, wanting the laurel wreathes, and royalties and interviews on the radio. It’s also about wanting your love reciprocated. I believe that a true artist makes something out of the ecstasy of love that human existence provokes in him, and all he wants is to share that ecstasy with his beloved, to let it multiply between them like children. To have the world completely ignore that offering is like the pain of having love letters returned to you, your beloved cold, indifferent, unmoved. It’s not wrong to be hurt by that. I’d say it’s impossible not to be hurt by that, if your love was true. So I guess the question is not do you want to be great or famous? But will you go on, will it still be worth it to you if you are great and not famous, great and unknown? Will it have been better to love and yet be unloved than never to have loved at all? Were and are those love letters, nevertheless, worth writing?

Zombie Love

When Peter and I were living in Honduras we had a weekly ritual. Tuesdays were 5 Limpira day at the movie theater, which is about a dollar American, so every week we would first go to Pizza Hut, (which in Honduras is about as swanky as it gets) and then to the Mall to jostle high school kids in the line for the dollar movie. We saw some really awful movies that year, "Jumper," for instance, pronounced "Humper" in Spanish, which was the only memorable thing about that movie.

One of the less awful movies that we saw that year was "Soy Legende" or "I am Legend." Don't get me wrong, it wasn't good, but it had a couple scenes that stayed with me, sort of burrowing into my subconscious to pop up at other moments. One such scene was when his beloved trusty golden retriever falls victim to the nefarious zombie bite. It spreads like a disease, with just minor symptoms at first, but over the course of a couple days, it finally takes complete hold of it's victim, transforming it into something completely different, loveless, blind, unknowing, unthinking, self-destructive, flesh hungry violence. The moment I remember was when Will Smith's character was holding his dog tightly in his arms with the animal's jaw locked. He was holding him and crying and loving the friend buried somewhere deep within a demon, while that demon tried with all the strength of body and soul to devour him.

So what occasion prompted this image to reassert itself into my consciousness? Why, marriage of course, what else? Marriage is the ultimate zombie love story. If I were going to write a zombie flick I would make it so that the zombie-ism (?) was a condition that came and went in episodes or attacks, like asthma or schizophrenia. In most zombie movies the emotional tug is in the tragic farewell to an unsalvageable identity that has been irrevocably consumed, and that's good stuff, but that's such a short lived emotional conflict, and it doesn't seem all that true to life either. I prefer the concept of loving someone, journeying with someone, who, when they're in their right mind is your best friend, your beloved, your mother, your child, but when the meds wear off will attempt to take a bite out of your femur.

Sometimes I feel like that, and sometimes I feel like all the people I love are like that too. 90% wonderful, amazing, devoted companion, 10% blood-thirsty, lumbering, psychopath. It reminds me of The Apostle Paul, talking about how he couldn't stop doing the things he didn't want to do and couldn't make himself do the things he wanted to do. Sometimes it's like we're possessed, completely overtaken by a spirit of selfishness, wrath, jealousy or self-pity, and the arms go up and the gaze goes blank and the teeth start gnashing. This behavior is especially obvious in marriage, where your zombie curbing inhibitions might be a just a scooche less vigilant. Now most of us, in fact I'd say any normal human being with the self-preservation instinct of a gnat would flee the zombie, barricade ourselves behind the heaviest doors we can find, pile furniture against that door and then pick up an axe for good measure. But God holds the zombie in his arms like Legend held his dog, he bear hugs it as it thrashes and snatches and snaps it's jaws in his ear, holds it until the human soul inside the demon comes back to him all shaken and shivering and in a cold sweat. And that is what we're called to do too. We are called to hug the zombies. When those we love, and more importantly those we don't love, attack us, malign us, use us, disrespect us, shatter us, we not supposed to flee or chop their arms off to render them powerless, we're supposed to hold them close and know that there is a precious, made in the image of God soul in there, and whisper steadily as we hold them, Forgive them Lord, forgive them Lord, for they know not what they do. 

Messing Up Your Kids

We had a bad morning. He woke me up too early, after a night of uncomfortable, pregnant, half sleep. I woke up rabid, angry at the world, angry at him. I could feel molten lava surging through my veins where the blood should be. I felt like a train barreling down an unfinished track, the dizzying speed, the inertia, whistle blasting, no stopping until the impact of an inevitable crash. Who knows what it was. He didn't want his diaper changed, didn't want to get dressed, something trivial and stupid, and instead of the momma who gently persuades or puts out the fuse with a song, a tickle or a hug, he met the runaway train momma and KABAAAM! He's screaming and crying. I'm hissing at him like a viper, threatening spankings, disownment, Guantanamo bay, all the while screaming inside, Help! Runaway train! Somebody stop this thing! I finally set him in time out and walk away to my own time out feeling like a huge failure and knowing that it didn't have to be that way, that it all happened because I woke up a freight train.

