Sipped Ink vol 5 issue 5

The Goldfinch pp331-433

Hi, how are you? How did you get on this week? We’re out of the desert and back in the city; we lost another Decker; we went our separate way from Boris; Fabritius’s masterpiece remains tightly wrapped in a pillowcase.

I’ll be honest with you: I’m writing all of this on Sunday, having also done all of the week’s reading this afternoon. I started a new job last week, and then managed to get sick, all of which has thrown my organisation for this newsletter for a bit of a loop. So please accept my apologies that what follows is less thought-out than usual, and more in pure note form.

Fortunately for all of us, therefore, another of our number stepped up to do some heavy lifting this week. I’d like to start by including sections from an email I received from IM, with some of their thoughts.

I like the contrast you pointed to between a richly textured New York and a dystopian Las Vegas (the constant references to the sand blowing and wind ruffling the pool and the sun canopy). There are also the more emotional contrasts between the ‘safe and comfortable’ surroundings of Hobie and his workshop (p314) and the almost complete abandonment of Theo in LV. The gross neglect by his Dad - no food, no routine, little distinction between day and night.

It seems to me Tartt works quite hard to make the Vegas chapter quite distinct in tone, and these are certainly some of the ways in which she accomplishes it. On a personal note, when I first read the novel in 2013 I actively disliked the whole Vegas episode and was desperate to get back to New York. Re-reading the novel, knowing that that was to happen, I actually got a lot more out of the Vegas stuff this time.

also shocking is the devastating insensitivity and solipsism of Larry and Xandra when they arrive in NY to whisk Theo away (Xandra poking around the bedroom, champagne with the meal, Larry blaming Theo’s mum for the marriage breaking down ‘… though God knows she didn’t deserve this’ (p191)). The depth of Theo’s hatred is distilled on p217 where he thinks ‘no power on earth could have convinced me they [Larry and Xandra] hadn’t murdered her’.

Larry & Xandra are almost cartoonish at points; their neglectful self-absorption is enough to make the reader revile them. However, Tartt does allow them their human moments. Through Theo - who remains a good-hearted person - we can see glimpses of Sandra, the scared, desperate-for-approval girl behind Xandra. When in a quiet moment she breaks the awkward tension between herself and Theo by offering to bring him back food from work, there’s the slightest hint that she’s capable of caring. And similarly with Larry. His moods are volatile and set at the whim of sporting events, but when things are going his way and Theo finds a way to bond with him over Sunday football games, there’s the smallest spark of a parental relationship visible. In Larry’s case, Tartt seems to be playing a trick on us. It is immediately following his apology to Theo that he has been such a poor parent that Larry asks Theo for his social security number. It’s unlikely, at that juncture, that the reader doesn’t at least suspect impurity in Larry’s motives - and of course we are proven correct.

I like Tartt’s descriptions of the transcendent feelings that fill Theo whenever he looks at the painting. The description (p304 hardback) of the ‘solidity’ it gave to things ‘ … the bedrock rightness that reassured me just as it was reassuring to know that far away, whales swam untroubled in Baltic waters and monks in arcane time zones chanted ceaselessly for the salvation of the world.’ Wow! Contrast this with the apocalyptic description brought on by the setting sun in Las Vegas ‘… end-times footage of catastrophe and ruin: detonations on Pacific atolls, wildlife running before sheets of flame’ (p268). Admittedly Theo is hungover at this point!

I think in large part this is Tartt doing the work of seeing the world of the novel through her narrator. Theo remains a highly sensitive character, and his impressions of the people, places, and objects he encounters are shot through with his strong feelings about them. His feelings about the painting are as strongly rooted in its association (for him) with his mother, as with the painting itself - perhaps more so. And likewise, his feelings about Vegas are bound up with his feelings about his father, and how lost and directionless his life feels whilst he’s there.

OK, let’s talk Boris. And since they included their own thoughts in the email, I’m going to continue leaning on IM here.

Although Boris has had to be tough to survive he has his own morality. For example when it comes to stealing he is quite prepared to shoplift but dismisses Theo’s suggestion that they pick pockets in Las Vegas as this to him constitutes stealing from working people rather than rich corporations. Also his Islamic moniker Badr al-Dine (also the chapter heading) is about the warmth he feels to the Moslems who looked after him rather than any religious feelings.

