Nick Reads The Goldfinch -- Page 864 (the end!)

So I have finished the book!  Beware...spoilers abound.  You may have been able to read the blog posts and still enjoy getting to page 564 after the fact, but now I am really going to ruin the book.

You've been warned.

So shortly after page 564, why, miracles of miracles Boris shows up!  Theo is looking for drugs downtown and Boris (who has been looking for Theo), happens to see him walking around.  Boris has two big things to tell Theo:

1.  Theo actually doesn't have the painting.  Boris stole it from him right before Theo's dad died and replaced it with his civics book, all wrapped to look like the painting.  Theo hasn't tried to look at it since then (it is stored in a special storage space Theo has rented), and he is rather shocked to find he's never had it.  You'd think he would be relieved, but the discovery unhinges him a bit more, if he could be more unhinged.

2.  Boris thinks he may be able to figure out where the painting is.

For the next two hundred pages or so Theo continues pining away for Pippa even as he is engaged to Kitsey.  Lucius Reeve is more of a problem.  And Boris keeps calling up saying he is a little closer to figuring out where the painting is.  Finally, Boris shows up at Theo's engagement party (which he isn't enjoying) and tells him to grab all the cash he can, they are going to Amersterdam to get the painting.

Theo is going to pose as an American interested in holding the painting as collateral (buys the painting for $40,000, the sellers use that money to push drugs, they buy it back for $80,000.  It's a classic pawn), with Boris and some of his associates providing the muscle, arranging the location, etc.  Theo seems to get cold feet before show time (just about the time where Boris is assembling a pistol) and suggests maybe it was best just to call the cops.  Boris and his men laugh at this.

They meet the sellers in a cafe off the Red Light district, The Purple Cow.  Boris and his men get a funny feeling, and in the blink of an eye they have physically out muscled the sellers of the painting (though they haven't killed anyone, have barely hurt anyone) and made off with painting without giving anyone a cent.

Flush with success, Boris and Theo separate from the other three men, agreeing to meet later for a good meal and maybe a trip back to the Red Light district after the painting is put back.  But doublecross!  Boris and Theo are accosted by two or three men, they steal the painting and are probably about to kill Boris and Theo...Boris flicks his cigarette at one of them, a scuffle ensues, Theo manages to get hold of a gun, and the two friends gun down their assailants.  A third man runs off with the painting.

Boris is shot, Theo is unhinged.  They split up and Theo heads back to his hotel room.

The next 20 pages or so are the most excruciating of the book.  Theo is alone in his room with a packet of heroin.  He is mopey, he is suicidal, he is scared to death that he will be pegged with the murders.  He tries to leave the country but can't (Boris has his passport, consulate won't give him a new one unless he files a police report).  He finally tries to commit suicide, fails, dreams of his mother, and then...

It's Christmas Day.  Boris barges into the hotel room with a sackfull of cash.  After the painting was stolen from them he got to thinking, and decided that Theo's idea wasn't so bad after all.  He traced the painting to Frankfurt, called the art police, and took all the award money (no questions asked!).  We are rich!

And that's it.  Theo heads home, the engagement to Kitsey is at least suspended, and Theo spends the next year going around with his share of the art money, buying back all the furniture pieces he passed off as things that they weren't.

And that's the end.

But if I complained that maybe the first, I dunno, five hundred some odd pages of the book lacked meaning, the final two hundred pages are dripping with significance.  I'll wrap it up in a final post before the book club.
For those of you in the book club who haven't read the book yet....no cheating!  You must read it all!

Nick Reads The Goldfinch, Page 569

I realize now that I probably shouldn't have written my last post when I did, because some pretty important stuff happened right after Theo's dad died.  

Theo panics.  He fears that he will be tossed into human services again and he just can't deal with it.  So he decides to run away back to New York, without really knowing what he will do when he gets there.  He and Boris steal money and drugs from Xandra and Theo makes his way on his own, by bus, with his little kick dog Popper.  

I mentioned before that Tartt is really good at giving the book a real sense of place.  The New York of Theo's youth was pleasant and cultured, Las Vegas was empty and bright, decadent and lonely.  Now, as Theo returns to New York, Tartt's characterization of the city has changed.  It is cold, raining.  The cities building looms close, predators roam in the parks.  If we must draw parallels with Dickens the newly orphaned Theo has arrived in a city as dark and perilous as Victorian London.  