There might be nothing people shy away from talking about more than how they are failing as a parent. People will talk years and years after the fact about how they could have done this or that better, wish they had done more of this or less of that, and that's good. Twenty years distance grants an incredible amount of perspective, clarity, and humility, and also a pleasant amount of anesthetizing vagueness. In hindsight things blend and balance out, a parent can just sort of wave a hand of ablution over the whole messy thing, forgive themselves, and usually it seems, be forgiven by their children.

What people won't talk about either because they don't see it, or because it's too painful to speak aloud, or because they're afraid someone will call Child Protective Services, are the moments when the worst in you comes flooding out and you see in your child's big, clear eyes that they are learning, when you watch your child break beneath the weight of your own flaws, when you see them suddenly channel an anger, a frustration, an aggression that is not their own and you know, right then, in that moment that you are changing them, that you are fashioning into them emotions and patterns of behavior or thought that, one day, they will anguish to be purged of. And even as you see it happening you can't stop it. Maybe you'll stop it one time or ten times, but you won't be able to stop it every time. Eventually you will have to, if your honest, face the fact that you are messing up your kids.

There are ways to feel better about this. For one, you're also giving them everything good and strong and noble and loving about yourself. You're not only messing them up, you're also bettering them. They likely would not be better off without you. They likely would not even be better off with someone else. Everyone else is messed up too. Other parents would mess them up in other ways, maybe worse ways, and if they didn't someone else would. We all walk around like living sculptures with chisels in hand that we take to each other mercilessly; school mates, friends, enemies, lovers, we chisel away with incredible casualness. Our children will be chiseled at one way or another.
These truths can assuage the personal burden of guilt, but still, I don't want to damage my children. It hurts me more than anything in the world to be deeply irreparably flawed and making my children pay for it, and eventually it leads me back to the question, "Why, why, why does God give so much power to messy sinners? Why does God give babies, those most vulnerable, beautiful little creatures, who simultaneously have the most potential either for good or evil to evil people who will mess them up?""What kind of a God? What kind of a God! WHAT KIND OF A GOD!!!" Well, the more I ask myself that question the more it seems to me that it must be a very interesting God. It's an incredibly interesting and, if one can say this of God, unorthodox way of doing things.

If I were God I would probably establish some kind of Platonic Gymnasium for children. Babies would immediately be rescued from the unclean hands of their parents at birth and brought into the perfect, safe, sterile nursery of my own construction and under my own oversight, where they would be reared to perfection. But then I'd have to establish a divine middle school, divine secondary school and college because once perfection takes its hand away from imperfection the whole thing is bound to fall apart. I'd basically have to wrap my human creations in bubble wrap and keep them away from each other forever, because sooner or later the messing up would begin.

Hemingway wrote that, "The world breaks all of us and afterward many are strong in the broken places." I've never heard a better summation of God and the world he has made. I think God prefers the company of interesting, strong, broken people to that of innocent, perfect, untried people. And that is really what God is doing after all, he's making company for himself, but he can't directly make the kind of company he desires. Hardship and pain and brokenness and love and sacrifice are what make the kind of people he likes to be around, and that, fortuitously, just happens to be the specialty of the messed up. We can't make perfect, but we can make interesting.

Severed Limbs and Gauged out Eyes- There Jesus Goes Being Scary Again

I used to work at Trader Joe's when I lived in Minneapolis. One day at work, I saw a man, probably about sixty, who'd lost an eye: like, that morning. There was gauze over the empty space where the eye had been. The gauze was taped at the brow, temple and cheekbone, but it was loose and askew. There were faint blotches of blood on the gauze that really seemed to advertise the wound more than conceal it. I had the familiar sensation of something ghastly beckoning me to look at it, the way road-kill does when I have to drive right over it. There's some morbid draw that pulls at my eyes like a magnet toward tiny organs and bones and torn flesh, and I have to pass my eyes over it quickly to resist it. It didn't help that I'd just finished King Lear with the homeschool kids I taught, so that the image of a wandering, blinded, old man carried all kinds of tragic, Shakespearean overtones. I couldn’t stop the brooding curiosity that flooded my mind. Was the bandage askew because he couldn’t see that it was askew? The carelessness of the bandage gave the impression of it being there as a token courtesy to others because an eye that isn’t there cannot look with disgust on it’s own absence. He had another eye though, so of course, he could have seen it. Perhaps, I thought indignantly, it was the shoddy work of some heartless nurse, who hadn't even the respect to properly bandage a man's wounds and shield him from prying eyes...like...mine. All this intrusive wondering went on in the time it took for my spine to shiver with repulsion as we passed in the frozen aisle.

I was working cheese that morning, and to be honest, I was hoping he wouldn't come near me. I was already mentally exhausted from our first split-second encounter. Nonetheless, he ambled over to the deli meat section right next to me where he stood briefly, considering the rosemary ham while I knelt before the dairy case, arranging triangular stacks of Brie and aged Parmesan. Because of the looseness of the bandage and my vantage point, to the side of him and below, I was at the perfect angle to see the space where his eye had been. I tried to resist, failed, and stole a couple quick, horrified glances. It looked like that part of his face had been taken out with an ice cream scoop. I pictured his surgeon hitching up his sleeve to the elbow the way the guy at the ice cream shop always does before plunging his hand down in.

