Sipped Ink vol 5 issue 6

The Goldfinch pp433-533

Hello, how are you? I write from a warm Oxford where carnival celebrations are reaching through my window from a couple of streets away. I am recovered from my bout of illness (thank you to those who asked) and I have some thoughts for you on The Goldfinch up to page 533, or the end of Section IV, Chapter 9, part x if that makes it easier for you.

Mainly this week I want to talk about the passage of time in the book, and how it’s experienced by Theo. During this week’s reading we’ve seen a big jump in Theo’s age, and we’ve also seen him settle back to a life in New York which is not quite the one he once had but shares more in common with his pre-Met childhood than his time in Vegas ever did.

[T]hough often walking to school I thought of my old, lost life with my mother — Canal Street Station, lighted bins of flowers at the Korean market, anything could trigger it — it was as if a black curtain had come down on my life in Vegas. (p.464)

It is as though the two cities (and his time in them) are so qualitatively different for Theo that his interlude in Nevada can be disassociated from almost wholesale. Unlike he did with New York he feels no lingering attachment to Las Vegas. With his father dead, and Boris largely incommunicado, there is no one writing him letters from the desert as Hobie and Andy Barbour did whilst he was away from New York. The fraudulent, unreal quality of the place (which we noted during Theo’s time there) seems to make it all the easier to let go.

And yet - also as noted last time - the New York to which Theo returns is altered. He experiences a series of encounters that reveal to him just how much the world has moved on whilst his attention (and his life) was elsewhere. Just as Theo has been swept on by the tide of time, and events outside of his control, so too has the world around him in unpredictable ways.

The building in which he lived with his mother as a child is being gutted and turned into unimaginably expensive condominiums. And, most prominently this week, the Barbours are almost unrecognisable from the family that took Theo in when he most needed it. The past is not immutable and unchanging in Tartt’s novel. Theo’s experience of his second stint in New York is as that of a palimpsest, with his burgeoning adulthood laid atop his own childhood in such a way that uncomfortable juxtapositions make themselves apparent in strange and sometimes painful ways. As he says of the building he once called home ‘it had all seemed so solid, so immutable’ (p.480) and yet he learns that it is not. One more vestige of his younger days, one more connection to his mother, is gone.

how strange to find that the present contained such a bright shard of the living past (pp. 527-528)

This is also true of the family he once almost had. It is, quite literally, tragic that Andy Barbour meets his end (more sudden disaster proximal to Theo) in ‘his most hated element’, bringing a dark conclusion to his father’s insistence that he sail. Does this make us look back on those dinner table conversations in a different way? Of course, thanks to Platt, we now know a good deal more about Mr Barbour’s history with mental health problems. How does this affect the way in which we read his behaviour earlier in the novel? And do we now frame his marriage differently? Perhaps because it is seen through Theo’s eyes as a child there is a monied ease pervading the Barbours’ life as he originally knows it. Mr & Mrs Barbour have different interests, and pursue them separately, but there is no sign of discord in the house save for the vague cloud that hovers around Platt. Do we look back on them differently now?

In his time with the newly subdued Platt and the bed-bound Mrs Barbour, Theo has a moment when the weight of the change touches him:

a terrible sadness came over me, and when we looked at each other it seemed that the whole past was redefined and brought into focus by this moment (p.498)

The reason I ask so many questions above about how these revelations might alter our own reading of the earlier parts of the novel, is that they reframe things for Theo as well. We sense his feelings toward Mr Barbour, and Platt, evolve as the latter tells him the story of the former.

