Tag: adolescent boys

The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt

The Goldfinch (2013) is quite a novel, quite an ambitious novel. Tartt writes here everything she knows about life and everything she knows about art, as well as about how they intersect, how the artist is inspired at one moment in time and how the viewer is inspired on seeing the same art 400 years later.

This work is about such a work of art, a classic portrait of a goldfinch, and how fate has put it into the hands of Theo Decker, the hero of this novel, when he is only thirteen. It has been put into his hands by a dazed and dying older man named Blackwell after a terrorist bomb has exploded in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The traumatized Blackwell believes he is saving the painting from a violent past in Europe.

The novel is not about the explosion, however. It is about the emptiness that that explosion leaves in the heart of Theo when his mother is killed in the same explosion. Indeed, she becomes so alive in even a few pages at the start of this novel—especially when he returns to their apartment after the explosion and keeps waiting for his mother to join him—that we feel the emptiness of a world without her and immediately understand how and why Theo feels so alone and disconnected. It is a situation I could relate to, having lost my own parents early, and so I identified with Theo and became fascinated by his story. How was this boy going to survive such a tragedy?

The result is a novel that evolves into three parts. The first part, and the most successful, follows an “orphaned” Theo as he is taken in by the Park Avenue family of his best friend, Andy. At first, the Seymour family takes pity on him, but his goodness earns their respect. He also calls on Blackwell’s partner Hobie, who repairs furniture in the couple’s antique store. But then he is wrenched out of this scene by the re-emergence of his gambling father, and I did not look forward to his move out west to his father’s unstructured life.

In a vividly described Las Vegas, Theo meets Boris, a mysterious, street-smart Polish/Russian youth who will become central to this story, as Theo moves from the disciplined household of his mother to an undisciplined world of alcohol, drugs, and adventure. Boris will become a force in this book, clever at persuading Theo to defy convention and take risks. But this vivid boy is too one-dimensional for me, seeming to serve the author as a means to advance the plot and never really changing as that plot advances.

The first part continues, as Boris persuades an unhappy Theo to return to New York, where he once was happy. Theo’s friend Andy has died, and so he turns to Hobie, who comes to trust him with more and more responsibility. But Theo has concealed one thing, that he still has the painting of the goldfinch. He has carried it, without telling anyone, from his mother’s apartment to the Seymours, to his father’s house out west, and now back to Hobie’s store. It seems to fill the gap left by the loss of his mother, and he is filled with guilt for hiding it, but is also afraid he will be punished if he turns it in.

This first part works, not least because the restoration and antique business of Hobie is so real. Which required considerable research by the author, but is worked in smoothly until we believe in Hobie and the business. In addition, Theo is fascinated by Pippa, a young girl who also survived the explosion. And who will be a love interest as elusive as the goldfinch itself.

But then part two jumps eight years, and Theo is a young man in charge of the business side of the antique shop. He becomes less attractive as a hero, however, and my identification with him is diminished. Because he sells restored antiques as real when he learns the shop is losing money under Hobie. He wants to save the shop, but does the end justify the means? My reservations are compounded, moreover, by a pharmaceutical addiction that Boris has encouraged, and that reflects Theo’s sense of guilt, because of both his financial activities and his continual possession of the Met’s missing painting. Equally worrisome is his pursuit of Pippa.

And now Boris returns, and the novel enters its third part, which is an adventure story. For Boris reveals he has deceived Theo. He has made off with the painting, and it is in Europe. But he has a plan to retrieve it. He will not tell Theo the plan, however, and its execution in Europe is confusing to the reader. It is suffice to say that there are meetings with mysterious men along with gunfire and death, as if Tartt has decided to forgoe the guilt and moral ambiguities of her story and to sustain reader interest with action.

I think this strategy is a mistake. The novel loses its depth and emphasizes its surface action. Proof of a missing potential seems to be in the final coda, as, a year later, Theo reviews what has happened to him, and comes to some interesting conclusions about life being short but often cruel, while both human love and the love of art can last forever.

Tartt describes the artist painting the goldfinch: “the brush strokes he permits us to see, up close, for exactly what they are—hand worked flashes of pigment, the very passage of the bristles visible—and then, at a distance, the miracle, or the joke…the slide of transubstantiation where paint is paint and yet also feather and bone.” And then, she continues: “It’s the place where reality strikes the ideal, where a joke becomes serious and anything serious is a joke. The magic point where every idea and its opposite are equally true.”

She continues, with Theo concluding: “I’ve come to believe there is no truth beyond illusion. Because, between where “reality” on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there’s a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic. And—I would argue as well—all love.”

This is the exploration of art and the human awareness of love, that I wish this novel had treated once Theo’s guilt at retaining the painting has begun to trouble him. And not relied on the exaggerated character of a Boris who dominates both Theo and the action of this novel, and as a consequence the European finale that rightly belongs to another novel. (November, 2015)

The Unfinished Season, by Ward Just

This 2004 work is an unusual novel for the author. It is not about politics, not about war, not about Washington, DC. It is a coming-of-age novel, and a fine one. An excellent one. A literary one, beautifully written.