Unable to reconnect with the Barbours (his wealthy benefactors) Theo winds up being taken in by Hobie. Theo enrolls in an early college program, and studies his brains out -- mainly math and science, which he doesn't seem to enjoy.  But in a way, he seems to be punishing himself for the death of his parents, especially as he feels both of them could have been avoided if he had only done one thing or the other, to somehow alter the march of time in a way that would save either.  

He gets in, but doesn't apply himself.  And...

And then it's eight years later.  Theo is twentyish, done with school, and working at Hobie's.  Hobie owned an antique store with his partner Welty (who died in the explosion...it was he who encouraged Theo to take The Goldfinch painting out of gallery and also gave him a ring to take back to Hobie).  Since Welty's death the store has languished, as Hobie really doesn't understand or care for the business side of things.  

Theo starts to turn things around, and soon the store is profitable.  But he's done it an underhanded way, selling restored items of furniture as original works for outrageous prices.  He's a cunning salesman, but always seems to be scheming someone.  There is one person (Lucius Reeve) who sees through all this.  Normally when a person discovers they have been duped by Theo (if they ever do) the complain and Theo buys back the piece often at 10% less than the person paid for it.  How he manages to do this I am not sure...but he does it.  But Lucius Reeve won't budge, and we find out that he has made the connection, he knows that Theo still has The Goldfinch based on the fact that Theo obviously met Welty in the gallery (the story of the ring is well known) and that Welty died in the gallery where The Goldfinch was placed.

Meanwhile, it seems that Theo is engaged to be married to Kitsey Barbour, who he first met when the Barbours took him in after his mother's death.  Theo did eventually reconnect with the Barbours only to find that his two favorites (peer Andy and the manic-depressive Mr. Barbour) died in a sailing accident.  

Theo is an odd character, it's had to know what to make of him.  He seems to be truly a combination of his mother and father...he has his mother's love of art and all things old, but he's inherited his father's knack for running a scheme, for stealing, for running away, and also his addictive tendencies.  Theo struggles with drugs (mostly oxycontin and the like) and while I think for the moment he's clean I am not really sure.  

What does it all mean?  I don't think Donna Tartt is ever going to make that clear.  So I've given up on trying to decipher a "cause" or a "meaning for the book" and instead try to look at things symbolically.  

I do ask myself (as I guess I should as this is for a church book club) where is God in all this.  In all the 569 pages thus far he's hardly mentioned.  Mrs. Barbour, I think, seems to be devout but the death of her son and her husband has left her a shell of who she once was.  For the rest, there is really no discussion or religion or lack thereof.  It is the opposite of, say, the Brothers Karamazov, where a single event (the death of the elder Karamazov and subsequent trial of Dimitri) kick off a host of metaphysical discussions. 

So often in the midst of tragedy we ask "where is god in all of this?"  The answer is usually something along the lines of "God suffers with us" or that God somehow has the power to redeem something horrible by making it meaningful in some way.  

But here?  There is only nothingness and the feeling that such a thing could happen again at any instant, which is engrained in Theo's psyche.  Theo needs the drugs to fill the nothingness (there is an excellent description of how a depressed person would view humanity and its struggles as essentially meaningless when he tries to kick the habit) and keep his fears at bay.  There is love now, perhaps with Kitsey Barbour, and attempt to move on and out of Hobie's and into the real world....but I get the sense that the painting, which he still has, is going to drag him back into the darkness and that maybe his love for Kitsey isn't as real as he thinks it is.  

You want to see redemption for Theo.  You want to see him snatch something beautiful out of so much loss and apparent meaninglessness....but I get the sense that maybe we aren't going to get such satisfaction here.  It would be a bold statement for Tartt to make.  In doing so I don't know if she is pointing to the perils of an outlook on life where redemption is not possible, or if she is saying that we must adopt an outlook where redemption is possible if we are to survive.  

Perhaps by next post I will have finished the book?  Stay tuned.   All 12 of you.

