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.