Sipped Ink vol 5 issue 9

The Goldfinch pp734-864

So, here we are. I wonder whether any of you, like me, read the last 130 pages of the novel in one day. So strong was my recollection of how moved I was by the closing chapter that I retreated to the quietest room in the house just to commune with it. And it is brilliant, and utterly beautiful; I stand by these sentiments from my journal when I first read the novel five or so years ago:

At the end of her 850 page novel [Donna Tartt]’s bold enough to have her narrator elucidate the emotional truth of the narrative, and somehow it not only works but is thrilling in a way it has no right to be. It’s a trick only a writer of Tartt’s talent could even consider attempting, the poor execution of which would undermine all that had come before. The effect of its resounding success is to leave the reader feeling as though they have been struck like a bell - something of the work itself vibrating out and through them.

But let’s back up a little; we have some business to attend to before we can bask in the glow of the novel as a whole.

Within this final section of the novel we see Theo at (arguably) his worst, and his best. As seemed likely at the close of last week’s reading the association with Boris in Amsterdam quickly went off the rails - a likelihood that increased to a Chekhovian certainty once it’s revealed he has a gun.

The ensuing chapters - driving around with bags of money, tense stand-offs in remote locations, lethal encounters in parking garages - are the novel’s most melodramatic, and the experience sees Theo slide almost entirely from himself. This is some combination of the place (in which we should note Tartt is taking advantage of a slight geographic pun: New York having once been New Amsterdam, now Theo finds himself removed from the copycat city and lost in the original):

Without noticing it I’d left reality and crossed the border into some no-man’s-land where nothing made sense. Dreaminess, fragmentation. (p. 742)

and his personal mental state:

“Farruco Frantisek? I’m him?” Under the circumstances it felt like a meaningful question — as if I might be somehow disembodied or at least had passed beyond a certain horizon where I was freed of basic facts like identity. (p. 743)

His experiences in Amsterdam are the lowest dip in Theo’s arc. We have seen him low before - wasted and directionless in the Nevada desert; high and drifting under a cloud of trauma and depression in New York - but the nadir comes in a Dutch hotel room where, after the second most traumatic event of his life, he gets half way to attempting suicide.

And what is it that drives him to this point? Certainly it is the trauma of having his life threatened, and of taking a life in self defence. But it is also the bitter unfairness of being briefly reunited with the painting before losing it all over again. So much has happened in Theo’s life since he last saw ‘The Goldfinch’, and yet his reaction when he holds it once more reveals to him a different perspective on everything:

It was real; I knew it, even in the dark. […] I was different, but it wasn’t. And as the light flickered over it in bands, I had the queasy sense of my own life, in comparison, as a patternless and transient burst of energy, a fizz of biological static just as random as the street lamps flashing past. (p. 754)

The sudden, twin shocks of losing the painting all over again and having to shoot a man, deepen Theo’s sense of dissociation. Tartt returns to her fragmented sentence structures, giving us an almost impressionistic rendering of the Amsterdam streets through which a bloodied Theo is stumbling lost. In his own word he feels ‘disincarnate’ (p.769), ‘out of the world halfway: not myself’ (p.780). In fact, of the killing of Martin, he considers:

The act — the eternity of it — had thrown me into such a different world that to all practical purposes I was already dead. (p. 785)

And in the bravura passages that follow we witness Theo slide into his deepest depression. He admits to previous failed suicide attempts that he has kept out of his account until now, and begins to make a new one. Tartt conveys his mental state by adapting her post-trauma fragmentation technique into similarly impressionistic run on sentences that are shot through with raw emotionality. Theo’s mind wanders up and down his own timeline, revisiting old traumas and losses and regrets, irrevocable mistakes, irreparable damage. But also spins out to the greater trauma of the world and the living in it. Here Tartt has him mention ‘Black birds. Disastrous lead-colored skies out of Egbert van der Poel’ (pp. 801-802). That would be van der Poel, the Dutch painter who was so traumatised by the explosion at Delft that killed Fabritius that he painted dozens of landscapes depicting the tragedy’s aftermath. This is one of many ways in which Tartt reminds us that loss and pain are universal.

