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?