markm reviewed The goldfinch by Donna Tartt
Review of 'The goldfinch' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
I think I see the strength of this novel, but I had a problem with it and I didn’t know and may not know now exactly what it is. I will write about it to see if anything turns up. The novel is long with some complexity. It is written as an account by the protagonist of his early life. The characters are very well realized and the author’s eye for detail in character, dialogue, and setting is excellent. The story is a tragic one and is many different things. It is a coming-of-age story, a love story, and a buddy story. It is sometimes funny. It is an elaborate, minute, and horrifying account of drug addiction. Also, the McGuffin, a small painting, is asked to carry a heavy load of significance. It is key to the plot’s turns, but its actual significance is, for me, unclear. The story churns …
I think I see the strength of this novel, but I had a problem with it and I didn’t know and may not know now exactly what it is. I will write about it to see if anything turns up. The novel is long with some complexity. It is written as an account by the protagonist of his early life. The characters are very well realized and the author’s eye for detail in character, dialogue, and setting is excellent. The story is a tragic one and is many different things. It is a coming-of-age story, a love story, and a buddy story. It is sometimes funny. It is an elaborate, minute, and horrifying account of drug addiction. Also, the McGuffin, a small painting, is asked to carry a heavy load of significance. It is key to the plot’s turns, but its actual significance is, for me, unclear. The story churns along to its perhaps predictable ending, and then, in the last chapter, the author essentially makes an attempt to summarize the story’s significance through the voices of the protagonist, his Buddha-like mentor, and his criminal friend. But, to quote Pee-Wee Herman, “What’s the significance?”. If I had to pull as much as I could with my inadequate abilities out of this summary, i.e. summarize the summary, I guess I would say, “Life sucks and then you die, but there will be art.” Does the narrator really believe that he played a role in saving the painting that he stole himself? Should we be astonished that Boris avoids all consequences for his criminality? Is the narrator ultimately untouched by his murder simply because Boris said that the dead man was a bad person? One could assassinate many of the novel’s main characters and say the same thing. Several reviewers have compared this novel to Dickens, and I see what they mean, perhaps I am being too concrete. Finally, the author has Hobie say that all of In Search of Lost Time is in some ways about a moment when Swann falls in love with Odette because she resembles a girl in a painting by Botticelli that Swann had only seen in reproduction. I wonder if that is true. If Proust was right, and the only heaven on earth is the remembered past, what if our past is just theft, deception, a drunken stupor, and a murder we’ve blown off?
[Note of 9-29-22: It occurs to me that not only was the character Hobie correct but that a feature of Proust's great work is that many small parts of it are an encapsulation of the entire work - from the madeleine on.]
