Unlike some of my friends who write comments in books (and underline words new to them, to look up later, to valiantly add to their vocabulary), I think of books as sacred and would never scribble in them. But I couldn't help marking this passage in my copy of Donna Tartt's new novel, THE GOLDFINCH. She's describing the human condition in very pessimistic terms. "Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged moms. Oh, isn't he cute? Awww. Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells await them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and traveled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were."
Whew! Not a very happy point of view. But certainly descriptive, like all of her new book.
I've just finished THE GOLDFINCH and it's certainly a tour de force through Ms. Tartt's extensive capacity to spin a yarn, woven with such dense thread that it requires careful and very slow reading to appreciate the colors of the language. I've read her previous two books, THE SECRET HISTORY and THE LITTLE FRIEND, each of which, like THE GOLDFINCH, took ten years to write. I'm not surprised. She can't seem to let anything go unnoticed; every situation, every conversation, every character is so elaborately described that, like a good movie, you feel as though you're there. This is very nearly exhausting, like a marathon, or to mix my metaphors, rich like chocolate mousse, and I had to put the book down from time to time - it's also a heavy book at almost 800 pages - to catch my breath and cleanse my palate.
As everyone who's read a review of this new book now knows, her protagonist is Theo Decker who loses his mother in a terrorist explosion at the Met. He pulls himself out of the wreckage around him and with the urging of a dying man, takes the painting of The Goldfinch with him as he escapes from the museum. He becomes obsessed with the painting, which seems to be a stand-in for his lost mother, about whom he feels a certain guilt for not having saved her life, and for whom he mourns throughout the book. His adventures take him to the stilted, emotionally icy home of a friend on Park Avenue and then to Las Vegas for a reunion with his long-lost and formerly alcoholic father, where he meets Boris, a character straight out of Holden Caufield or John Le Carre.
The twists and turns of the plot come close to being contrived,. Skirting along the edge of believable but never falling off, Ms. Tartt makes them all work, in a 800 pages that are part Dickens, part Saroyan, and even part Tom Wolfe, which makes for quite an unusual combination. In the end, she waxes philosophic and tries to tell us that sometimes good can rise spontaneously out of bad - she doesn't call it evil - but even though I'd like to believe her truth, it lies just beyond my grasp, somewhere in the fog, just beyond my headlights. Still, in my view, like the painting of its title, the book's a masterpiece. Read it.
Whew! Not a very happy point of view. But certainly descriptive, like all of her new book.
I've just finished THE GOLDFINCH and it's certainly a tour de force through Ms. Tartt's extensive capacity to spin a yarn, woven with such dense thread that it requires careful and very slow reading to appreciate the colors of the language. I've read her previous two books, THE SECRET HISTORY and THE LITTLE FRIEND, each of which, like THE GOLDFINCH, took ten years to write. I'm not surprised. She can't seem to let anything go unnoticed; every situation, every conversation, every character is so elaborately described that, like a good movie, you feel as though you're there. This is very nearly exhausting, like a marathon, or to mix my metaphors, rich like chocolate mousse, and I had to put the book down from time to time - it's also a heavy book at almost 800 pages - to catch my breath and cleanse my palate.
As everyone who's read a review of this new book now knows, her protagonist is Theo Decker who loses his mother in a terrorist explosion at the Met. He pulls himself out of the wreckage around him and with the urging of a dying man, takes the painting of The Goldfinch with him as he escapes from the museum. He becomes obsessed with the painting, which seems to be a stand-in for his lost mother, about whom he feels a certain guilt for not having saved her life, and for whom he mourns throughout the book. His adventures take him to the stilted, emotionally icy home of a friend on Park Avenue and then to Las Vegas for a reunion with his long-lost and formerly alcoholic father, where he meets Boris, a character straight out of Holden Caufield or John Le Carre.
The twists and turns of the plot come close to being contrived,. Skirting along the edge of believable but never falling off, Ms. Tartt makes them all work, in a 800 pages that are part Dickens, part Saroyan, and even part Tom Wolfe, which makes for quite an unusual combination. In the end, she waxes philosophic and tries to tell us that sometimes good can rise spontaneously out of bad - she doesn't call it evil - but even though I'd like to believe her truth, it lies just beyond my grasp, somewhere in the fog, just beyond my headlights. Still, in my view, like the painting of its title, the book's a masterpiece. Read it.
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