The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt: Curl Up On the Couch Reading

I rarely take on books more than 500 pages, largely because I fear they will bog down, as they often do, and because there are so many good books to read, I rarely dally with anything too long. Not to mention a 100 page rule – if the book isn’t interesting enough by then, I’m done.

Oddly, this season alone, several great writers have released very long books, including the previously reviewed and much admired Elizabeth Gilbert, and Donna Tartt at 770 pages [the Booker winner Luminaries tops the chart at 880!]

For those of you also fans of Tartt's first novel "The Secret History" released twenty years ago, her just third novel is long awaited and has received mostly positive reviews. Thus, as the days grow shorter and winds pick up, seemed a good time to curl up on the couch with a great big book.

It is truly big, not only in heft but in depth of human experience. A few characters dominate the narrative and they are all a captivating. My favorite: Boris, a ne’er do well Russian émigré, dark at heart but light of spirit, whose voice is pitch-perfect and often hilarious and shows up at the oddest and most essential moments. 

However this novel is about Theo, orphaned at thirteen when a bomb blast rocks the Metropolitan Museum and in an odd twist of fate ends up walking away with a famous painting, The Goldfinch, by the Dutch painter, Carel Fabritius. You may remember the little gem: a golden bird chained at one leg to his perch. Ah, a metaphor is born.

Theo, chained to the memory of his mother’s tragic death, survivor guilt, the post-traumatic stress that ensues, to his self-serving, gambling-addicted father, and to loneliness. And, as it turns out, chained to the painting itself, which serves as both anchor and tormentor, and ultimately salvation.

Tartt’s descriptive prose is scintillating. Many scenes, occasionally too long, and dialogues, also occasionally too long, nonetheless enthrall the reader, as we move through a decade of Theo’s personal apocalypse. Through drug and alcohol-ridden escapades, thugs, well-meaning socialites, unrequited love, lost hopes, lost loved ones, and ultimate redemption, Tartt now and then slips an allusion to Dickens, as if the reader were not already aware that this novel is an homage to Oliver Twist and David Copperfield, among others.

I loved Dickens for the same reason that I so much appreciated this book – for the detail and the vividness of characters. We take the journey with them. Tartt peppers the narrative with profound observances related to relationships and the supremacy of friendship and concludes with some mighty fine existential stream of consciousness. She also deftly illuminates the weaknesses of the social services system, and the adult failure to fully understand the mind of an adolescent, as well as the human kindnesses that occasionally make up for that.

Curl up on the couch reading, for sure, but make sure to buckle your seatbelt, because the trip from NYC to Las Vegas to Amsterdam and back again is a wild ride, bumpier and faster than you might imagine and worth your time.

A Dickens of a tale...

"It was all very different from the crowded, complicated, and overly formal atmosphere of the Barbours, where everything was rehearsed and scheduled like a Broadway production, an airless perfection from which Andy had been in constant retreat, scuttling to his bedroom like a frightened squid. By contrast Hobie lived and wafted like some great sea mammal in his own mild atmosphere, the dark brown of tea stains and tobacco, where every clock in the house said something different and time didn't actually correspond to the standard measure but instead meandered along at its own sedate tick-tock, obeying the pace of his antique-crowded back-water, far form the factory-built, epoxy-glued version of the world."

Could be Dickens, yes? Propelled into the future, although a future not very different from 19th century London. However this is NYC, in the new millennium, but the writing might as well have come from the quill pen. Not Dickens, Donna Tartt, in the new novel, "The Goldfinch." I'm just half-way through nearly 800 pages. I rarely commit to novels so long, feeling always that they don't need to be, and I'm not convinced this one needs to be, except for the remarkable narrative propulsion, so each page is devoured, every minuscule detail of value. The tale of an orphan, orphaned repeatedly, struggling to correspond to rules he doesn't understand and dealing with demons and fears he cannot, will not, confide.

