Donna Tartt: The Goldfinch

This is a shorter analysis because I truly despised this awful book. Don't read this if you liked the novel. You have been warned. 

*****

If you think smoking, drinking, drugs, vomit, crime, and cruelty are cool, this is the book for you. The writing is gorgeous, if exhausting and overblown, but it's in the service of the most atrocious characters. The plot is strong but inflated to easily triple the size it needed to be, maybe quadruple. The narrative dribbles along in slow motion and is full of pointlessly baroque scenes and entire massive chapters that go nowhere. Pace your work, writers of the world.

The main character is by far the worst thing about the book, after all the vomit. Have I mentioned the endless vomit scenes? He has no spine and makes no decisions and in no way drives the story. All he does is lie around being squalid, very nearly ruins the life of the kind man who took him in when he was homeless, and follows others around doing whatever they want him to do. For the denouement, he gets shut into a hotel for weeks a country away. I'd do the same. But even then, he does nothing. He never looks at his phone, then mysteriously destroys it by plugging it in. (This is only one of many dozens of examples of impossible things shoehorned into the story purely for narrative convenience.) He never calls home to explain where he is or what's going on. He even fails to flee because his crime boss best buddy has his passport and he can't figure out how to replace it. He writes suicide notes then can't do that either. 

This terrible useless character makes two active choices the whole novel long: one, he saves a dog, very good--there's a whole book called Save the Cat that explains why this is a good thing for a writer to do for an otherwise irredeemable character. Two, he shoots a guy. Everything else, he sort of falls into it accidentally or acts like he's being pushed into it, including the actual stealing of the painting that drives the entire novel. He has a pointless adolescent crush on a manic pixie dream girl but he never speaks of it or or acts on it in any way except by giving little gifts. He steals from his friend and business partner and very nearly ruins the man's entire life. He's the most useless character I've ever seen in fiction. I even wondered whether Tartt was somehow playing off Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, because nobody ever shuts up about it, but no! The novel has no connection to it.

This is an overblown, self-indulgent, beautifully written, well plotted, vastly over-inflated paean to a worthless lump of a character and descriptions of vomit in infinite loving ways. The buffalo chicken vomited onto a white carpet springs to mind. Or the time when the main character feels like he vomited a quart of lemon juice. Nobody ever needs to hear this much about that and I can't think what would induce someone to write it. Lusting after squalor is not worthy of time or energy.

That said, the plot about the painting drove the story and made me stick with the novel to the point where I read the entire thing in one day because I had to find out what happened. I did not see a good way out for this terrible character, though of course anyone else could think up great ways to get the painting returned. Mail it to the museum, just as the first example that leaps to mind. It's just more evidence that he can't think his way out of any situation at all. It's an artificial obstacle and that is extremely annoying. How can a story that leans so hard on plot as one of its own redeeming features have so many enormous plot holes?

I read for character, generally. I despised this character. I found him lazy, weak, and worthless. I did not see anything sympathetic about him at all. What makes a character good to read about is CHOICE. Choices, consequences, choices, consequences. Who you are is what you choose to do. He neither chooses his situations nor gets himself out of them, right up until the very last few pages, when he goes around making amends for the harm he has done.

Lots of people adore this novel. I think they must be reading for the writing and not the character or the story. Or they're in love with bleakness and alcoholism and drug use and vomit as some kind of gritty realism, maybe? It bothers me because of the utter cheapness and weakness, the way these things so often seem to get checked off as though a list is issued at the beginning of a literary novel. Here's your list: put in drugs, alcoholism, death, neglect, body horror, pain, isolation, cruelty, weakness, infidelity, crime, guns, on and on. 

I have things to say about these choices in literary fiction and the damning things they say about our literary culture, but that's probably for another day. Or never, realistically. I simply can't figure out why anyone would recommend this book to me when it is everything I hate in the world and in fiction. And I can't imagine anyone who has actually suffered through these kinds of behaviors in real life wanting to read about them either. I would never spend a moment I didn't have to with someone so self-pitying and self-indulgent and self-destructive, especially if the person doesn't really exist and therefore is entirely optional in our lives. I'm feeling nauseous even writing about this book for this long.