Questions VBS Kids Have for God

Saint Mark Lutheran Church is having its Vacation Bible School this week.  The kids (aged 4 - 10) were asked to write down questions they'd like to ask God.

The answers ranged from the comical to the tragic to the thought provoking.  Here are some of my favorites:

Does Jesus Live in Kansas?

Why does my dad have to go to work everyday?

How do you get into a hot air balloon?

Why did God make cancer?

Why am I so awesome?

Nick reads The Goldfinch: Page 380

A major event has just happened in the book, so it’s time to take stock of where things stand. 

You may have noticed my reading rate has decreased…when I wrote my last post I was actually at page 267, not 200, so in the past 5 days I’ve only managed to read 113 pages.  Completion rate stands at a good 44%.  It is very unlikely that finishing it by the book club day will be a problem – all indications point to finishing it in a matter of weeks.

When I left off Theo was just about to move to Las Vegas with his father and girlfriend Xandra, and that is what happens next.  Theo does manage to pack up the painting of The Goldfinch and take it to LV with him.  

From the get go things go awry, at least where Theo is concerned.  His father is a recovering alcoholic and makes money gambling on sports, Xandra works in a casino on The Strip.  Both abuse drugs (Vicodin for Theo’s dad, Cocaine for Xandra), and while Theo’s dad does show him some affection by taking him out for dinner and bonding over football (or at least trying to) Theo is left very much alone in a large, empty house built during the 1990’s housing boom.  Economics (the great recession?) has left the surrounding subdivision unpopulated. 

Theo makes a friend, Boris.  I forgot to mention that this book is written in the first person by an older Theo looking back on his past (in the first pages of the book a Theo of unspecified age is actually in Amsterdam, clearly in some sort of trouble and hiding out in a hotel), and we are assured that Boris becomes a life long friend.

Boris is the son of a hard drinking Ukraining miner, who has dragged his son all over the world from one mining job to another.  A few years older than Theo, Boris has a world weary air.  He drinks and smokes heavily, and in no time Theo (who Boris calls Potter because Theo kind of looks like Harry Potter) has joined him and has moved on to pot and LSD. 

And this sort of continues for some time.  Boris and Theo go to school intermittently but don’t seem to be doing too badly (the school is apparently not very challenging) and spend much of their time drunk or stoned, eating food they steal from the local Costco.  Theo’s dad hovers in the background and slowly we start to see that he is in a bad way, he owes money to some bad people.  Tartt escalates this tension.  Theo’s dad tries to get money from Theo’s 529 plan; tries to open a line of credit with Theo’s social security number; a dude named Mr. Silver shows up with two burly muscle guys and a baseball bat, looking for Theo’s dad…

And then on Page 380, Xandra walks in to the house with the news that Theo’s dad has died in a car crash.  His BAC was 0.39.

That's pretty much where we are.  Though I am not there yet I am pretty sure that Theo is going to make his way back to New York (...okay, I flipped ahead.  What do you want?)

What do I make of this interlude in the desert?  Not sure.  Tartt has a good sense of setting, and her New York has a fullness and richness where Las Vegas has only emptiness.  While I don't think this is a morality tale whose motto is "Drugs are Bad" the author also takes care not to over-romantizse the tumultuous life style that Boris and Theo have.  These are two kids who have shrugged off the conventions of society and are riding a rough road;  while we tend to celebrate artists (such as Arthur Rimbaud, who has a quote gracing the part of the book where Theo arrives in Vegas) who do the same there is not much to celebrate with these two.  Their existence is gritty, they have had hard and young lives.  They are victims, its hard not to feel sorry for them, and yet one wishes Theo would find a more productive way to deal with the pain of losing his mother and the alienation of winding up in Vegas.  

I root for him, but based on the arc of this novel I am not sure things will be getting much better.  It will be interesting to see how well Theo can re-establish himself in New York after his rough stint in Vegas, if he can at all.

Still not sure what this book is about, though Theo does himself meditate on how catastrophe is only  a hair's breadth away (the painter of The Goldfinch himself was killed when a powder magazine in Delft exploded in the 1660s, a freak accident).  I am worried it will just end up being a continuous set of plot twists without a great deal of meaning.  

