Despite how incongruous it seems to suggest that I've been anticipating something for more than a decade, that's kind of how it's been with The Goldfinch, qua 'the next Donna Tartt' book, at any rate. The Little Friend came out in 2002 and I would've read it then or soon after and my liking for it has only grown over time (including through a re-read a couple of years later); and of course The Secret History was already one of the most totemic of all novels for me. And so maybe, against that backdrop, The Goldfinch was almost destined to disappoint, at least marginally.
It's a good Story, no doubt about it, and as part and parcel of that, I believed in the characters - most importantly the narrator Theo Decker, and even those at risk of caricature like his tearaway friend Boris. The key structuring motifs and events - the death of Theo's mother, his longing for Pippa, the (happily, not overly determined) painting itself - are plausible, as are the sets of motives and actions at whose centres they sit. I certainly wanted to know what would happen. And there's some really lovely writing along the way.
Having said all that, it somehow felt that The Goldfinch didn't really penetrate, and I don't quite know whether that's to do with the novel itself or rather with some present lack of receptiveness of my own. Part of it, I suspect, is that for all of my efforts to savour the book and not to race through it, over the weeks that I've been working through its 770-odd pages, the usual momentum did take over and I found the pages turning faster than maybe needed to really absorb it. And the final pages in particular probably need re-reading and time to percolate, throwing as they do the entirety of what's come before into just a subtly different perspective, hard-headed and demanding, yet lyrical:
...this middle zone illustrates the fundamental discrepancy of love. Viewed close: a freckled hand against a black coat, an origami frog tipped on its side. Step away, and the illusion snaps in again: life-more-than-life, never-dying. Pippa herself is the play betwen those things, both love and not-love. Photographs on the wall, a balled-up sock on the sofa. The moment where I reached to brush a piece of fluff from her hair and she laughed and ducked at my touch. And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky -- so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.
In fact, re-reading those pages now, with the distance of a few days, already I feel a slight transmutation in how I feel about The Goldfinch, the inkling that it will grow for me over the years, just maybe, as the novel itself ends, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.
* * *
As an aside, I've been enjoying the kindle that Jade gave me a while back and in fact had purchased The Goldfinch for possible reading during the recentish WA trip. But I ended up deciding to save it for post-holiday reading - and then, once back in Melbourne, surprised myself with the thought that, seeing as I'd only get one first read of The Goldfinch, I'd better read it as a 'real' book, and duly picked up and read it as a physical copy rather than the e-version.
It's a good Story, no doubt about it, and as part and parcel of that, I believed in the characters - most importantly the narrator Theo Decker, and even those at risk of caricature like his tearaway friend Boris. The key structuring motifs and events - the death of Theo's mother, his longing for Pippa, the (happily, not overly determined) painting itself - are plausible, as are the sets of motives and actions at whose centres they sit. I certainly wanted to know what would happen. And there's some really lovely writing along the way.
Having said all that, it somehow felt that The Goldfinch didn't really penetrate, and I don't quite know whether that's to do with the novel itself or rather with some present lack of receptiveness of my own. Part of it, I suspect, is that for all of my efforts to savour the book and not to race through it, over the weeks that I've been working through its 770-odd pages, the usual momentum did take over and I found the pages turning faster than maybe needed to really absorb it. And the final pages in particular probably need re-reading and time to percolate, throwing as they do the entirety of what's come before into just a subtly different perspective, hard-headed and demanding, yet lyrical:
...this middle zone illustrates the fundamental discrepancy of love. Viewed close: a freckled hand against a black coat, an origami frog tipped on its side. Step away, and the illusion snaps in again: life-more-than-life, never-dying. Pippa herself is the play betwen those things, both love and not-love. Photographs on the wall, a balled-up sock on the sofa. The moment where I reached to brush a piece of fluff from her hair and she laughed and ducked at my touch. And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky -- so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.
In fact, re-reading those pages now, with the distance of a few days, already I feel a slight transmutation in how I feel about The Goldfinch, the inkling that it will grow for me over the years, just maybe, as the novel itself ends, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.
* * *
As an aside, I've been enjoying the kindle that Jade gave me a while back and in fact had purchased The Goldfinch for possible reading during the recentish WA trip. But I ended up deciding to save it for post-holiday reading - and then, once back in Melbourne, surprised myself with the thought that, seeing as I'd only get one first read of The Goldfinch, I'd better read it as a 'real' book, and duly picked up and read it as a physical copy rather than the e-version.