Later, I was on register, and of course, he came through my line. He set a loaf of multigrain bread, a can of turkey chili and a box of English breakfast tea on the absurdly small ledge Trader Joe’s supplies its customers for unloading their groceries. A bachelor basket, I thought. I imagined him at home in front of the stove, stirring his pot of turkey chili, the gauze over his eye, or worse, the gauze not over his eye, taking it to the living room, sinking into his reclining chair, and eating his chili alone and eyeless, glad for his loneliness for once since it meant no one staring at him and his one eye. 

He pulled me from the downward spiral of my pitiful thoughts by cheerfully asking me how I was today. He said he loved Trader Joe’s but lived too far away to come often. He said he was coming in to the cities more often lately because he’d had his eye out at the VA hospital, and he made sure to stop by Trader Joes every time he had an appointment. He said they’d caught something just in time, and that he was really very lucky. He said that he loved this fall weather, and pointed out the windows to the trees that were burnished gold and very beautiful. He thanked me and wished me a good rest of my shift. He was one of the more grateful people I’d met in a while. I have both my eyes, but hadn’t seen much to be happy about for a while.

That man got me to thinking about something Jesus said, probably one of his better known horrifying, distasteful statements that he seemed to so enjoy tossing out. He says, if your eye causes you to sin, you should pluck it out. He said it was better to enter Heaven with one eye than to be cast into Hell with both eyes in tact. He also said, if your arm causes you to sin cut it off because it’s better to enter Heaven with one arm than to have two pretty arms in Hell. I paraphrase.

There was that hiker a while back who got his arm pinned under a boulder while he was hiking alone in the middle of nowhere, and eventually sawed his arm off with his pocketknife. They made a movie about it with James Franco, (which, coincidentally, I'd watched just weeks before meeting the man with one eye). It wasn’t until the hiker was absolutely sure he would die if he didn’t cut his arm off that he made the decision to do it. The movie was called 127 hours; that was how long it took him to decide to cut his own arm off, almost six days. It would seem that only death is worse than hacking off your own arm. I wonder how long it would take someone to decide to gouge their own eye out. My guess is more than 127 hours.

Dismemberment is pretty grotesque stuff for the Son of God to be chatting to people about, or for a priest to be sermonizing about, and I remember hearing that passage in Catholic church when I was young, and being terrified. Most older people, I think, decide Jesus must be exaggerating, or "speaking figuratively," which is another way of saying exaggerating, another way of saying It’s alright folks! He’s not really saying what it sounds like he’s saying. Don’t be scared. Come on back in. There will be no amputations this service.

That hiker and the nice man in the grocery store are the only two people I’ve ever known, or known of, who voluntarily cut off their arm or plucked out their eye. They did it to save their lives, not to save their souls. Each loved the rest of his body enough to sacrifice one part to keep it. I think most people would give up one body part to stay alive, and if they don’t have to cut it off themselves the choice is even easier. I don’t know a single person who has sacrificed a member of their body to save their soul. Maybe that’s because the things that might cause one to stumble can usually be cast off less gruesomely than an arm or an eye. Maybe arms and eyes are generally behaving themselves these days, whereas the more common offender tends to be something like, say, a computer, a relationship, a job, etc. Still, I don’t think Jesus is exaggerating. Even if it’s only hypothetically, my soul has been dogged by the question I feel Christ asking: which do you value more, your body or your soul? Which do you value more, this fleeting life or the eternal one to come?

As the man with one eye left my line and walked out of the store, I swear I saw, as though a veil had been lifted, just how seriously we humans take our lives and how casually we regard our souls, and I saw how totally, insanely backwards that is. I think Jesus is trying to get us to see that it is our souls we ought to be in a frenzy about while our bodies, he basically says, can be tossed onto the chopping block. If his statement is shocking it is because of how inverted our values are, how much we love, love, love our precious hides. Sin is a boulder pinning us down, we’re losing blood fast, death is imminent, and if we were whole and unfallen and had the vision and wisdom of God we would feel the identical urgency of that hiker to cut off the offending limb rather than perish. The math would be clear. We don't see it though. We don't recognize the boulder as a boulder. We don't see that we're pinned, and we love our mangled, gangrenous and unsalvageable arm there under the boulder too much to cut ourselves loose for a life we don't see either, and not seeing don't value. We tend, mistakenly, to believe that our passing mortal life is a thing of enduring eternal value and our eternal soul, if it gets a thought at all, is a trifle. We are like a snake who’d rather die than part with its skin. A snake prettying up and working out and dressing up to the nine's a skin that's rotting while it suffocates the real, vigorous, and potentially immortal life surging beneath it. The whole thing would be silly if it weren’t so truly tragic.