Sipped Ink vol 5 issue 2

The Goldfinch pp30-130

Hello, and thank you once again both for inviting me into your inbox and for giving me an excuse to re-read this incredible novel. I hope you’re enjoying it even half as much as I am.

My sources tell me that at least two of us were 45 pages behind at the start of the week, but have now caught up — congratulations. And also that one reader got so into the novel that she has now finished it! (MP, I would never do anything to dissuade someone from reading, but if you so much as try and discuss the end of this novel with other participants I will have you re-read the flaying scene from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle as punishment.)

Right, onward to actual discussion of the text.

Our week’s reading began with the bravura depiction of the explosion at The Met. Tartt places her unusually perceptive narrator at the centre of a catastrophe, and uses the fragmentation of his experience as a means of conveying the panic and disarray of the event. The whole stretch of the novel immediately following the explosion is characterised by shifts in Theo’s narration: lucidity, discombobulation, panic, fear. At times the text fractures into a mere series of impressions. Of these passages, Tartt has revealed:

I wrote that first and then cut it up, and fragmented it. Literally, like a [William] Burroughs cut-up. Mix things around, out of order. That was very hard to write.

What are we to make of the old man with whom Theo has a traumatic, confused encounter? His speech and mental state seem as fragmented as the novel at this point, and we might infer — from his age and the fact that he slips into French — that the explosion surfaces memories of the second world war for him. It is clear that he has lived through some trauma in the past, and Tartt subtly draws the parallel with Fabritius’s painting, itself now a survivor of two explosions. Because it is mentioned, and because I have it to hand, here’s an image of the rear of the canvas:

Unlike the painting and his elderly companion in that moment, Theo has not known trauma up to that point. It is clear that his relationship with his father is not good, but his relationship with his mother is so good that their life seems only minimally disturbed by the man’s leaving. It is perhaps clear by this point that Tartt is writing a bildungsroman, which will come as no surprise to those of you who watched the interview linked last week and heard her effuse on her love for Dickens. Consequential in any such novel is a dramatic moment of inflection where the narrator’s life takes a previously unimaginable turn. The explosion at The Met is obviously Theo’s, and we will be able to trace the marks it leaves on the rest of his life.

It’s not peculiar to the gallery explosion section of the novel that Tartt is excellent with sense impressions. Throughout the text she offers the reader bright moments of sensation that stand out on the page and help create the world of the novel. Images, such as the green lizard and the striped umbrella; sounds, such as fragments of glass that ‘tinkled’ and the ‘whap’ of helicopters; and even smells: citrus floor cleaner on Theo’s return to school, and the pile of scrambled eggs that turn his stomach.

The New York of the novel is so expertly drawn, and its small observations and moments like these that give it such clarity. Tartt doesn’t waste a single chance to give the world around her narrator texture and life. Consider this passage in which Theo thrice asks for directions:

The Village, with its erratic layout (triangular blocks, dead-end streets angling this way and that) was an easy place to get lost, and I had to stop and ask directions three times: in a news shop full of bongs and gay porn magazines, in a crowded bakery blasting opera, and of a girl in white undershirt and overalls who was outside washing the windows of a bookstore with a squeegee and bucket. (p.131)

Even this incidental little sentence is so full of life and observation that the reader feels pulled along with Theo, ever deeper into his world.

Do you feel differently about Theo this week? The choice to introduce him as a man hiding out in an Amsterdam hotel room seems increasingly curious now that we’ve spent more than 100 pages with him as a young teenager. Tartt is building a fascinating picture of a young man, however. His interests, his observations, the way in which he places himself in relation to the world is such that we can see Theo is at once exceptional and yet relatable.

Are our feelings about Theo altered by the juxtaposition of him to his former best friend Andy Barbour? And what do we make of the rest of the Barbour clan? Theo and his mother are obviously people of culture and, particularly in his mother’s case, a person of people. But what more than their shared intelligence links Theo and Andy’s lives? The Barbours are socialites with a house staff. They seem at a remove from the world in a way that the Deckers are / were not. Though they are kind and caring enough to take Theo in when he needs it most, Tartt suggests the extent to which Theo doesn’t quite fit in with their lives by having him sat awkwardly at the corner of a table in an unmatched chair. Jibes from Kitsey, the looming sense of mild dread around the appearance of Platt, getting accidentally bashed in the nose by a gesticulating Mr Barbour… nothing about Theo’s time in the Barbours’ home seems comfortable.

Even his relationship with Andy is more a thing of the past for Theo. Their sudden forced proximity rekindles it out of necessity, but it doesn’t have the natural ease it once had. In this way and a dozen others we find that one result of the explosion at The Met is to leave Theo a child displaced.

Everything was lost, I had fallen off the map: the disorientation of being in the wrong apartment, with the wrong family, was wearing me down (p.98)

In the immediate aftermath of the explosion this disconnection is at its most extreme. It is as though the very bounds of reality have been fractured. The old man holds part of a conversation with someone not present, and then seems able to read Theo’s mind: intuiting that he is thinking of his mother. Theo too briefly considers that he might be psychically communing with his mother, hearing (or rather feeling) her insistence that he leave the museum and go home immediately. Even once clear of the ruined building, amid the crowds in the street, Theo attempts to send a psychic message his mother’s way telling her to meet him at home.

But the sense of placelessness lingers for Theo. Piece by piece he comes to a series of realisations regarding his new circumstances, and about the extent to which his life has been changed. He is ferried out of his apartment and to the Barbours’, he is told to return to school, the threat of being shipped off to live with his estranged grandparents is held over him. Everything seems out of Theo’s control in this period, and we feel his helplessness. Only when (at Andy’s suggestion) he takes the positive action of going to Hobart and Blackwell with the ring do we have the sense that Theo has begun to actively seek a path forward for himself rather than have one dictated to him. At this stage he has no idea where it will lead him, and it will be our pleasure to find out.

I’ll see you next Sunday to talk about the rest of the novel’s first section, up to the end of Chapter 4.

— Adam