Sipped Ink vol 5 issue 3

The Goldfinch pp134-229

Hi, how are you? This week I received some nice notes from readers sharing their own thoughts. I always appreciate these, and my thanks go out to you again for sending them. Whether it’s HS picking up on a phrase that struck them:

“He was a planet without atmosphere” (p177). Whoa that is one of the best sentences I’ve read in a while - totally going to start using that in conversation.

Or MP pleading against the threat of reprimand:

I haven’t finished it! (Half-way). Such a great book […] PLEASE don’t make me go back to Murakami, promise I won’t discuss it with anyone.

These things brighten my inbox. I did seek permission from one reader to share their contribution in full; so here are MBM’s thoughts on the first 134 pages:

My opinion of [Theo] hasn’t changed drastically since week one - although he’s hiding out in Amsterdam you don’t get the feeling that he has necessarily done something wrong, or done so willingly. I’m finding the writing style really intriguing, that he’s narrating to us events but also injecting little comments in, such as when he explains his mother’s death was his fault, that everybody kept telling him it wasn’t but that he had taken that as proof that it was. All completely relatable reactions to such a traumatic event.

His sense of displacement seems completely justified in the circumstances, and the procedures surrounding him seem cold and uncaring - only giving him five minutes to pick anything up he might have wanted from his own home, asking him questions and saying a rough guess will do but then pressing for specifics, insisting on contacting his family despite the fact they have clearly had next to nothing to do with him and are little better than strangers (worse in fact to some degree, because they have rejected him).

The Barbour’s do seem to genuinely want to help him, trying to protect him from too much unwanted attention. It seems natural that the younger siblings would be wary of him and that honestly no matter who he was with he’d probably be feeling just as alone. The fact they rely on staff to do their chores is a culture shock for him but I thought it was also notable that Theo wants to do some chores as a way of thanking them for taking him in. It’s a completely different world to the one he’s used to, and in some ways less happy than his had been. Andy’s dad clearly doesn’t care to listen to his own son when it comes to what he’s interested in or not. He wants to shape Andy to be the person he wants him to become. Theo and his mother seemed to have had a much better, more genuine relationship where she wanted to nurture him. Share her interests yes, but not force them on him.

All of this strikes me as true, and the point about Theo seeking small ways to repay the Barbours’ kindness was not something that had occurred to me.

Things have changed a lot in Chapter 4. Last week we left Theo taking his first steps to influence the direction of his own life after the loss of his mother. This week we leave him more helpless than ever, being whisked off to Nevada with his estranged father and… Xandra.

But back up a moment. Of all the settings in the novel, one of my favourites is the interior of Hobart & Blackwell. Tartt does an amazing job of rendering it - a rich jumble of objects and images and impressions. In all of its complicated mixture of finery and disrepair it reminds me of nothing more than Satis House: the crumbling mansion of Miss Haversham in Dickens’ Great Expectations (1861). As mentioned in the previous issue of this newsletter, Tartt names Dickens as her favourite novelist, and the description of the antiquities shop is only one place where his influence is apparent this week. There is — perhaps most obviously — a sly nod in Hobie’s tendency to call Pippa by the diminutive: ‘Pip’. And, more indirectly, there is the tangled web of familial ties, money, and history that Hobie begins to lay out regarding Pippa’s mother Juliet, Welty, Margaret et al. For the most part I appreciate Tartt’s touch with handling this stuff, weaving it into conversation rather than doling it out in heavy-handed exposition. The moment in which we learn about the temperament of a dog’s mother, however, is perhaps the outer edge of acceptability.

There were a couple of things this week that struck me as just a little ill-judged, and I’m wondering how others of you felt. Firstly, and perhaps most petty, I felt it entirely out of character that Andy Barbour (of whom the principle thing we know is his advanced intelligence) would use ‘your’ in place of ‘you’re’ in a text message (p.154). I know this is a small thing, but it bugged me probably for the duration of reading that entire page.

Secondly, I’m curious to know how you reacted to Theo’s surprise that Welty had died. Everything about the passage in which Theo escapes from the rubble of The Met suggests that survivors are very few, and nothing about Theo’s interaction with Welty before they part suggests to me that Theo expected the old man would make it out alive. However, when he arrives at Hobart & Blackwell and is told that Welty perished, he reacts with a level of surprise that confused me a little.