It is also a paean to Chicago and the Midwestern life.

This is the story of the teenage Wilson Raven. It begins as a family story, a story of his relationship with his distant father, an altruistic lawyer who becomes a victim of commerce when he inherits a stationery printing company. A liberal who considers himself fair to his employees, he becomes disillusioned when his employees don’t think he has been fair, and go on strike. All of which occurs in the 1950s, when Republicans ran Washington and his father’s fellow businessmen fear the big Red scare.

But this is not to be a political story, even one far from Washington. It is to be the story of 19-year-old Wils, who fills the summer before entering college with a day job as a newspaper copy boy and his nights cavorting at debutante parties given by Chicago’s high society. The heart of this novel is to be a love story, a love between Wils and Aurora, a girl he meets at one of the dances, and a girl with whom he immediately clicks in a brilliantly created (by Just) conversation.

Wils meets Aurora about one-third into the book, and just as there has been no story line in his relationship with his aloof father, or his father’s tenuous relationship with his mother, and we have been completely enthralled, so, too, even as nothing dramatic happens when he starts courting Aurora, we continue to be enthralled. This is Just in complete control of his material, as well as the technique of the novel.

Indeed, in the relationship between his father and mother, he is foreshadowing Wils’ coming relationship with Aurora. For both the women seek the adventure that back East offers, while the men see themselves as Midwesterners. Dreaming Midwesterners at that.

In the absence of drama, what makes this novel work for me is Wils’ observations about the people he meets and the Chicago life he encounters, from the debutante dances to the city room to the jazz clubs that he frequents.

Finally, the drama arises when Wils meets Aurora’s father, Jack, a famous psychiatrist, an aloof man with a mysterious past who watches with pride over his daughter. He likes Wils, and there is no immediate dramatic conflict, but an adversarial relationship between his daughter and his mistress Consuela suggests the inevitable confrontation that will change Wil’s life.

But before that confrontation there is a wonderful section two-thirds into the novel, when, without Aurora, Wila spends a day alone in Chicago. Again, nothing happens, but it is beautiful writing. Its purpose seems to be to reflect the title of this novel that has an ending but no conclusion, which is why it is Wil’s “unfinished season.”

It is Wils’ last day at the newspaper, and he has a wonderful conversation with his boss, in which his boss says he will never make a good reporter because he loves the mystery, the romance of an event, especially when it is inconclusive. He cites Wils’ fascination with a women who was found frozen, who was revived, and who then disappeared. Whereas a good reporter, he says, digs until he finds the facts and comes up with a conclusive ending. In fact, as we finish this novel we realize the inconclusiveness to Wils’ love story is again being foreshadowed here.

Then Wils kills an afternoon at the Chicago Art Institute, where he is entranced by the Impressionists and how their style suggests the lives behind the characters being portrayed. Whereas, the works of Edward Hopper are hard-edged, with anonymous figures filled with melancholy, and no suggestion of what waits them beyond the picture frame. It is, again, a metaphor for the “unfinished season” Wils is about to endure.

In the final scene of that afternoon, there is a finely drawn wake, and then the book’s only dramatic flare-up. Which changes Wils’ life and leads to a deeper inconclusiveness. And yet we as readers do not feel cheated. There is a completeness here, not least because Wils accepts what has happened, is not resentful, realizes it is part of entering manhood. And also because the author brings together two adversaries, has them holding hands, has them also accepting the ending of their relationship.

Just concludes his novel with a scene set 40 years later, a technique many authors use to reveal the final fate of their characters. I often dislike those chapters; they become a cop-out. But not here. In part because this final chapter is beautifully written, and in part because it brings contentment to two lives but no clear answers about what caused Wils’ life to change.

Ron Charles’ review does not accept the narrative. “The moment you stop reading,” he writes, “the spell breaks and you’re left with the aftertaste of pretentious thought.” He cites “slippery comment from this maddening narrator, who oozes earnest sincerity and weighty import.” He cites a “most treacherous of friends (and narrators), the humble, self-effacing observer who wants only to witness and understand the challenges other people face.”

Which is precisely why I loved this novel. I identify with this sensitive boy who does not understand himself or the world he inhabits. Whereas Charles does not. Which suggests that what the reader brings to the novel, his life experience, can determine the novel’s effect on him. What I do find, as consolation, is Charles’ summing up: “If you fall in love with that voice, as the author did, The Unfinished Season is a moving and beautiful reminiscence of a time of great change.” And fall in love I did.

To sum up, this is a wonderful change of pace for Ward Just. He was clearly writing out of his love for the Midwest, and yet is aware that that love often cannot be reconciled with the dreams, the ambitions, of the loved one. He is also writing about the romance of youth, when all seems possible, when endings are not needed. And yet the voice of one writing 40 years later frames this story with reality, with the realization that this was the story of the youth he no longer is. (May, 2014)