Sipped Ink vol 5 issue 8

The Goldfinch pp634-734

So, rather neatly, we leave off this week - at least geographically - almost exactly where we began seven weeks ago? Eight? I lose track. The novel begins with Theo in Amsterdam, hiding out in his room, wary of the police. Tartt spends her entire book showing us how he got to this point. Tantalisingly, we’re not quite there. But with Theo in Amsterdam, in the company of Boris, there’s only… a few hundred things that could go wrong.

Let’s back up for a moment, because this week also developed the relationship between Theo & Kitsey, and helped us answer the question that IM posed last week.

At first, Theo kind of marvels at Kitsey: her icy calm, her unflappable nature, how together she is, when he himself is a virtual wreck of neuroses, held together by a volatile drug problem. He sees her as a kind of safety net, or a firm foundation into which he can anchor his life to stop it entirely falling away. It’s not exactly romantic, or passionate - all the powerful feelings of romantic love that Theo has are reserved exclusively for Pippa - but it’s a partnership; it’s something steady at the centre of his complicated life.

But events reveal that not to be the case at all. Quickly Tartt introduces a little suspicious behaviour on Kitsey’s part, and just when the reader may be developing suspicions more advanced than Theo’s own, the curtain is pulled back. Kitsey’s initial betrayal of Theo hurts because it undermines the security he’s seeking, and also the love from her that he thought he had found. The most painful aspect for Theo, at first, seems to be that he only glimpses his fiancé’s true nature when she’s in another’s company. He is not even engaged to a real woman, simply a projection of a society lady that Kitsey Barbour has composed (likely based on her mother as she saw her in youth) and performs perfectly.

Yet, actually, Tartt has something far crueler in mind even than this. The - brilliantly written - scene in which Theo finally confronts Kitsey about her infidelity twists the knife agonisingly for the reader. At first we are perhaps proud of Theo for confronting her, but the manner in which Kitsey twists the argument back against Theo is powerful. The lie that Theo thought he had uncovered, actually reveals a different, larger lie, into which he is inveigled to cooperate. Kitsey makes him feel so small, revealing her knowledge of his previous affairs and his drug habit, and cooly sets the stakes of their whole relationship as though she feels Theo is being unreasonable to disagree. Their pairing is, and always was, for Mrs Barbour’s benefit, and so Kitsey looked to be marrying someone at least a little more reputable than Tom Cable. It is a literal marriage of convenience, and Kitsey makes Theo feel the fool for wanting it to be anything more.

Most heart-wrenching of all, Theo caves and goes along with it because he is convinced he deserves nothing more, nothing genuine. Of his bride to be he thinks:

Not only had she arranged for the marriage that would most please her mother; she was sleeping with the person she really loved. (p.704)

By contrast, of Platt’s suggestion that ‘girls always love assholes’, Theo thinks only:

untrue. Else why didn’t Pippa love me? (ibid.)

Theo’s readiness to accept that his entire relationship with Kitsey, marriage and all, is based on a gigantic falsehood, speaks to the great reservoir of self-loathing that we have noted in him previously. With my armchair psychiatrist’s hat on last week I diagnosed Theo with a latent desire to bring about his own destruction. This self-defeating belief that he deserves nothing good or genuine in his life feels related to me.

Let’s talk Pippa for a moment. Much as I love the passage of the novel in which she and Theo are reunited, the experience of reading it is shot through with a strong desire for Theo to find courage enough to tell her how he truly feels. But it is the same drive as noted above that paralyses him. Just as Theo considers himself worth so little that he will acquiesce to a relationship built around a lie, so too he will not pursue that which his heart truly desires. To do so would be to believe on some level that he deserved to be happy - and that is beyond him.

And yet their date is sweet, and awkward, and perfect despite being imperfect. Hinted at in each their discomfort in crowds, their shared trauma has an energy to it that binds them. The same powerful force that has toppled so many dominoes in Theo’s life - all that pain traceable back to the Met explosion - also has the power to bring people together. It is how Theo found Hobie, for one. But it is also what fuses Theo & Pippa together at some level they are not being truthful to.

Tartt gives us just enough about Pippa’s journey that we can glimpse the manner in which it mirrors Theo’s own. Mont-Haefeli - the place at which she recuperated from her injuries - sounds deeply odd and beholden to its own rules: we can perhaps assume it was Pippa’s Vegas. And her life since has been one in which, despite its relative comforts, she also feels disconnected from things that she values deeply at heart: music, Hobie, New York. The voice of his ‘former junkie pal’ haunts Theo when he’s around rich clientele and the socialites of his own engagement party, insisting that he ‘never forget you’re not one of them’ (p.711). I would wager that Pippa has her own version of this voice that follows her around the streets of London, loudest when she’s most homesick.

I don’t wish to end on such a down note, so here’s a glint of hope. Even if he lacks the courage to stand up for himself or to value what he wants in his life, I find hope in the fact that Theo is not numb yet.

I wasn’t so sure I loved Kitsey either (at least not the way I’d once wished I loved her) but still it was surprising just how bad I felt, considering I’d been through the routine before. (p.674)

Theo is all too aware of his damage, but he is at least still able to feel bad for himself. In unguarded moments like this he allows himself to wish at some level for something better, even if most of the time he doesn’t believe he deserves it.

I haven’t talked about the painting at all, and that’s semi-deliberate. We’ll talk about it next week. We’ll talk about it all next week! Do enjoy the end of the novel, which — without exaggeration — is one of my favourite endings to any novel I have read. When I first read the book I made this note in my journal:

I have just put down Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch having read the final 50 pages in one sitting of constant wrestling between competing desires: to speed through to its conclusion, and to savour its every last word. The final chapters have left me a little stunned, entirely in awe of how sublimely they are written, and—not to put too fine a point on it—elated; glad simply to have been so touched by a work of art.

So that’s it for now. I’ll leave you with a passage from this week’s reading which I thought was particularly masterful, and which I think captures something about the novel as a whole:

To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole; but ever since the painting had vanished from under me I’d felt drowned and extinguished by vastness — not just the predictable vastness of time, and space, but the impassable distances between people even when they were within arm’s reach of each other, and with a swell of vertigo I thought of all the places I’d been and all the places I hadn’t, a world lost and vast and unknowable, dingy maze of cities and alleyways, far-drifting ash and hostile immensities, connections missed, things lost and never found, and my painting swept away on that powerful current and drifting out there somewhere: a tiny fragment of spirit, faint spark bobbing on a dark sea. (pp. 676-677)