Sipped Ink vol 5 issue 4

The Goldfinch pp229-331

OK, firstly, let me apologise for the fact that last week’s newsletter was sent out on Saturday night, not Sunday. If you want my excuse: I had Sunday plans, so I wrote everything on Saturday and then hit ‘Send’ instead of ‘Save’. Mea maxima culpa — I hope it didn’t cause you any problems. (My spies on Instagram report that at least one of you is 180 pages behind, so not a problem for that person at least!)

Secondly, thank you again for all your contributions this week. Let’s run through some of those before I start waffling on.

HS had an insight on a moment in the text that I struggled with: Theo’s assumption that Welty made it out of The Met:

[D]o you not think that that might just be his naive/positive outlook on situations like that? The quite childish (or self-help/success book) ‘if I wish it enough, it will happen’ scenario. I read it and assumed that that’s how his brain works, as this is the guy who walked all across New York after being blasted in an explosion because his mum would come home to find him there - even though he had experienced the damages up close himself and probably knew deep down she wasn’t going to come back. Sometimes our minds hold on to the small glimmers of hope to save us from the soul-crushing reality?

I think there’s definitely something to that. I don’t read Theo as an unalloyed optimist, but there is some youthful naivety about him (especially pre-Met) and his wandering home after the explosion sure he’ll find his mother there is a good example. MBB had a related but slightly different take:

In terms of [Theo’s] surprise at Welty’s death. It was a little odd, and if memory serves me right, I think Theo even comments on the fact he probably should have realised. I have two main thoughts on this. The first being that to Theo it is the day his mum died, the fact that other people died that day is likely largely not on his mind as the enormity of his own loss clouds out other events. My other theory is that, as can happen when someone with a terminal illness dies, it can still be a shock. Although logically he would have known Welty likely didn’t make it it probably didn’t really sink in until he heard it.

This reads true to me also, and these two comments taken together make me think I hadn’t paid enough credence to Theo’s mental state in the period of time after the tragedy. This is always more subtly conveyed in a first-person text, as the reader has to pay more attention to what the narrator is saying and isn’t saying. Here’s a quote from Donna Tartt on precisely this aspect of literature:

That’s one of the most interesting things the novel can do, which is to portray things from the inside. In film you can’t do that. You’re looking at someone’s nervous state, looking at Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion. You don’t really know what she’s thinking. A novel is really the only way you can be someone else.

Thank you to these attentive readers for their contributions.

And finally this week, AB shared my puzzlement at the historic union of Audrey & Larry Decker, and supplied an interesting note about Theo’s similarity to his mother:

I am very intrigued as to how Theo’s mum and dad ended up together as they seem so opposite. Maybe they were just both young and, like, totally totally good looking? Also, isn’t Theo like his mum in that he withdraws when he is upset (even when maybe he really should tell someone what’s going on or what’s on his mind)?

I find this particularly interesting in the light of what has followed this week, so consider this a neat segue into discussion of Theo’s time in Vegas.

Vegas in The Goldfinch is presented as a kind of non-place, it seems to me. In contrast to Tartt’s rich portrait of New York, which is full of noted sights, sounds, smells, traffic, people, and activity, Vegas (and particularly the territory in which the preponderance of this week’s reading plays out) is strangely empty. A run of houses out in the desert, almost all of them empty. There is an odd, modern sterility that characterises this space, in stark contrast to the thoughtfully crafted furniture of which Hobie continues to write to Theo; everything is gaudy, and carelessly constructed so that it’s only borderline liveable. The image of Boris’s home, far enough out that the streets are being reclaimed by the desert sands, seems to be symbolic of Tartt’s whole impression of the place.

No one belongs in the Las Vegas of the novel - it is just a place where people have ended up. Whether it is Boris and his father, itinerant travellers with accents to match, Florida-girl Xandra (sleeping in her Miami Dolphins shirt), or the flock of tourists in the casinos - Vegas is a place to pass through if you’re lucky, or get trapped in if you’re not. Theo’s case is no different. It stings us as readers when Mrs Barbour waves him off saying “You were an awfully good guest Theo” (p.240), because we know that Theo had hoped he was more than that to the Barbours whilst at the same time fearing that that was precisely what he was: an unwanted houseguest; a burden.

And soon we find that were right to be worried. Yes, Theo is with a blood relation now, but his relationship with Larry is almost as empty as the large house in Canyon Shadows - there is little in the way of love, or even warmth. Larry Decker proves to be every bit the self-absorbed man we had been led to believe from earlier description. And the life into which he thoughtlessly ushers Theo is so different from the boy’s life in New York — and the transition so careless — that we fear for Theo in new ways. It is difficult to say which is worse for Theo: being under the ‘care’ of a guardian who clearly lacks any desire to parent, or being separated from New York, The Barbours, Hobie… all the connections Tartt had allowed him after his mother’s death. All severed by geography.

What we witness is Theo’s slide into behaviours and ways of thinking that would have seemed completely out of character for him in New York. With the shoplifting, drinking, suggestions at pickpocketing etc. are we seeing the start of a transformation that leads Theo to where we met him? Are these the behaviours of a teenager who winds up on the run from police in Amsterdam in later life?

To an extent, Boris is the Andy Barbour of Theo’s Vegas experience: a boy of similar age with whom Theo shares some things in common. But whereas Theo & Andy are alike in their intelligence, and shared an unenviable position in their school’s social hierarchy, Theo’s connection to Boris is based in pain. Both have lost their mothers; both have strained relationships with their fathers; both find themselves lost in the Nevada desert through no choice of their own. And there is no doubting that socialising with Boris leads Theo into many of the behaviours we would have found counter to his nature a few chapters previously. The unanswered question (at least at this point in the novel) is what choice Theo had. If he had not had Boris at his side, what would have become of him then?

In some of the scenes of raucous drunkenness (eg. pp.298-9), Tartt returns to the fragmented sentence structures that characterised the immediate aftermath of the explosion at The Met. Not only does this serve the purpose of effectively conveying her narrator’s disorientation in both circumstances, but it also subtly links the two - reminding the reader that Theo’s current state is the result of what he has been through.

At the very end of the week’s reading, we find Theo perhaps for the first time beginning to question some of the changes that have come upon him during his time in Vegas:

How had I gone from AP everything to being lumped in with a derelict like Kotku? (p.331)

The drinking, the fighting, the aftermath of each, all begins to pile up around Theo until he finally asks this question. Unthinkingly he has been doing whatever it has taken to survive his trauma. But now that he’s asked the question, what path will he choose going forward?

That’s it from me this time out. Next time my intention is to talk a bit more about Boris, and I’m keen to hear your thoughts. What do you think of the character as written? What do you make of the role he plays in the novel? Do you like him? That’s not a homework assignment; either way, I’ll see you back here next Sunday! We’ll be discussing up to the end of Chapter 7, section iv (on page 433). See you then; enjoy the week’s reading!