This whole section of the book is peppered with bad paths, physical and psychological. The multiple closed streets and dead ends that Theo & Boris encounter in the car, and the wrong turnings around circular canals that Theo takes on foot, mirror his mental state. Trapped, confined, endlessly impeded progress. Even in sleep he cannot escape it:

in my dreams I couldn’t get to where I needed to be (p.789)

He dreams of the absence of his mother, always just out of reach, always just gone from the place to which he has arrived. And yet the one dream that is an exception to this rule proves a genuine, specific turning point for Theo. The brief, strange, silent visitation from his mother is the beginning of a new path for him. It is the moment at which he renounces the behaviours that have led him so far astray. Tellingly this takes the form of Theo stating ‘[w]hatever happened I would not be like my father’ (p.814).

From this moment he decides to accept the consequences of his actions, and in doing so comes to believe that he is not entirely defined by his mistakes. Tartt allows us (and thus Theo) a measured lack of certainty at the conclusion of the novel: his engagement to Kitsey is still on, though no one is holding him to it; he is wealthy but spending most of the money (and his time) reclaiming the furniture he sold in bad faith - a venture which may or may not be successful; his relationship with Hobie is altered somewhat, but finally free of subterfuge; and, of course, he receives from Pippa the very message he has always dreamed of hearing: that she does love him. This last also has its caveat, however, the open question of whether they are too damaged in too similar a way to be together.

I’m choosing not to go too far into the overall themes of the novel here at its conclusion because, as I quote myself saying above, Tartt’s final chapter finds a way to state them masterfully. I can find no better way to lay out the book’s thesis. But let’s touch glancingly on one aspect of it: the question of fate.

Towards the end of the novel our attention is drawn to the number of characters who have espoused some theory of fate or chance or luck or destiny. There is Larry, of course, who is perhaps most closely associated with it. But even Hobie’s first reaction upon hearing Theo’s story is to say: “It does all swing around strangely sometimes, doesn’t it?” (p. 844). We hear echoes here less of Larry and more of Boris, who has more recently been espousing the distasteful lessons he learned from Dostoevsky’s The Idiot: that good does not necessarily beget good, nor bad bad. Or, as Hobie has it, “Can’t good come around sometimes through some strange back doors?” (p. 850).

This is one of the novel’s messages, I feel: that there are no purely good people or irredeemably bad people. There is action and consequence, and the latter is unpredictable and difficult to track through the myriad twists it takes. The explosion in the Met that takes Theo’s mother but gives him ‘The Goldfinch’ and Hobie and Pippa. The painting that is first a lifeline to his past and then a secret source of unspeakable anxiety and then almost gets him killed and then makes him rich. Tartt’s novel, for being more than 860 pages, is tightly woven - there is very little extraneous. There is a wealth of detail and impression, but it is in service of building a world we recognise and a character through whose eyes to see it. And this, in turn, is in service of what Tartt believes to be a unique power of literature:

“It’s the nature of our life on the earth, […] how things can just turn on a dime. It’s one reason that the novel is sort of a moral playing field in which moral problems can be played out in the field of time in a way that we can’t experience it in normal life. You might live a whole life without learning the lessons of Emma Bovary. Books are other lives. They enable us to be other people.”

With your permission I’ll keep your email address on file for just a little while longer. When tickets for the September release of the film are available I’ll email you once more to see if anyone would like to meet up and see it - most probably in London. Based on the two trailers, I have high hopes for the adaptation, and now that you’re done with the novel you could watch those trailers (1;2) and get excited too!

There is much more to explore, and I encourage you to do so. One particularly fruitful enquiry might be to ask what the novel has to say about the value of transient things versus that which is ‘deathless’. Or you might prefer to wonder how Theo is influenced by the people he spends time with: his mother, the Barbours, Hobie, Boris. I’m going to leave it here for now, but I would love to hear your thoughts and your feelings about the book as a whole. I hope you enjoyed it even half as much as I did. I’d like to thank each and every one of you for reading along with me this year, and to everyone that sent me a comment, idea, suggestion, or input of any kind thank you again.