So you've read the Goldfinch. You've set it aside. You've picked up Middlekauf's history of the American Revolution, The Glorious Cause, but skipped all the boring crap about the stamp act and parliamentary representation and gone ahead to the fun part where the bullets start flying. You've watch the Hokies mostly trounce the Tribe pretty well dibby doe doe doe, and watched Tony Stewart climb into his stock car once again and go fast turn left go fast turn left go fast turn left go fast turn left go fast turn left go fast turn left go fast turn left go fast turn left go fast turn left go fast turn left go fast turn left go fast turn left until he got a flat tire and finished 41st and the Antony Bourdain's Boudin 400 brought to by Tiddlywinks: Tiddlywinks! They're not just for truants and wise guys any more.
In other worse, you (and by that I mean "I", though I must admit I didn't watch the Nascar race) have had a chance to digest the book and really try to figure out what it is that Donna Tartt is getting at.
I think the big flick of the book is how is it, where is it, that we find meaning in our lives.
Theo's mom dies in a terrorist attack. Naturally, as we try to identify him, we wonder how he is going to pick up the pieces. Let's face it, his story is not that unfamiliar to us all. From terror attacks to mass shootings random and senseless death has touched the soul of our nation time and time again and the media have brought the various tragedies into our living rooms. We get to know the survivors and the family members of those who have died and we ask ourselves "how will these people go on?"
We assume they will, because in despite of an ongoing malaise our nation is still a rather optimistic one. So it is that even as I wondered "how will Theo go on" I assume that he will find a way to piece it all together, I assume he will be able to build a meaningful life on the back of the tragedy that has claimed his mother and altered his life forever (Theo is both a survivor and someone who lost a loved one). When the Barbours take him in and he meets Hobie shortly after the bombing I assumed that that was the place where he would find meaning, that slowly he would build a life on those two points of light.
But it's not to be. His father comes with his drug dealing bartending girlfriend Xandra and they whisk him away to Las Vegas where there is really....nothing. The desert is expansive, they live in a deserted subdivision, Xandra and Theo's dad are often not around.
Theo does meet his friend Boris (who to me is a mix between the the lead singer of Gogol Bordello and Dimitry Karamazov). Friendship can bring meaning to life, and it is true that Boris's act of love to try to get the painting back and in the end call the art cops does redeem somewhat the situation for Theo, but with the drug use and the alcohol I feel that Theo is just kind of passing his days away.
The use of drugs was kind of troubling in this story. Tartt never condemns their use. Sure, there are plenty of hangovers and bad days and the physiological trap of addiction is well spelled out - she does not romanticize, I'd say. But the characters keep using and they don't seem to suffer much in the way of consequence.
I almost came to feel that the drugs are more of a metaphor for how, in a nihilistic worldview, we are all just really marking time until the ultimate truth of our lives (our demise) is realized. Theo fills that void with drugs, and he would say that the rest of us fill it with houses, kids, music, art, religion. We are all fooling ourselves.
And yet the book is also sort of saying that that is the point. Much as the Goldfinch in the painting stares out at us over 400 years with dignity despite his hard life (he is chained to his perch after all) so it seems that for Theo the meaning in life is facing up to the lack of meaning in it with dignity. Therefore those things (art, love) which pull us out of our despair are what make life worthwhile....and to love those things which are timeless in a sense grants us some immortality even as we know that the truth of our lives is that all of this can end and will end, possibly at an instant.
Do I agree? By baptism I am contractually obligated to call such a worldview a bunch of fiddle faddle, and argue that my relationship to God holds the ultimate meaning in life. But relational Christianity is a tough thing for me, and as one who feels God's absence more than God's presence, I'd have to agree that having dignity for the sake of honoring the beauty of life is about as good a meaning as anything else I can think of.
784 pages is a long way to go for "Life is Short", which is something that Theo tries to impart on the reader as the book closes. Thankfully I think that Tartt is scratching at something a little deeper than that.
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