It's a marvel, such writing. Rare. No wonder Tartt took ten years to write this book, as the two others: just three all together in twenty years. When I finish, probably next week, I will review, but wanted you to have an advance word. For those of you who loved Dickens once long ago, you have another chance to embed yourself deeply in characters and setting and the constant sense of foreboding, needing to know what comes next, thus turning every page with anticipation. A marvel. A true Dickens of a tale.

The Power of Twitter

I've come to love Twitter. I follow writers and book reviewers, and a few humorists for good fun, and of course the great and glorious Maria Popova @Brainpickings. I learn, I link to interesting facts and stories, I feel part of a literate community.

So imagine my surprise when I tweeted about reading a great novel by Iris Murdoch [Under the Net] that I'd not read before, and got a reply from Iris Murdoch. Specifically, @IrisMurdoch. Dame Iris passed years ago. And yet she tweeted to little me, from the great beyond.

I followed the lead and discovered that @IrisMurdoch is the Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies at Kingston University, UK, in conjunction with the Iris Murdoch Society. They must carefully track via keywords all that is written about the great writer, and respond accordingly. Out of curiosity, I "followed" @IrisMurdoch and @IrisMurdoch now follows me @ocbookblogger.

Suddenly I feel a greater responsibility to tweet intelligently, and meaningfully, more than even before, as Dame Iris is watching. Although, were Dame Iris alive, I'm not sure what she would make of this mode of communication. Likely she would scoff at it.

What a hoot! Who would have imagined that I might reach a point in my life that a writer of such renown would be reading my tweets? Metaphorically of course, or as Dame Iris might have thought, metaphysically. Whatever the descriptor, in effect, a connection has been made, and it makes me proud.

Thus, the power of technology. The power of Twitter. The power of one writer reaching out from the grave to inspire another. I'd like to think that in another life and time, Dame Iris and I would have been, if not friends, friendly acquaintances. I would admire her spirit and existential wisdom; she would appreciate my perseverance and good cheer.

A lovely fantasy, compliments of Twitter.

Booker Winner

Writer Eleanor Catton

How wonderful that a lesser known writer like New Zealander Eleanor Catton won the Booker for her novel "The Luminaries" which only just published in this country today and might otherwise have faced obscurity.

I'm told she is the youngest ever to win [28] and the book is the longest [over 800 pages.] She is in great company now, on the heels of Hilary Mantel last year, Julian Barnes the year before, and in the recent past, Margaret Atwood, Yann Martel, A. S. Byatt and Iris Murdoch.

She is also a triple threat: talented, award-winning and beautiful. I might hate her if I wasn't so pleased for her.

The first Man Booker award for fiction in 1969 went to a writer named Newby for a novel named "Something to Answer For" proving once again that even with a prestigious award, a book might disappear from the shelves and/or the public consciousness.

The Booker has a history of naming more eclectic titles as winners, although consistently good writers, and the National Book Awards have also become very hard to predict or comprehend. Awards are not the measure of talent nor skill, and too often political, but I daresay less important to writers than celebrities, even if an award will catapult a book to far greater sales. Writers simply have to write and they can only hope for readers.

Lady Iris

Iris Murdoch

Swamped by the piles of new books, and so many good ones this season [must reads: Elizabeth Gilbert and Alice McDermott] I fled for a break back to the grand dame, Iris Murdoch. Lady Iris wrote 24 novels and lots of philosophy, and I've read much but many more to go. Finally got to "Under the Net" a Booker winner and what a winner it is.
Murdoch writes literary page-turners with eccentric and eclectic characters and simple plots that often go a bit wild and often hilariously funny. However, within her deceptively simple narratives, short sentences and easy dialogue, there is buried treasure - deep sometimes dark explorations of human connections and Net is a great example.
I found myself often stopping to re-read a few pages, in fact I had to go back several times, because I was swept on the current of a fairly linear plot when I realized that between the lines was a fascinating depiction of the power of language and communication, the losses of love and friendship and trust when people make presumptions based on circumstance, and the self-deception game we all play.
Read Iris Murdoch for the fun of it and then enjoy the pondering that will surely follow.
I especially recommend "The Sea, The Sea" and "The Bell" my favorite, and the more well known, "The Black Knight." I also recommend watching the decade old film, Iris, where Judy Dench and Kate Winslet play Lady Iris old and young, a  truly touching film.
Now and then, there is nothing like going back to the greats.

