Honesty is the Best Policy
Jul. 9th, 2015 11:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvesselSep 2014
The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt - Little, Brown, 2013 (Kindle edition)
* * * *
Donna Tartt really needs to publish more often. Each of her books has been good but each has had flaws that stop them being classics. This one is no exception. The writing is mostly brilliant; there are some lovely and original turns of phrase and the characterisation is as strong as in her previous works. But there are problems with the book's structure and a few inconsistencies in the telling that grate.
It follows an adolescent boy called Theo whose life is changed by a major event at an art gallery, during which he acquires a valuable painting, Fabritius' Goldfinch. Unfortunately Theo is not particularly honest and doesn't return it when he could have done, instead hiding it away. There are good emotional reasons for this - the event has traumatised him and upended his life so he is understandably not thinking straight - but it is also clear that lying is something that comes to him naturally.
Unfortunately Theo is not surrounded by people who could put him back on the straight and narrow. His father is a wastrel with a white-trash girlfriend called Xandra, the social workers who get involved are well-meaning but utterly unempathic, his school chum Andy Barbour is a social recluse with a snooty upper west Manhattan family, and his best friend Boris, a mongrel Slav with an abusive father, is amoral and dangerously adventurous. Only his friendship with Hobie, a small-time antiques dealer, and Pippa, a red haired girl with whom he falls in love when he first sees her in the art gallery, offer anything like a positive role model, and he sees little of them. As a result, as he gets older and the results of his lies and deceit come back to haunt him, Theo's life spirals out of control.
Tartt has always specialised in vivid and mostly unlikeable characters, but this can cause problems with reader sympathy. In this case, the first two thirds of the book is fine - Theo is a teenager who has suffered a huge emotional trauma, and the reader both sympathises with his situation and forgives his experimentation and selfishness. But then the story then jumps forward ten years and Theo, unfortunately, does not. He is outwardly respectable but is still lying to the people he cares about and is engaging heavily in recreational drug use. And now he no longer has the excuse of teenage inexperience or post-traumatic stress, which means that the reader rapidly loses sympathy and makes the last third of this very long novel something of a drag. It is not helped by a complicated situation involving a large number of rapidly introduced bit part characters which Theo - and therefore the reader - does not understand.
There is also a problem with style. The story is told in a confessional first person mode which makes the frequent literary purple patches incongruous. Fun though they are, Theo simply would not write in that way. Tartt would have been better off telling the story in third person.
And yet there are so many good things. Boris is a genius character who is one of the most vivid and memorable that I have come across for a very long time. As a rumbustious moral tale about the importance of honesty, it works, despite an overly theological ending. And I loved some of the turns of phrase:
My feeling is that Tartt has in her a literary masterpiece in which experience with long form writing will have ironed out the kinks and flaws that mar this and her previous books. But sadly, at her current rate of working, we will never get it.
The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt - Little, Brown, 2013 (Kindle edition)
* * * *
Donna Tartt really needs to publish more often. Each of her books has been good but each has had flaws that stop them being classics. This one is no exception. The writing is mostly brilliant; there are some lovely and original turns of phrase and the characterisation is as strong as in her previous works. But there are problems with the book's structure and a few inconsistencies in the telling that grate.
It follows an adolescent boy called Theo whose life is changed by a major event at an art gallery, during which he acquires a valuable painting, Fabritius' Goldfinch. Unfortunately Theo is not particularly honest and doesn't return it when he could have done, instead hiding it away. There are good emotional reasons for this - the event has traumatised him and upended his life so he is understandably not thinking straight - but it is also clear that lying is something that comes to him naturally.
Unfortunately Theo is not surrounded by people who could put him back on the straight and narrow. His father is a wastrel with a white-trash girlfriend called Xandra, the social workers who get involved are well-meaning but utterly unempathic, his school chum Andy Barbour is a social recluse with a snooty upper west Manhattan family, and his best friend Boris, a mongrel Slav with an abusive father, is amoral and dangerously adventurous. Only his friendship with Hobie, a small-time antiques dealer, and Pippa, a red haired girl with whom he falls in love when he first sees her in the art gallery, offer anything like a positive role model, and he sees little of them. As a result, as he gets older and the results of his lies and deceit come back to haunt him, Theo's life spirals out of control.
Tartt has always specialised in vivid and mostly unlikeable characters, but this can cause problems with reader sympathy. In this case, the first two thirds of the book is fine - Theo is a teenager who has suffered a huge emotional trauma, and the reader both sympathises with his situation and forgives his experimentation and selfishness. But then the story then jumps forward ten years and Theo, unfortunately, does not. He is outwardly respectable but is still lying to the people he cares about and is engaging heavily in recreational drug use. And now he no longer has the excuse of teenage inexperience or post-traumatic stress, which means that the reader rapidly loses sympathy and makes the last third of this very long novel something of a drag. It is not helped by a complicated situation involving a large number of rapidly introduced bit part characters which Theo - and therefore the reader - does not understand.
There is also a problem with style. The story is told in a confessional first person mode which makes the frequent literary purple patches incongruous. Fun though they are, Theo simply would not write in that way. Tartt would have been better off telling the story in third person.
And yet there are so many good things. Boris is a genius character who is one of the most vivid and memorable that I have come across for a very long time. As a rumbustious moral tale about the importance of honesty, it works, despite an overly theological ending. And I loved some of the turns of phrase:
Gloomily, I watched the crowd of workers streaming off the crosstown bus, as joyless as a swarm of hornets.
The walls glowed with a warm, dull haze of opulence, a generic mellowness of antiquity; but then it all broke apart into clarity and color and pure Northern light, portraits, interiors, still lifes, some tiny, others majestic; ladies with husbands, ladies with lapdogs, lonely beauties in embroidered gowns and spendid, solitary merchants in jewels and furs. Ruined banquet tables littered with peeled applies and walnut shells; draped tapestries and silver; trompe l'oeils with crawling insects and striped flowers.
Mrs. Barbour was from a society family with an old Dutch name, so cool and blonde and monotone that sometimes she seemed partially drained of blood... her ears were small, high-set, and very close to her head, and her body was long-waisted and thin, like an elegant weasel's.
Even as a six year old - dreamy, stumbling, asthmatic, hopeless - the slur of misfortune and early demise had been perfectly visible about his rickety little person, marking him off like a cosmic kick me sign pinned to his back.
My feeling is that Tartt has in her a literary masterpiece in which experience with long form writing will have ironed out the kinks and flaws that mar this and her previous books. But sadly, at her current rate of working, we will never get it.