Boris is certainly a complicated character from a moral standpoint. He is a liar, a thief, an abuser of any and all drugs he can acquire, and ultimately he is physically abusive to a girl with whom he is in a romantic relationship. At the same time, Tartt has imbued him with precisely the kind of charm that makes elements of him irresistible. He has a backstory full of hardship, and — like Theo — he has no parent interested in looking out for him. In this way, as mentioned last week, he’s a kind of model for one version of Theo’s life - but he also seems vital to Theo surviving his time in Vegas. Imagine the Vegas episode without Boris at Theo’s side. It’s not difficult to imagine that Larry Decker would have driven Theo entirely under his heel if Theo had not had an outlet like Boris, and had not learned from him some hard lessons about how to survive for oneself.

And, as IM says, Boris does have a moral compass. It is imprecisely calibrated, and it exerts a pull of its own that ends up altering Theo’s morality too, but it’s not possible to see Boris as out-and-out bad news.

There is a precursor - of sorts - to Theo’s relationship with Boris and that is his friend from school Tom Cable. In fact it is his friendship with Tom in New York (smoking, breaking and entering houses) that leads to Theo and his Mum being at the Met on that fateful day. Theo describes the relationship with Tom as having a ‘wild manic quality something unhinged and hectic a little perilous’ (p91) which sounds pretty close to the way he feels about Boris. Theo and Tom have also traded blows which is a feature of his relationship with Boris.

This is an excellent point that I had entirely overlooked! In my inattentive reading of Theo’s arc thus far he was a studious, bookish, thoroughly “good” boy until the explosion at The Met, and has bent sinister only thereafter. But of course this isn’t accurate; IM is quite correct that there are signs of behavioural issues for Theo very early in the novel. For me this altered something about the way I saw Boris: he does not drag Theo from saint to sinner, but allows him a (much-needed) outlet for his pain and confusion and anger. At one point Theo describes Boris thus: ‘It was Boris I missed, the whole impulsive mess of him: gloomy, reckless, hot-tempered, appallingly thoughtless’ (p.334). It made me think that, in this moment at least, Boris is operating as a kind of anthropomorphised representation of Theo’s grief.

IM — who, elsewhere in their email, makes an interesting comparison between Boris and Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty — offers a slightly different view:

[Boris] allows Theo to escape from the grief of his mother’s death but also the stultifying order of his life in NY (being subject to ‘formal inquiry’ at the Barbours p172). He also opens Theo to the notion that ‘ … life was full of ridiculous possibilities’ (p414)

This is Boris as catalyst; Boris as irresistible force, propelling Theo off in a changed direction. As Theo himself says ‘there was not exactly a word for Boris and me’ (p.333), and when they part Tartt allows the reader at least the solace of knowing it’s not forever.

the parting scene between Theo and Boris where Theo stops himself blurting out ‘something we both knew well’ - ‘I love you’! As readers - and participants in Theo’s thought processes - how could we not take Boris to our hearts!

Thanks again to IM for their contributions this week.

I’ll close out with a grab bag of impressions I took from this afternoon’s reading, and ask you again to forgive me for their nascent state.

• Whilst certainly lesser in magnitude than the Met explosion, Theo continues to find himself proximal to sudden explosions of unexpected violence: Boris on Kotku, Larry on Theo, then Larry’s death.

• At p.387 Theo glimpses his own trajectory if he pursues the path down which his time in Vegas (and friendship with Boris) has started him. This goes hand in hand with his musing last week on how he had ended up in the same category as Kotku, his brief contemplation of whether drug abuse has tainted his soul (p.427), and is also reflected in (of all people) Xandra’s warning to him at p.413. It is, however, the comparison to his father that closes the week’s reading that truly haunts Theo. As close as he was to his mother, having anything in his nature akin to the man that mistreated and betrayed her is unthinkable for Theo.

• Via Boris we get a glimpse at something that remains otherwise largely outside of Theo’s first-person narration: his feelings of rejection and shame around his fear that the Barbours didn’t want him (p.389).

• The taxi driver who takes Theo to the coach depot only has three pages or so in this novel, but I must have thought about him a dozen times since I read the book: a brilliantly constructed small character.

• Finally, there is something askew about the New York to which Theo returns. He remarks several times that it is noisier, more crowded-seeming, and dirtier than his recollection. As noted above, this is our narrator seeing a place through the lens of his current feelings and circumstances. However, on top of this, it is also a New York where an altered Mr Barbour snaps at Theo in the street, and where a series of potentially threatening men approach Theo, their intentions unknown, between Port Authority and Central Park. Not until he arrives, destitute, at the door of Hobart & Blackwell does Theo feel safe in the city. I find his return to the antique shop, and to his friends Hobie & Pippa, genuinely moving, and I’m excited to watch the next chapter of Theo’s story unfold this week.

I’ll try and be more judicious with my reading this week, and hopefully I’ll have shaken this bug - that would make things easier. I hope you’re continuing to enjoy the novel. See you here in a week’s time.

— Adam