Another Beginning

Should anyone be watching, or reading, I have moved my blog to a new blogspot which I will shortly integrate into my new website: randykraftwriter.com.
Here, hopefully, blogs will build on the tradition of philosophical ramblings and all things writing and reading. Follow me here and @ocbookblogger.

Literary Mystery

aka J. K. Rowling

Bookstore shelves are overflowing with mysteries – it’s a popular genre not only because of the element of suspense but because most mysteries, and these include espionage thrillers, are plot driven, not a whole lot of descriptive prose or literary technique, thus easy to read and often just plain fun. The proverbial page-turner. I was always a fan of English mysteries like Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie and the great Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and although not well known, W. Somerset Maugham wrote terrific espionage tales, and of course I devoured Nancy Drew as a girl.

In the last twenty years, the selection of mysteries has exploded, thus sometimes difficult to find just the right one, and I tend to favor more literary works – not a snob exactly, just protective of my reading time. Although often disturbing, I admired the “Girl With the Dragon Tattoo trilogy,” and I am a fan of Henning Menkell and Elizabeth George, so once I discovered, as we all did recently, that a first mystery novel was in fact the work of JK Rowling, my curiosity was piqued. The critics were right: it’s a very good murder mystery with fully formed and diverse characters and an ending that mostly works, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading her often elegant prose and detailed descriptions of people and place. I also liked the protagonist: Cormoran Strike, a wounded veteran, the bastard child of a celebrity, a man with heart who struggles with his own demons, but not to the detriment of the mystery at hand. Another great touch was the introduction of the fledgling assistant-detective, Robyn, a temp who has always wanted to be a private investigator, and Rowling has successfully set up Strike and Robyn as a continuing tale, so watch for #2 of “The Cuckoo’s Calling” [by Robert Galbraith]. 

I will say that Rowling's inherent optimism operates in these pages, as it did in Harry Potter despite the progressively bleak story lines, so unlike her Swedish counterparts, she will never wear you down and make you want to crawl under the covers and weep for humanity. 

            Just before I read JKR, I read a novel entitled “Don’t I Know You” by Karen Shepard, published some years ago but only recently risen to the top of my pile. Not a traditional whodunnit, rather a literary work with a mystery at its core. The story unfolds via three different characters who all have something to do with the death of one woman. This is solid, often riveting psychological drama that delves deeply into parenting and romantic relationships, and the dark side of mental illness. The book takes place in 1976, well before Internet, emails or cell phones, at a time when communications were more often elusive or contradictory. While I lingered with JRK, enjoying the steady methodical connection of the dots, this novel is a page-turner, you simply have to know who did what to whom and why.

One other mystery crossed my desk recently: a self-published whodunnit that takes place in Laguna Beach. I confess that I did not finish reading “South on Pacific Coast Highway” by Gary Paul Corcoran because I found the language a bit too clichéd, the ghosts of too many gumshoes hovering on every page, but the setting and some of the people will feel extremely familiar to the SoCal reader and it seems a good yarn. Corcoran, who lives in LA now, lived down here for many years, so he knows of what he writes and he writes with ease, so if you are looking for a grittier mystery with a familiar locale, the Kindle edition is available at Amazon for just $3.99 and I’m sure Laguna Beach Books, if they don’t have it, can get it.

Stay posted on all things reading and writing here, on my blog at www.ocinsite.com, and on Twitter: @OCBookBlogger.