Book-A-Day #20: Desert Island Read, THE GOLDFINCH

THE GOLDFINCH
DONNA TARTT
Little, Brown
$30.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: It begins with a boy. Theo Decker, a thirteen-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new home on Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who don't know how to talk to him, and tormented above all by his unbearable longing for his mother, he clings to one thing that reminds him of her: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into the underworld of art.

As an adult, Theo moves silkily between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty labyrinth of an antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love-and at the center of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle.

The Goldfinch is a novel of shocking narrative energy and power. It combines unforgettably vivid characters, mesmerizing language, and breathtaking suspense, while plumbing with a philosopher's calm the deepest mysteries of love, identity, and art. It is a beautiful, stay-up-all-night and tell-all-your-friends triumph, an old-fashioned story of loss and obsession, survival and self-invention, and the ruthless machinations of fate.

My Review: The Doubleday UK meme, a book a day for July 2014, is the goad I'm using to get through my snit-based unwritten reviews. Today's prompt is to identify the book one would take to a desert island.

It was between this book and The Luminaries, a more artistically successful and more culturally enriching book; a book with grace and beauty and charm; a rich feast that says things to me even yet, months after reading it.

I chose this book.

I look at the blanked-out faces of the other passengers--hoisting their briefcases, their backpacks, shuffling to disembark--and I think of what Hobie said: beauty alters the grain of reality. And I keep thinking too of the more conventional wisdom: namely, that the pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful.

Only what is that thing? Why am I made the way I am? Why do I care about all the wrong things, and nothing at all for the right ones? Or, to tip it another way: how can I see so clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet--for me, anyway--all that's worth living for lies in that charm?

A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don't get to choose our own hearts. We can't make ourselves want what's good for us or what's good for other people. We don't get to choose the people we are.

It's not Art, but it's a good, solid, real moment. I bought into Theo, I cared about the dumbass, I found him the kind of kid I'd try to fix and straighten out so he wouldn't flounder so messily as he looked for the path through the thicket.

Then there's traife like this: "'When you feel homesick,' he said, ‘just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go.'” Gag me. That's so Disney-movie pseudoprofound I could unswallow all over the book.

But then...

Whatever teaches us to talk to ourselves is important: whatever teaches us to sing ourselves out of despair. But the painting has also taught me that we can speak to each other across time. And I feel I have something very serious and urgent to say to you, my non-existent reader, and I feel I should say it as urgently as if I were standing in the room with you. That life—whatever else it is—is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.

Sadly, it goes on after that to bury the well-made point and the well-turned phrase in verbiage.

Donna Tartt won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in recognition of this novel. I am not equipped with the information the judges of that prize use to make their decision. I can only say that, from my perspective as a reader, this is a good, solid read that should've been 600pp not 771pp, with many lovely phrases and a lot of good, well-incorporated action, but not especially prize-worthy. It's a thumping good read, as my friend Suz says.

And for that reason, I'd take it to a desert island, and I'd cuss and fume and fret about its shortcomings after I finished each read wet-eyed about Theo and his travails. Sometimes Theo acts so damned clueless I wanted to give him a bloody box of chocolates and a bench and plant a Barnaby Rudgely raven called Grip on his damn shoulder. And then:

You could study the connections for years and never work it out--it was all about things coming together, things falling apart, time warp, my mother standing out in front of the museum when time flickered and the light went funny, uncertainties hovering on the edge of a vast brightness, the stray chance that might, or might not, change everything.

So, yeah, this is the one that makes the desert island trip. Sorry, Eleanor Catton, your gorgeous and so very deserving tome will wait for me safe on my shelf.


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THE HOURS with MRS. DALLOWAY, Amazing Political Stories for the Internet Age

THE HOURS
MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM
Picador (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$12.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In The Hours, the acclaimed author Michael Cunningham draws inventively on the life and work of Virginia Woolf and the story of her novel, Mrs. Dalloway, to tell the story of a group of contemporary characters struggling with the conflicting claims of love and inheritance, hope and despair. In this edition, Cunningham brings his own Pulitzer Prize–winning novel together with Woolf’s masterpiece, which has long been hailed as a groundbreaking work of literary fiction and one of the finest novels written in English.

The two novels, published side by side with a new introduction by Cunningham, display the extent of their affinity, and each illuminates new facets of the other in this joint volume. In his introduction, Cunningham re-creates the wonderment of his first encounter with Mrs. Dalloway at fifteen—as he writes, “I was lost. I was gone. I never recovered.” With this edition, Cunningham allows us to disappear into the world of Woolf and into his own brilliant mind.

My Review: Three women mirror the facets of the life of Clarissa Dalloway, heroine of the novel Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. One life is Mrs. Woolf herself, shown in the depths of despair as she convalesces from one of her crippling bouts with depression in the suburban aridity of Richmond while pining for life in London's Bloomsbury, writing her novel of the exquisite nature of the quotidian. Another is the life of Mrs. Laura Brown, dying a million deaths every day in suburban Los Angeles, raising a son and pregnant again by a good man she doesn't love, as she reads Mrs. Dalloway and ponders escape. Lastly the life of Clarissa Vaughn, whose long unrequited love for Richard Brown, her gay poet/novelist friend, has led her to care for him tenderly in his final years as an AIDS patient. He long ago nicknamed her “Mrs. Dalloway,” both for her first name and for her exquisitely self-abnegating strength.

Over the course of one day in the life of each woman, everything she knows and feels about her life is sharply refocused; it is made clear to each that, to escape the trap she is in, she must accept change or die in the trap. The ending of the book brings all three strands to their inevitable conclusions, with surprising overlaps.

I first read this when it came out in 1998. I fell in love instantly, as I had with Mrs. Dalloway at a slightly earlier date. I loved the imaginative structure of interwoven lives, commenting on each other and riffing off the events in each world, echoing some facet in every case the events in the iconic novel Mrs. Dalloway.

I can't give it five stars because, in the end, I wondered a bit if the clever-clever hadn't gotten in the way of the emotional core of the book, which I saw as the gritty determination of the women to live on their own terms and in their own lives not dependent on convention. In making the book conform to this ideal, I felt that some plot strands weren't honestly dealt with but rather forced into a shape required by the author's plans.

That cavil aside, the book is beautifully written and wonderfully interestingly conceived. I'd recommend it heartily, and suggest reading it in conjunction with the movie.