The Goldfinch by
Donna Tartt
Book Review August 2014
A profoundly Christian Novel?
It is very difficult to like the main character! Theo is a
drunk and a drug addict (though his self-knowledge is so limited that he doesn’t
see himself as either), he sleeps around and swears endlessly and very directly
at people, he lies, steals and cheats. He could put you off buying antiques forever!
There’s a reason for this though – and I don’t think Tartt
is asking us to excuse him. His mother’s catastrophic death, followed by his
father’s, have destroyed his ability to expect any stability from life or
relationships. There are a lot of sudden deaths in this book: after Theo’s
mother and father’s come Andy’s and Mr Barbour’s – life is a series of
unpredictable disasters. Theo is thus caught in a desperate quest for lasting
relationships: in his heart he does not believe it can ever be successful.
His feelings about Pippa (the waif-like fellow victim of the
bomb blast that wrecked both their lives) are, as he comes to realise himself,
a projection of the desperation that both drives his quest and makes it
unrealisable – he deeply desires the love that is the only way he can ground
himself, and deeply fears it as he believes it will only let him down again.
Theo’s connection to Hobie is a relationship with the
stable, unconditional father he never had. His connection with to Mrs Barbour,
cold as she seems to us, is his reaching out to the mother who is gone. His
delight at being able to please her by proposing to her daughter Kitsey is
plainly about trying to regain his lost mother – though Kitsey in her own way
turns out to have inherited her mother’s aloofness in a different form.
His relationships with people his own age are however not
about the search for stability and security but the opposite. They are defiant
alliances made by the victims of the random destructiveness of the world. He
makes an alliance with Andy, the victim of incessant, undeserved,
life-threatening bullying at school and even at the hands of his own brother.
He makes an alliance with Boris who lives like a sociopath because he has moved
from country to country every few months of his short life and who like Theo is a victim of the drunken
rages of his father.
So the list of people Theo likes or respects is very short –
Hobie, Boris, Andy, Mrs Barbour... Apart from them, he sees everyone as a
manifestation of life’s vicious absurdity. All
the people who come to the antiques shop are liars and cheats, all his classmates are bullies, all the people who try to help him are
self-serving bores, all the people
who come up to him on his return to New York are predators, and so on. What a
terrifying world he inhabits!
This is the classic picture of a hurt person being unable
either to give or receive love. It was love that made you vulnerable to pain,
love that made you think life was worth living until randomly, viciously, it
was swept away. So you dare not love again, or the same will happen. You cannot
trust others who say they love you – they are only setting you up for more
pain. Is this the quicksand beneath the very rapid sinking of Theo’s declared
love for Kitsey? The terrible anxiety and resentment it provokes in him? Is
this why he chooses to love her and her mother Mrs Barbour – does their very
aloofness make them safer objects for his attachment?
No wonder then that there is a long passage of Theo’s
soliloquy on the emptiness of human life, the futility of every human
endeavour. It’s on pages 534-5 of the 2014 Abacus paperback edition – let’s
have it in full:
This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far
beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human
endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological
order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones
were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking
and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more
new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even
somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the
lose-lose game. Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged
moms. Oh, isn't he cute? Awww. Kids
shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited
them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip
replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at
the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the
artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human
predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and
golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars
and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got
worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their
neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable
organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and
dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and
devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and
communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves
forget it: where we were, what we were. But in a strong light there was no good
spin you could put on it. It was rotten top to bottom. Putting your time in at
the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your
retirement party; then chewing on your bed-sheet and choking on your canned
peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born—never to
have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything.
This is up there with the great soliloquies of Macbeth or
Hamlet and also has clear echoes of the Biblical Book of Ecclesiastes. It is expressed
with extraordinary power and with the vivid yet deathly clarity of the deeply
depressed – surely Tartt is writing with personal insight here. Yet Theo’s
conclusions are not the only ones that could be drawn from this survey of the Vanity
of Human Wishes. Couldn’t one also say that, since our lives are so
circumscribed by pain, futility and extinction, we ought to take all the more
care to be kind to one another, giving all the love and support we can muster
to each other in our brokenness? However Tartt’s duty as a novelist isn’t to
expound a philosophy, but to be true to her characters, and in this case she is
expressing the thoughts of one who is deeply damaged.
