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Another way I beat the odds is to listen to author interviews on NPR (when they bother with them anymore). Those are usually enough to let me know if I'd be interested. I hate NPR reviews, though, and always snap them off before I become contaminated (and end up talking like that).
I am now on Chapter 5, where Boris is introduced.
It's wonderful so far. It's quite long, elaborated, and verbose. But that's no real problem. It harkens back beautifully to the best of Dickens's first-person narratives such as Great Expectations and David Copperfield, with their elaborate and beautiful prose styles and graceful grand narratives.
Now finished with five whole chapters
Congratulations, AJ. I found the chapters involving Boris and Theo in suburban Las Vegas to have been some of the best in the novel; by which I mean I found the central metaphor for post-Recession America, that of a mostly abandoned, barely finished, housing development, being slowly reclaimed by the desert, as alienated teenagers and dubious adults fumble through it, to have been apt and effective. Boris is a great character, too. As I mentioned above, he has a little of the Artful Dodger about him, and a lot of Rogozhin, from Dostoyevsky's The Idiot--a book The Goldfinch frequently mentions. In fact, he loves Theo, which is more than the Dodger ever did Oliver Twist (he's using Oliver the whole time and ditches him in a pinch). Boris is Theo's dark alter ego, as Rogozhin was to Myshkin. Rogozhin was darker, but Boris is dark enough. Congratulations on having come so far. There are things going on beneath the surface of the plot at this point, but I don't want to give them away. I hope you continue to enjoy it. :)
^ ah thanks Pompey. I noticed some of the roles The Idiot played in the novel.
I finally finished The Goldfinch, and I loved it. Took a month to finish all 771 pages. Yes, it's flawed. Yes, the Amsterdam section was a bit too long for its own good. And perhaps it was a bit excessive. But who cares. Such a compelling story told in such compelling, poetic, and tactile prose. I still gave it a 5/5 star rating.
It's that wonderful.
I have several thoughts that I will take a while to jot down. But THE GOLDFINCH was amazing. Theo and Boris are now quite memorable and etched in my memory as memorable literary creations.
Congratulations, AJ! Glad you enjoyed it. I'm sure you'll want to take a break from her for now, but be sure to read The Secret History at some point. If you have a taste for Tartt, you'll love it.
^ yeah, it will be a while before I go onto another Donna Tartt novel or before I reread THE GOLDFINCH.
But yeah. THE GOLDFINCH was a remarkably rewarding experience.
Extended thoughts:
One of the main reasons we tend to revisit the works of Charles Dickens and the great 19th-century masters such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville is that, apart from the profound themes and stories in their works, there remains a certain richness in the style. Consider this passage from Dickens’s masterpiece Bleak House:
.Quote:
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds
This passage, full of elaborated description of fog, is very unlikely to make it into modern fiction, largely due to its baroque construction, which could cause it to fly beyond the heads of many a reader today. In our quest for minimalism and a “less is more” sentiment, we have run away from proper indulgence that was possessed by many of our 19th-century forebears and, in the last century, authors such as Vladimir Nabokov, William Faulkner, and Cormac McCarthy.
Which is why The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt’s acclaimed, award-winning, and polarizing long novel, reads so wonderfully today. Its 771 pages carry the beauty that marked the best of Charles Dickens — the Dickens of Great Expectations, David Copperfield, and Bleak House, the Dickens of long, serialized, incident-based stories such as these. Its prose carries a tactile weight and poetic beauty to it, a weight and beauty so often shied away from on the part of many a writer. Its story and characterization is one for the ages, so beautifully constructed and almost richly chaotic and rambling, its characters so memorable and colorful that they remain etched on the mind for almost forever (Theo and Boris come to mind, as do other “smaller” characters such as Andy Barbour, Pippa, and Hobie).
