*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.