There’s a verse of Scripture that reminds me of this
passage, Hebrews chapter 2 verses 13-14:
Since the children have flesh and blood, (Jesus) too shared in their
humanity, so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of
death – that is, the devil – and free those who all their lives were held
captive by their fear of death.
“all their lives held captive by their fear of death” sounds
descriptive of Theo: the hideous wounds death has inflicted destabilise his
psyche, disable him from loving, and dump him into the despair of this vivid
passage. To Theo death seems so all-pervading, destroying everyone he cares
about, just as it does in Hebrews. This passage reads like Tartt’s own
meditation on the down side of this verse. Yet Hebrews also carries with it the
hope that redemption is possible, through suffering and death, in the sacrifice
of Jesus. More of this later...
In the story The Goldfinch comes in Theo’s mind to be a
bastion against this insidious, pervasive fear of death. It’s been around for
centuries, it’s outlived everyone who has ever seen it, it’s survived not just
one but two massive explosions unscathed. Neither its own creator nor Theo’s,
his mother, were able to survive, but The Goldfinch did. The Goldfinch seems to
show us the serenity of art, an object standing outside the current of time
that leads every human being to destruction. When Theo gets the picture back at
last, he compares its permanence to the transience of his own biological life
(p.754)
So why is it also a symbol of captivity? The bird’s brief
life is spent enchained to its perch, it can never be free. Pages 676-7 contain
Theo’s meditations on it as a symbol, not of bomb-proof security, but of
fragility and impermanence after he has lost it and no longer knows where it
is, who has it or how it is being looked after. Suddenly everything threatens
its delicate brushwork with irreparable damage. The Goldfinch has an amphibious
life, both the security of an archetypal existence beyond the power of this
world to destroy it, and yet also deeply susceptible to that very decay and
destruction that belong so emphatically to this world. For Theo it seems
representative both of his own wretched condition and of his longing to escape
it – just as the people in his life are either fellow victims of its terrible
destructive power or rescuers who he hopes may help him to escape from it.
Tartt has a number of references to existentialism amidst
all this angst – for example to Wind,
Sand and Stars (one of my own favourite books). Saint-Exupery’s philosophy
is that we must create meaning in a meaningless universe by imposing our own
order on it – by defying its forces in creating an aeropostal network, or
building great pyramids or some other work of human aspiration. Tartt quotes
Nietzsche: We have art in order not to
die from the truth. [i]
Death is the truth, art is something we can leave behind us to defy it. Tartt
has many more passages, such as that on page 780, that take us deeper into the
morass of death and anxiety inherent in human life.
So perhaps the Goldfinch is a symbol of this existential
crisis. It is both about the effort of art to transcend human futility and the
futility from which it seeks to escape. Is this then why it is tethered? It can
never fly, can never deliver the freedom for which we long? Existentialism is
therefore not a solution for the human condition, just as The Goldfinch cannot
be a solution for Theo’s condition, in fact when it is stolen by drug dealers
it becomes a symbol of the brokenness of his existence. Something more is
needed.
This something more finally arrives in Theo's life only when
he hits rock bottom. He is trapped in a hotel room, anxiously waiting for news
about a deal with vicious gangsters to return his beloved Goldfinch, isolated
from all human contact in a foreign country, not even knowing whether his
friends are alive or dead, in terrible fear and anxiety. It is at this point
that God speaks to him out of the silence around him, and he awakens to a sense
of purpose, of being loved, and of a need to change.
Here in fact it turns out to be Christianity that delivers
the goods for Theo. His name means one
who loves God, and it is only when God’s love for him becomes a reality that
Theodore is finally released to stop hurting himself and others. As the thriller
element in the novel comes to a crisis with Boris and Theo’s attempts to
recover The Goldfinch from gangsters, Boris comes out with a garbled Bible
story. The Prodigal Son, repentance, Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, Redemption and God bringing good out of evil are all
referenced. [ii]
Christmas Day is the day of Theo’s repentance – bells ringing and all (there is
a slightly corny element in the overstated symbolism here). It is only as he
gives up all hope of seeing The Goldfinch again or of dealing with the chaos
that has broken out in his life as he has sought for it that The Goldfinch
finally comes back. When we seek to save our life, we lose it, said Jesus, but
if we lose our lives we will find them again.
