The Goldfinch

This 2013 novel by Donna Tartt won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction this year.  It received mixed reviews when it was first published and mixed reviews from my literary friends.  Some gave it a thumbs up, some a thumbs down, and some, like me, a sideways thumb.

The strongest reaction from my friends was that it is too long (784 pages), too heavy on detail, repetitive, etc., etc.  I agree that economy is not the author’s strong point, and especially since a lot of the detail involves copious consumption of drugs and alcohol, I almost didn’t finish it myself.  I stuck with it, partly because I was looking for a good reason to award it a Pulitzer Prize; partly because I was curious how the main character, suffering from multiple psychological wounds, was going to end up; and partly because I was quite mesmerized by the actual Fabritius painting “The Goldfinch” as well as its fictional fate in the novel.

In any case, apart from the suspense surrounding Theo Decker’s life drama, starting at age 13 as a motherless, practically fatherless, unintentional art thief, the novel is worth our time for the complexity, the artistry, and the profundity that makes any work of fiction worth reading, however long and drawn out.

By the way, at one point the text indirectly defends the excessive detail in the novel, suggesting that no detail in a work of art is wasted.  The artist is trying to tell us something with every brushstroke.  That may be true, but a writer might be wise to attend to her readers’ capacity, lest she lose them.

As for the complexity, The Goldfinch can be read, studied, and appreciated from numerous perspectives.  It is a coming of age story as Theo is initiated into a world of violence, homelessness, drug addiction, petty theft, as well as not so petty theft, and a whole dark underworld of criminal activity.  It is also a conversion/recovery narrative as he eventually meets what he himself calls his Damascus moment, alone and suicidal in an Amsterdam hotel (on Christmas Day no less), and begins to take responsibility for his past misdeeds and heal from the early and sustained effects of his traumatized childhood.

It is also a realistic study of the dark underside of modern civilization in contemporary settings like New York City, the Las Vegas desert, and Amsterdam.  In these settings the disease of modern life is played out with drugs, alcohol, family dysfunction, gambling, deception, , crime, heartbreak, anxiety, pain, loss, and the incessant longing, not only for freedom from our history and circumstances, but also for the love and belonging that could somehow fill the absence of family and romantic fulfillment.

It is a psychological drama of Oedipal conflict, repressed desire, hostility, and relentless anxiety.

And it is a captivity narrative as Theo is trapped by his personal and social circumstances, his own desires, and the painting itself, his “fateful object.”

At another level it is the universal story of human tragedy and redemption—the hero’s entrance under dangerous conditions, his initiation into evil, withdrawal, trial and quest, the encounter with death, rebirth and return.  In this case the mythic promises of redemption and atonement are muted by the compromises of reality, but they are not entirely denied.  Though in the end Theo calls himself a nihilist, he leaves the door open for God and an afterlife. 

What redeems the “cesspool” of life, Theo comes to see, is art, illusory as it may be, for it is in art that reality strikes up against the ideal, and it is in that space that we glimpse a mysterious something that transcends the human tragedy and the “wreck of time.”

And what redeems The Goldfinch, for all its failures, is the way it weaves great works of art through its narrative, reminding us, as Theo comes to see, how beautiful objects can speak to us past the limitations of time, space, and mortality.

Thus in the first chapter, titled “Boy with a Skull,” Theo’s mother shows him Hal’s painting of the same name just moments before a terrorist explosion rocks the museum, killing her, turning Theo’s like upside down, and thrusting him into a future in which his mother’s absence becomes his constant psychological companion.

In that chapter, his mother, an art lover and student of art history, also delivers a commentary on “The Anatomy Lesson,” in which a cadaver, laid out on a table, is being dissected, surrounded by students and doctors in a medical school.  In chapter two, titled “The Anatomy Lesson,” Theo learns the lessons of loss in the immediate aftermath of his mother’s death.  As the painting exposes the stark mortality of every individual life, so Theo continues to be haunted by his mother’s death just as we are all required to live our own lives in death’s shadow.

But the painting Theo’s mother had really come to see that fateful day is “The Goldfinch” by Fabritius, a trompe l’oeil of a goldfinch “chained to a perch by its twig of an ankle.”  In the 17^th century goldfinches were popular as indoor pets, chained to their feeders in this fashion, instead of being caged as pet birds are today.  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goldfinch_(painting))  A trompe l’oeil is a realistic painting that “deceives the eye” into seeing it as an actual object.  Theo’s mother first loved a reproduction of the painting in an art book she had as a child.  These details become significant later when Hobie, a furniture refinisher who becomes Theo’s surrogate father and the one stable point in his chaotic life, reflects on the value of art even if it is a copy or fake, and when Theo reflects on the value of art even if it is an illusion, because it saves us from gross reality.