Theo still has the painting.  

Nick Reads the Goldfinch: Page 200

So here we are on page 200 of Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch.

Having completed 23% of the book in only 4 days, I'm not as worried as I was about finishing it before the 9th of September.  On the other hand, I am starting to get worried that I will forget about things that I read in the beginning of the book if I don't start writing them down.  So I figured it was time to make an update.

So far I give the book a thumbs-up.  It certainly is a quick read so far...me reading 200 pages in 4 days is not unheard of though also not typical.  It's a good clip.  Thus far Tartt has managed to keep the story kind of moving along, introducing new elements of the plot just as things are starting to go stale.

As for that plot it isn't too complicated just yet.  Teenager Theo is about to go to a parent teacher conference with his mother (whose name I have forgotten), who seems like a pretty good person all in all.  They live in current day New York City and on the way to the conference they get side tracked and go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the mother was a former small time model and majored in Art History), where there is a special exhibition on the Dutch Masters.  And there....

Ugh...I don't want to say, because that is a major spoiler.  But I don't see  how I can continue without not saying so, as what happens there is a major part of the rest of the book.  So:  there is a terrorist attack of some kind in the museum, a bombing and the mother dies in that attack.  Don't know yet who really did it - Theo overhears a news report that says it was perpetrated by domestic right wing extremists, but that's all I know.  It's hard to say if that will play an important factor later on.  It may not.  

Theo of course is crushed (who wouldn't be?)  Because his father skipped town about a year prior and his grandparents won't take him due to health reasons he is cared for temporarily by a wealthy family who's son goes to school with Theo.  During that time he meets Hobie, who is an antique furniture restorer and is connected to someone else who died in the attack, and another teenage girl who survived, Pippa.  But she's moving to Texas.  Maybe she'll be important later.

Just as things are looking up Theo's father comes back and it looks like they are going to take Theo to Vegas, where the father lives now with his girlfriend, Xandra.

And that....that is really it, aside from one important thing:  Theo takes a painting from the wreckage of the museum, a small painting of a Goldfinch.  It is the dying request of the man who was a friend of Hobie's.  He hasn't given it back yet.  It was one of the last things his mother commented on before the bomb went off.

And that...that is it.  Pretty much.

Would I compare it to a Dicken's novel?  Sure, but remember I'm no expert.  I've only read successfully Nicholas Nickelby and The Christmas Carol, and bits and pieces of others (some of Great Expectations, Drood, etc.) that I could never finish.  I should read more Dickens, I really should, but I  find it tiresome.

But it is Dickensian in that a) it's long, b) the characters are a little flat...at least the secondary ones, so far, c) there are constant plot twists as we move forward and d) the kid is sort of an orphan, at least for a little while.

Of course Dickens was about something.  Even an overall uplifting book like Nicholas Nickleby was still saddled with depictions of the injustices suffered by many that were rife in Victorian London.  It was a reflection on the culture.

Does this book do that?  Sure, this book is about a boy who loses his mother and what happens after.  But you'd expect the Pulitzer Prize to be more than that. But I'm only 23% and I will forgive the author if the premise isn't yet clear.

One thing I will say is that this book seems to have buzzing through it the fear that anything can change in an instant, and not for the better.  Clearly the terrorist attack is one such example of this.  But it also seems that just as things are looking up for Theo things change for the worse..Pippa is going to Texans and it looks like Theo is going to Las Vegas, and I don't get a good feeling about his father.  In the blink of an eye everything can change.

That has always been true, but I wonder if that is something we worry over more today.  With terror fresh in our mind and with the 24 hour news cycle that seems to feed on catastrophe, I just wonder if we all don't have this sense that just around the corner something bad is going to happen, and it's something that drives up the anxiety of the American psyche, to the point where you suddenly see people walking around the supermarket with guns in their holsters and running shoes on their feet, ready to fight or fly (or both!) in an instant. Even though chances are that thing we fear most probably won't happen.  It could of course, but it probably won't.

And even then, can you prevent it?

Well, at any rate, it sure seems to be happening to this kid.  Let's hope it gets better for him in the next 654 pages.  I hope it will, but based on what I've read on the dust jacket it probably won't.....