More redemption motifs follow: Transubstantiation (the
miracle of art is that a few strokes with a paintbrush are also a goldfinch,
and The Goldfinch is also a symbol of human defeat and aspiration, so it's at
least three things at once) and other references to communion, the Damascus
Road, It's a Wonderful Life – Theo
refers to the whole experience as his "conversion" (page 861) and he
tries to live it out by going back to people whom he has deceived to repair the
damage.
I'm not trying to say that Tartt is using her novel as
Christian propaganda, in fact there are Buddhist motifs in there too, though
not in such abundance. But when Tartt writes about Theo's deepest needs, when
she opens out the possibility of human freedom from the law of sin and death,
it is unavoidably Christian language that she draws upon. She believes that
Christian language is the language of the human heart at its most profound.
Here is a summary of Theo's philosophy from the last few pages of
the novel:
· There is an order that transcends this life
which we may as well call God.
· From it flows beauty, a divine messenger about
the transcendent, and love, ditto.
· This beauty / transcendence is conveyed by, but
not bound to, physical objects and people even though they are also subject to
transcience.
· This connection is like transubstantiation in
that physical objects such as blobs of paint can also be a feather on a wing.
· This life is complete shit but we can wade
through it with our heads high and our eyes fastened on the transcendent which
is both beyond us and all around us.
· We can't help what we are, what we want or what
befalls us. But we can look for a greater pattern in this transcendence and
find meaning even in all life's bad stuff.
Not everything about the book is wonderful. Some of the
descriptions don't work for me, for example. Lots of them come in threes with a
variation in each of the three and this I found irritating at times. It's very
hard to believe that the excessively intent observations Theo makes as he goes
to the gallery with his mother at the start of the book could really be the
observations of a pubescent boy, and sometimes when everything is made
indiscriminately so vivid there is a loss of light of light and shade – less
headroom for intenser moments to stand out. A good editor might have got rid of
a description of someone who is like a puffer fish, and like a cartoon strong
man, and like an inflatable model admiral: or asked how another character can
be both saturnine and spritely: or asked how Andy who we're told hardly ever
talks to anybody, regularly uses long words in conversation.
And there are some loose ends that don't get tied up, for
example a couple of New York collectors who put in a very sinister appearance
and seem to be closely involved with the fate of The Goldfinch – but we never
hear what becomes of them.
These however are minor niggles in the best contemporary
novel I have read for a very long time. This deserves to be a classic! The general
acclaim really seems to be justified, and how unusual it is to see that acclaim
given to what is in many respects a profoundly Christian Book.
I want to finish with Hobie because he is one of those very
rare characters in fiction, a genuinely good character who is nonetheless very
attractive. There is a short passage somewhere (while the two are working
together in Hobie’s workshop?) where Tartt almost describes him as a Jungian
archetype – the wise old man, though she stops short of calling him a wizard,
substituting “artisan.”
And what a job – repairing the old and damaged, salvaging
wrecked existence and restoring value. His goodness consists in complete,
unquestioning acceptance of Theo, even when he turns up in trouble in the
middle of the night, even when he has lied and cheated and implicated the
innocent Hobie in his double dealing. He deals in exactly the same
unconditional way with other strays like Pippa. His otherworldliness is a
symptom of his ability to lose himself totally in his work, devoting himself to
nurture and restoration in a labour of love. This seems to be the secret of his
inner wholeness.
And yes there are flaws. When Theo confesses to the frauds
he has committed, Hobie takes some of the responsibility, saying it all happened
because he didn’t want to know about Theo’s side of the business. He
deliberately left it all to Theo in spite of his lack of experience because he
didn’t want to be taken from his absorption in the craft he loved. But patient,
wise, affirming, gentle, accepting, kind, non-judgmental – Hobie is pretty much
the ideal father. He resembles the compassionate bishop of Les Miserables,
continuing to forgive and forgive again, long past the point where most of us
give up. He is a figure of grace – the grace that is not linked to desert but
gives for no other reason than because that is what grace does.
