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.....
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