The painting of the goldfinch also symbolizes Theo himself, chained to his time and place; chained to his life circumstances; chained to his addictions; chained to the painting itself, which he takes from the museum and has to hide and later rescue; chained to the memory of his mother; chained to a “self one does not want” and “a heart one cannot help.”

The painting thus represents layers and layers of reality and layers and layers of illusion.  The reality of a goldfinch chained to a wall is almost repulsive, but somehow the painting, the deceptive copy of reality, redeems that grossness, that “cesspool,” as Theo calls human reality. 

And the painting, which becomes Theo’s burden, also becomes his salvation, as it lifts him “above the surface of life” and teaches him who he is.  Surrounded by secrets and lies the painting becomes the means of Theo’s redemption, and such is the paradox at the heart of the novel—how truth cannot be separated from falsehood, good from evil, beauty from corruption, love from loathing, life from death.

Ironically, Theo’s friend/enemy, Boris, a Russian immigrant who had lived for a while in Indonesia, converted to Islam, and been given the Arabic name Badr al-Dine (“Badr” means “light”), for all his darkness—drug addiction, crime—becomes the means by which the painting is rescued and Theo is saved from punishment for having innocently removed the painting from the museum in the aftermath of the explosion.  And it is the light that draws Theo’s mother to both the paintings that she loves (“that clear pure daylight” in “The Goldfinch”) and those that she hates (that “radioactive” quality of the corpse in “The Anatomy Lesson”). 

No light without darkness, no darkness without light; no imagination without reality, no reality without imagination; no truth without illusion; no illusion without truth.

A Christmas Carol

I’ve seen it so many times on stage, screen, and TV, but I just read Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol  for the first time.  I was immediately struck by its combination of gothic tale, light comedy, and conversion narrative.

Originally published in 1843 A Christmas Carol is subtitled “Being a Ghost Story of Christmas,” thus introducing a contrast between the darkness of the gothic tradition and the coming of the light celebrated at Christmas and at the Winter Solstice.  If the Scrooge of the first part of the story represents the darkest time of year and the world before Christ, then the Scrooge of the last part represents the return of the sun and the birth of the Christian savior.

The humor is introduced early as Marley is pronounced “as dead as a doornail” and a full paragraph is devoted to light-hearted discussion of the somewhat irreverent simile.  Comic caricature combines with melodrama as the rest of the story unfolds, following the well-known patterns of gothic tale and conversion narrative.

The gothic plot typically begins in rational reality, proceeds to an encounter with the irrational, and concludes with either destruction or escape.  Thus does the materialistic, greedy, hard-hearted Scrooge, after encountering the ghost of his dead partner, Jacob Marley, and the spirits of Christmas past, present, and future, confront his doomed life of avarice, bitterness, and loneliness.  In this version of the gothic tale, the hero can choose his fate, and Scrooge chooses to reject his doom in favor of a redeemed life of generosity, open-heartedness, community, and love.

The secular ghost story thus converges with the religious story of conversion and redemption.  The traditional Christian narrative typically begins with a sinner, proceeds to a conversion experience, including confession and atonement, and concludes with salvation.  Although A Christmas Carol is more secular than religious, it parallels the traditional Christian story, which underlies Scrooge’s conversion to the Christmas spirit.

While observing the conventions of both traditions, Dickens lightens the melodrama with humorous exaggeration and jocularity, making it impossible to take either ghosts or religion too seriously.  The essence of the Christmas “spirit” in A Christmas Carol is human, not supernatural: human compassion, love, celebration, and merry-making.

A sub-plot is the story of the Cratchitt family, struggling in poverty but bound together in love.  Their story also loosely follows a familiar pattern, the success story, which begins in hard-working, virtuous poverty, proceeds to opportunity, and concludes with success.  In this case the opportunity is the windfall of Scrooge’s conversion, which leads to a raise in salary for Bob Cratchitt and life-saving care for Tiny Tim.

Part of the popularity of Dickens’ classic is its use of familiar, popular narratives; part of it is the sentimentalism; part of it is the humor; and part of it is the secularism.  As familiar and popular as is the Christmas story in the Gospel of Luke, it is the secular message that transcends any particular religion and speaks to the non-religious as well as the religious, for all can appreciate the human story of redemption.

There is a political message, as well.  As Republicans currently seek to protect the wealthy at the expense of the poor and speak cynically of freeloaders at the public trough when it is their own policies that have reduced opportunity and lowered wages, it is hard not to see Scrooge as a hard-hearted Republican hoarder of wealth greatly in need, not only of honoring Christmas in his heart and keeping it all year, but also of a political form of redemption. May it be so.  And may it be a Merry Christmas!