A Little Bird Told Me

I didn't hate The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and Amazon's 2013 Best Book of the Year, but I also didn't love it. I'd seen it on the best-seller lists. For a couple of years I would walk by it, in bookstores and at Costco, admiring the cover (a partial image of the Carel Fabritius painting after which the book is named, revealed by a tear in the paper that hides the rest), but I never even picked it up to look at the jacket copy. I honestly don't know why not. I sort of knew the premise: a young boy (Theo) loses his mother in an explosion in an art museum and in the ensuing smoke and chaos snatches a priceless small painting from the wall which in the years to come serves as a precious talisman and connection to his mother as well as a millstone of guilt that he can neither live with nor do without. Sounds interesting, and I had heard nothing negative about it to put me off.

When it was chosen as the April selection for my book group, I found a copy at Bookman's, Tucson's wonderful used book store chain, and settled in for a long (nearly 800 pages in hardcover, more in paperback) read.

In a blog post entitled "Talking about Books I Don't Like,"  (http://modernmrsdarcy.com/books-i-dont-like/), Anne (sorry, I don't know her last name) cites art critic Peter Schjeldahl's approach to reviewing works he doesn't like, or as he puts it, "work that isn't immediately congenial." He asks himself:

     What would I like about this if I liked it? That is, I sort of project myself into the mind of somebody who thinks, "Wow, this is great, this is what I like." And sometimes that idea in my head persuades me, and I come around. I come around a little bit . . . . If that fails, I say, what would somebody who likes this be like?"

As I learned last week at book group, some of my friends like The Goldfinch very much (though no one seemed to think it was perfect or life-changing). Those who like it have good reasons for doing so, while others have equally good reasons for disliking at least parts of it. So let me be clear, I do like, even admire parts of it very much. For example:

• Some of the writing is very, very good. Tartt can describe a scene fairly economically and at the same time put you right in it, and she's equally good at sketching out the large number of characters in this novel. That's undoubtedly why, in addition to the sheer size of the book, some critics and readers have called it Dickensian.
• The reader will learn things, all sorts of things. For example, The Goldfinch of the title is a real painting, with a real story behind it, though the narrative in the novel is entirely invented. (Actually, I learned that not from the novel but by googling it.)
• Donna Tartt is impressively well informed in a number of areas, from the arts and antiques trade to Russian organized crime. You have to respect a writer who does her homework, and there must have been a great deal of homework involved here; either that or she's led a remarkably interesting and possibly dangerous life.
• The book contains intriguing and in some cases very appealing characters, notably Hobie, the kindly antiques dealer who takes Theo, the protagonist, under his wing, and Boris, a modern-day, adolescent Russian immigrant equivalent to Dickens' Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist. (As in Oliver Twist, motherless children and/or orphans abound in this story.)
• While Theo is not a particularly sympathetic narrator - at the beginning the reader feels sorry for him, of course, but as he develops more unpleasant habits it becomes clear that he feels enough self-pity for a whole boatload of tragic orphans - he is well and convincingly drawn. A member of our group who has reason to know of such things also says that Tartt's portrayal of junkie culture and the way junkies think is spot on.

However, none of those things are enough to make me recommend the book, and here's why:

• It's at least half again as long as it needs to be. That's true of the novel overall and even some of the paragraphs. 
• Tartt sometimes seems to be unsure of or lose sight of what kind of book she's writing (the reader may share that feeling). Is it a heart-warming coming of age story in which the protagonist finally rises above tragedy, fear, and guilt? Is it a Quentin Tarantino-style action thriller? Is it Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer making mischief in the lunar landscape of an unfinished and nearly unpopulated Las Vegas suburb? Is it a touching tale of unrequited love? It tries, in fact, to be all those things, which I suppose is why it's so long and perhaps why it fails to be a satisfactory example of any of them.
• Taken separately, various elements work well or at least come close to working, such as the explosion that begins the story; the weird period Theo spends in Las Vegas with his ne'er-do-well father and his father's girlfriend, where he meets Boris, who is arguably the most interesting and appealing character in the story; the scenes revolving around art and antiques and other elements of backstory. But I think it's a problem when the backstory is more interesting than the main story. 
• It's also a problem when you'd rather be reading a book focused on one of the supporting characters: What really happened to Pippa at her Swiss "boarding school" for traumatized girls? What was Boris doing in the years he and Theo were apart? How did Hobie become who he is, living the life he lives? But unfortunately it's a first-person narrative, so we must always return to what's going on inside Theo's head, which after a while was not a place I really wanted to be.
• The opening, with Theo holed up in a hotel room in Amsterdam, didn't pique my interest, as it seems pretty contrived from a stylistic perspective, but the final section, an epilogue of sorts which is supposed to wrap things up and, I guess, show how Theo has grown through his experiences and hold out some hope for his future, is even less satisfactory. Introductions and conclusions are hard to write, I know, and this case illustrates the principle that less is, or could have been, more.

All that brings me to Schjeldahl's second question: ". . . what would somebody who likes this be like?" That's a hard one. They might be nicer than I am, in the sense of feeling enough compassion for Theo to excuse his self-absorbed whining. They might just be more patient, or they might be more able to put story above style (I can't put in the time to read certain very popular thriller authors, but I often enjoy the movies based on their books). 

Other people have similar mixed feelings about The Goldfinch, such as those reported on in Evgenia Peretz's 2014 Vanity Fair article which raises the question of why critics and others have their panties in such a wad about it (http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2014/07/goldfinch-donna-tartt-literary-criticism.  Critic James Wood wrote in The New Yorker that "Its tone, language, and story belong in children's literature" (not so sure I'd agree with that, given the recurrent drug use and other elements). He also told Vanity Fair, "I think that the rapture with which this novel has been received is further proof of the infantilization of our literary culture: a world in which adults go around reading Harry Potter." Now just a minute there, James. There's a lot to be said for Harry Potter (more, in my opinion, than for The Goldfinch, though you have likely figured that out), but this post is over-long already.

Perhaps my reservations about the novel are borne out by the fact that the screen rights have been purchased by Warner Brothers and that it will be produced by the folks behind Rush Hour and The Hunger Games movies, which is not necessarily good news for those who would like to see it treated as serious literature. However, Peter Straughan, who wrote the screenplay for Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, based on the John LeCarré novel, will adapt it for the screen, so there's some hope. And it will no doubt be shortened significantly, though whether or not that's a good thing will depend on what gets cut and what gets left in. No doubt the Tarantino-esque sequence near the end will get full and loving treatment. 

Two things I'm sure of: 1) devoted fans of the book will be unhappy with some of the cuts and compromises inherent in translating literature into film, and 2) sitting through the movie will be a whole lot quicker than reading 800 or so pages. The hours I spent doing that are hours I'll never get back. Whether or not you agree with me, I'd love to hear your comments.