A dreamlike mangle of past and present: a childhood world miraculously intact in some respects, grievously altered in others, as if the Ghost of Christmas Past and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come had joined to host the evening. (p.525)

This latest allusion to Dickens is not accidental. We have noted previously both that the novel is modelled on the bildungsroman, and this week’s account of Theo growing has showcased that more than ever. What’s more, we have also noticed that Tartt provides various models for Theo should he walk (by choice or not) one path or another. Andy, Boris, even Platt - shaken and changed by his own tragedy - are echoes of what Theo could (have) be(en). The novel is replete with comments on how time works strangely on things:

Anything too evenly worn was a dead giveaway; real age, as I came to see from the genuine pieces that passed through my hands, was variable, crooked, capricious, singing here and sullen there… (p.467)

There are possible outliers, such as Boris (for whom ‘the future had never appeared to enter his head’ (p.465)) and Hobie ( for whom ’time didn’t actually correspond to the standard measure’ (p.443)). But for the most part the message seems to be that nothing remains entirely itself over a long enough span of time. Rather, like Hobie’s ‘changelings’, things are altered, parts removed and replaced.

And what are we to make of the man that Theo has become; the version of himself that is emerging? He begins the week pained, not for the first time, by the similarity he sees between himself and his father, and arguably his behaviour throughout the week’s reading sees him following in the older Decker’s steps ever more. Indeed, despite plenty of time spent happily in Hobie’s company, by his own estimation Theo eventually develops talents entirely opposite to the old antiquarian’s: chief among them ‘obfuscation’ (p.513) at which Larry was a practiced hand. Much about him is fraudulent. He is selling pieces of furniture under false pretences, lying to Hobie, cheating on women (who are, themselves, cheating), and has developed a serious drug problem. His own, brief biography makes for sad reading:

[M]aybe I didn’t have a girlfriend or even any non-drug friends to speak of but I worked twelve hours a day, nothing stressed me out, I wore Thom Browne suits, socialized smilingly with people I couldn’t stand, swam twice a week and played tennis on occasion, stayed away from sugar and processed foods. I was relaxed and personable, I was as thin as a rail, I did not indulge in self pity or negative thinking of any kind, I was an excellent salesman — everyone said so — and business was so good that what I spent on drugs, I scarcely missed. (pp. 529-530)

All of this balloons as soon as Theo puts the painting in storage, almost as though - like some inversion of Poe’s ‘The Telltale Heart’ - he feels unburdened with it out of sight, and acts increasingly recklessly. In his most reasonable, lucid moments he continues to at least have an inkling of how things have begun to twist away from him.

In the first instance he admits that ‘the suddenness of the explosion had never left me’ (p. 528) and even namechecks PTSD directly. And yet there is something more chronic and pervasive that continues to affect Theo. Last week we found him suffering under a ’generalized miasma of shame and unworthiness and being-a-burden that never quite left me’(p. 408), and this week he mentions again the ‘poison of why did I and if only that had wrecked [his] life’ (p. 526). So whilst the inciting incident here is the dramatic one - the explosion at The Met that killed his mother - the corrupting force that continues to work on Theo is a more complicated cocktail of feelings of inadequacy, shame, guilt and so on.

Even the potential figure of his salvation is unreachable for Theo. His feelings for Pippa are, even he realises, complicatedly tied to those for his mother:

it was as if — sick with loneliness for my mother — I’d imprinted on her (p. 521)

And yet this knowledge does nothing to quell the potency of his longing for her. At some level Theo acknowledges that in a world that has changed around him, Pippa is the closest thing to a home to which he can hope to return.

For in the deepest, most unshakable part of myself reason was useless. She was the missing kingdom, the unbruised part of myself I’d lost with my mother. (p. 519)

Tellingly, he also refigures this same sentiment explicitly in terms of longing for a stable, unifying element that his life has been missing ever since his mother’s death:

She was the golden thread running through everything, a lens that magnified beauty so that the whole world stood transfigured in relation to her, and her alone. (p.520)

Will Theo find some peace, or will his various reckless and illegal actions catch up with him? Or both? I hope you’re still enjoying the novel, and that you’re excited to find out. I leave you this week with a photo sent in by HS, who took themselves to the beach in an effort to brighten up some of the novel’s bleaker moments. See you next weekend to discuss everything up to p. 634 / the end of Chapter 10 section xii.