This is particularly the case since the effects of the explosion continue to impact Theo markedly. Not only has he lost the most important person in his life, and been handed a future chock full of uncertainty, but we see it ever present in his mind, reflected in the way he views the world. Little conscious things, such as noting that the champagne was ‘bottled in a happier year when my mother was still alive’ (p.221). But also unconscious things such as the way in which he is haunted by the image of the Civil War soldiers:

There had been a trapped thought about to emerge, something essential and unspeakable, released by the mention of those blank-faced soldiers. Now it was all gone but the image: dead boys with limbs akimbo, staring at the sky. (p.141)

Understandably, the event is monumental enough for Theo that he has mentally divided his life into two parts, referring in the text to a capitalised ‘Before’ (eg. p. 160). That he had not considered Welty as belonging entirely to the Before seems unusual.

Another curious result of the explosion is the way in which it brings Theo together with Pippa. Having both survived, and both lost someone close to them, they have much in common. And yet this alone doesn’t account for their immediate closeness. We know that Theo felt an attraction to Pippa even at first sight, and we know also that Pippa recalls Theo’s face even if she cannot remember how she knew him. As soon as they are reunited in the dark bedroom however, it’s clear that they share a strong bond.

Like Theo, Pippa has also been transformed by her experience at The Met. As Hobie says, her relationships to others have been made indistinct to her, and her relationship to the world likewise. She cannot presently play, or even comfortably listen to, the music that had been so central to her young life. And, of course, she is confined to a dark room by virtue of her physical condition. (There are the broadest of echoes here of Miss Haversham, of course, but it would be uncharitable toward Pippa to belabour them.)

I wanted to note some progress in Theo this week, though it is admittedly slight. Tartt hints at it, for example, in the way she has him thinking of ‘The Goldfinch’ as ‘her painting’ (meaning his mother’s) on p.71, and ‘my painting’ on p. 196. Even this small shift in his internal monologue suggest that Theo has begun to move forward slightly in what he might term the After.

The key to Theo’s progress, it seems to me, is his empathic nature - evident since the early part of the novel. His feelings towards Hobie and Pippa, and also to Andy and Mrs Barbour, are complicated for him. But the more he is around them, the closer they become, and the better it seems to be for Theo.

This empathic streak is also seen in the way he reads the furniture in Hobart & Blackwell, and the distinction he draws between it and the more sterile-seeming pieces in the Barbour household. Theo is sensitive to artifice and nuance, and just as he appreciates the warm, genuine quality of the authentic antiques he encounters, he can tell when Hobie’s moments of levity are genuine versus when they are performed.

It’s this that makes Tartt’s scattering of her characters so painful. No sooner has Theo made a connection to Pippa, and been strengthened by it, than the girl is to be taken away to Texas. And no sooner has Theo been invited to Maine with the Barbours (with adoption even being hinted at), than his father turns up to drag him to Las Vegas. It doesn’t take someone with Theo’s sensitivity to character to discern that Larry Decker is a fraud on every imaginable level: the kind of man who has been lying to everyone else so long that he’s almost convinced himself. (I don’t want to write too much about Theo’s father at this point, as it’s obvious we’ll be spending a bit more time with him in the chapters to come. However, let me just note that at present the greatest mystery of the novel is how someone like Audrey winds up married to someone like Larry.)

That she first throws Theo a rope in the form of a prospective relationship with Pippa, or life with the Barbours, and then snatches it from his hand, is cruel on the author’s part. But it’s also a natural evolution of a narrative that begins with a literal explosion. These latest occurrences are all shockwaves that continue to ripple out from that one event. It will be our pleasure to follow where they lead.

Next Sunday I’ll write to you with notes up to the end of Section II, Chapter 6, part iii; this is on page 331 in all editions of the novel I’ve come across, but it came to my attention this week that at least one of us has an edition with alternate pagination, so hopefully this will help everyone stay together. Enjoy the week’s reading, and I’ll see you then.

To close, here’s a picture of Donna Tartt with a pug simply because I found it and liked it and had no other place to include it: