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It strikes me that The Goldfinch is really a novel about guilt, an insight I have yet to see elaborated upon in any of the innumerable reviews and analyses I've read of the novel, as I flit between digitized versions of Old Media exegeses (mostly subscription-based these days) and ramblings on Amazon and Good Reads from the proletarian reader base ("I only gave this book one star. It was really long. How can anybody be expected to struggle through 800 pages?")
Theo commits the crime that gives its name to the novel in the first 100 pages of the book. Invisible strings holding the fictional Universe together become unhinged in an unexpected way. He becomes incredibly disoriented, has a Fateful Encounter, and that Encounter leads to a crime that acts as a propellant for that moment of unreality, expands it into a mantle of smoky distortion that eclipses and subsumes Theo's subsequent life. Theo spends the rest of the novel searching without luck for something as real as the thing he has stolen so he can find another central core of reality. Looking for ideograms in clouds, as I like to call that process because I, too, spend huge amounts of time wandering around, sucking in random details – something Theo does quite often throughout the novel, which the one star Amazon reviewers find really boring.
I'm forcing myself to read the book very s-l-o-w-l-y although my impulse is to lock myself in a closet and devour the whole thing in three days.
But guilt, yes. That one act for which there can be no redemption. Yes.
###
I dreamed about Marybeth last night. She was telling me, We can't be friends anymore --
But why? I asked. What can I do to change your mind?
This final, irrevocable verdict from one of the few people on the face of the planet who actually matters to me was just devastating.
And I kept waking up at intervals throughout the night as though awaiting visitations from the Spirits of the Christmas Past, Present and Future Perfect Subjunctive to be hit by the revelation anew: Marybeth has withdrawn her sponsorship for your Visa application to the human race...
It was a rough night.
###
Also yesterday I decided that it was not, after all, a very good idea to give up on the next seven months of my life. I corralled l'il Jeremy and we repaired to the Richard Russo cafe to make our phone call to the Albany office --
"The organization is just too dysfunctional," I said.
"This is rather different from what you were telling me a month ago when we met in Albany," said the Organizational Representative.
"It is," I admitted. "We went to some trouble to set up a transportation scheme for getting us to the mall for the gift wrap fundraiser we're doing. They signed off on it weeks ago. And then at the very last minute they arbitrarily and with no explanation pulled their permission. And it just kind of struck us – We have absolutely no operational budget, we're incredibly marginalized within the organization, they're acting as though they're doing us a favor to let us work there, and it's not the situation we thought we were signing up for."
The Organizational Representative agreed that it sounded... dysfunctional.
So, we're looking to hop to other projects. L'il Jeremy wants to go back to St. Louis where he can bunk with his parents. I'd like to find something in business development more-or-less locally since moving would be a logistical nightmare at this particular juncture. There are a lot of interesting assignments in NYC but that's way too far-- and too expensive -- to commute to, and I doubt that I could find digs that I could afford in the city itself. Plus there are the kitties whom in a Mrs. Macawber-ish display of emotion, I will never desert.
Locally? There is an urban redevelopment housing analysis study at Vassar that my Public Policy master's qualifies me to do. And actually, I like that kind of work.
Anyway, nothing's going to change until at least the end of January. A doable planning horizon. And I suppose it's within the realm of possibility that something could change at Pollyanna and my brilliant business plan and comic book recruitment scheme could seem viable again.
I'm not discouraged. More perplexed and bemused...
Theo commits the crime that gives its name to the novel in the first 100 pages of the book. Invisible strings holding the fictional Universe together become unhinged in an unexpected way. He becomes incredibly disoriented, has a Fateful Encounter, and that Encounter leads to a crime that acts as a propellant for that moment of unreality, expands it into a mantle of smoky distortion that eclipses and subsumes Theo's subsequent life. Theo spends the rest of the novel searching without luck for something as real as the thing he has stolen so he can find another central core of reality. Looking for ideograms in clouds, as I like to call that process because I, too, spend huge amounts of time wandering around, sucking in random details – something Theo does quite often throughout the novel, which the one star Amazon reviewers find really boring.
I'm forcing myself to read the book very s-l-o-w-l-y although my impulse is to lock myself in a closet and devour the whole thing in three days.
But guilt, yes. That one act for which there can be no redemption. Yes.
I dreamed about Marybeth last night. She was telling me, We can't be friends anymore --
But why? I asked. What can I do to change your mind?
This final, irrevocable verdict from one of the few people on the face of the planet who actually matters to me was just devastating.
And I kept waking up at intervals throughout the night as though awaiting visitations from the Spirits of the Christmas Past, Present and Future Perfect Subjunctive to be hit by the revelation anew: Marybeth has withdrawn her sponsorship for your Visa application to the human race...
It was a rough night.
Also yesterday I decided that it was not, after all, a very good idea to give up on the next seven months of my life. I corralled l'il Jeremy and we repaired to the Richard Russo cafe to make our phone call to the Albany office --
"The organization is just too dysfunctional," I said.
"This is rather different from what you were telling me a month ago when we met in Albany," said the Organizational Representative.
"It is," I admitted. "We went to some trouble to set up a transportation scheme for getting us to the mall for the gift wrap fundraiser we're doing. They signed off on it weeks ago. And then at the very last minute they arbitrarily and with no explanation pulled their permission. And it just kind of struck us – We have absolutely no operational budget, we're incredibly marginalized within the organization, they're acting as though they're doing us a favor to let us work there, and it's not the situation we thought we were signing up for."
The Organizational Representative agreed that it sounded... dysfunctional.
So, we're looking to hop to other projects. L'il Jeremy wants to go back to St. Louis where he can bunk with his parents. I'd like to find something in business development more-or-less locally since moving would be a logistical nightmare at this particular juncture. There are a lot of interesting assignments in NYC but that's way too far-- and too expensive -- to commute to, and I doubt that I could find digs that I could afford in the city itself. Plus there are the kitties whom in a Mrs. Macawber-ish display of emotion, I will never desert.
Locally? There is an urban redevelopment housing analysis study at Vassar that my Public Policy master's qualifies me to do. And actually, I like that kind of work.
Anyway, nothing's going to change until at least the end of January. A doable planning horizon. And I suppose it's within the realm of possibility that something could change at Pollyanna and my brilliant business plan and comic book recruitment scheme could seem viable again.
I'm not discouraged. More perplexed and bemused...