Consider one of the opening passages:
Right in the beginning of the story, Donna Tartt catches and awes the reader with her wonderful sense of imagery, her willingness to focus on the small and large details that makes the novel so exhausting and yet so wonderful at the same time.Quote:
“Chaotic room service trays; too many cigarettes; lukewarm vodka from duty-free. During those restless, shut-up days, I got to know every inch of the room as a prisoner comes to know his cell. It was my first time in Amsterdam; I’d seen almost nothing of the city and yet the room itself, in its bleak, drafty, sunscrubbed beauty, gave a keen sense of Northern Europe, a model of the Netherlands in miniature: whitewash and Protestant probity, co-mingled with deep-dyed luxury brought in merchant ships from the East. I spent an unreasonable amount of time scrutinizing a tiny pair of gilt-framed oils hanging over the bureau, one of peasants skating on an ice-pond by a church, the other a sailboat flouncing on a choppy winter sea: decorative copies, nothing special, though I studied them as if they held, encrypted, some key to the secret heart of the old Flemish masters. Outside, sleet tapped at the windowpanes and drizzled over the canal; and though the brocades were rich and the carpet was soft, still the winter light carried a chilly tone of 1943, privation and austerities, weak tea without sugar and hungry to bed.”
I am all too familiar with some of the harsh criticisms directed at Tartt’s style, that it’s overwritten fluff, that it’s too indulgent for its own good, that it belongs in a children’s book and nowhere near a Serious Modern Novel, that it needed a stern editor ready to purge the dross and bring the novel down to 300 pages (or even 200 pages, if some sterner minimalists had their way) rather than the horrible 771 pages, and that Tartt’s overindulgence is indicative of the problem of writers being too indulgent nowadays.
I would express my disagreement and argue that it is largely due to Tartt’s neo-romanticism and baroque attention to detail that allows The Goldfinch to move beyond the mere story and take on a beauty of its own. The almost-rambling indulgence may be off-putting to some (perhaps this is why many have taken an aversion to the 19th-century classics), but the rambling allows Tartt to authentically capture the voice of its first-person Dickensian narrator Theo Decker, whose mind rambles, stumbles, indulges, and elaborates. This indulgence also brings to it a richness and a beauty that marked the best of classical novels and often lacking in our novels today (though contemporary authors such as Thomas Pynchon and Anthony Doerr still specialize in rich prose that evokes beauty and audacity).
More impressive than the prose style, however, is Tartt's genius in storytelling and capturing the authentic voices of its distinctive characters. Most of the storytelling is based on an incidental first-person autobiographical account, thus arguably recalling Great Expectations and David Copperfield. Thus, there is a lack of propulsive plotting as one would see in other novels, and sometimes this structure can be exhausting, specifically with the Amsterdam section. However, the rambling narrative is full of life and awe, even amid the apparently disorderly and fatalistic tone. I cared for the characters, particularly Theo and Boris. They are some of the most authentically captured fictional characters I have ever read. Even if they aren't always "likable," Tartt so vividly draws these characters together that it's impressive to behold.
The length of the book is another positive in its favor. I am all aware that there were complaints about the book's massive length, that it was a sign of overindulgence on the part of the author, that the book needed a strong editor with a red pen to cross out all the boring parts and make it more story-focused. I would disagree with this. I would say that for an ambitious literary story like The Goldfinch, a longer length was perhaps needed in order to capture the exhausting and engrossing narrative that this story is based on. To pare it down in the name of "editing and restraint" would have taken away from the exuberant and lively richness that marked this book — a richness that sometimes exhausts and goes overboard, but a richness that always satisfies and involves.
For long stories like these, I think author Chigozie Obioma had these wise words to say, that "the novels that are remembered, that become monuments, would in fact be those which err on the part of audacious prose, which occasionally allow excess rather than those which package a story -- no matter how affecting -- in inadequate prose."
That is why I believe that The Goldfinch will live on to become a literary masterpiece and a classic of the 21st century, much like Charles Dickens's novels remain as classics today. It does err in its excess at times, but that doesn't take away from the greatness and the mastery of the overall novel, which remains one of the most satisfying literary experiences ever in my mind.
Great essay, AJ. I've given my (high) opinion of Tartt already, so I would just repeat quickly that some of the static she gets from time has little to do with her prose and much to do with her hesitation to play the celebrity game, and especially her refusal to write many books in the short term, to be can securely flogged by her publishers while she is still a hot property. Don't look for another book from her for another decade or so.