mallorys_camera | Solstice at Last

Finished The Goldfinch. Wrote

If The Goldfinch can be said to have a flaw, it's that it's that rare novel that's both totally immersive and exceedingly long. (Seven hundred and seventy-one pages in print; a whopping 3,300 on the i-Device on which I read it.) Once you get caught up in its spell -- that takes a few pages -- you don't want to put it down.

But, of course, even if you do have the kind of lifestyle that allows you to disappear unremarked into a book for three days, it's a virtually impossible task. Most readers simply don't have that kind of fortitude. They start to zone out -- some sooner, some later. They feel the need to skim, and they justify their flagging attention span by developing impatience with Tartt's extraordinary wealth of detail, with the numerous character flaws and inconsistencies in Tartt's protagonists, with the clunkier plot twists of the caper part of the story. (News alert: Donna Tartt ain't no Elmore Leonard.)

If I had to summarize the book, I'd say it's a catalogue of all the different species of guilt that motivate the human psyche. Guilt was the catalyst in Tartt's first novel The Secret History as well, but in The Goldfinch, it becomes a veritable Linnaean taxonomy. There's junkie guilt; there's criminal guilt; there's the guilt you feel when you mislead people who've come through for you whom you know to be good and true. There's conventional guilt over the failure to live up to parental expectations, as well as the guilty pleasure of watching yourself star in a modern remake of The Masque of the Red Death, reflected in a parabolic mirror, that happens when you deliberately throw society's expectations by the wayside. Most of all, though, there's survivor's guilt that acts as a kind of caesura to the tempo of normalacy.

Of course, all novels about guilt are also novels about redemption. In The Goldfinch, redemption is a literal act that has to do with its titular masterpiece as much as a figurative act transforming its self-destructive protagonist Theo in its positively Tolstoy-esque final chapter.

Reviewers have described The Goldfinch as Dickensian. I suppose that's true. The Great Expectations homage is obvious in Tartt's affectionate conscription of "Pippa" for the Lost Love (though Pippa herself is more damaged Agnes Wickfield than Estrella), though I'd say the greater structural influence is The Christmas Carol. Dickens wrote serials that lived or died on their plot twists so that readers would line up to buy the magazines they appeared in the day they came out. Emotional consistency didn't matter all that much to Dickens, but it does to Tartt. It's the glue that binds the ridiculous coincidences and other unwieldy plot elements together. Effective for the most part. If you read s-l-o-w-l-y.

Sat across from Seraphina (NHRN), Zach (NHRN) and Charlotte (NHRN) at the staff Xmas party and had a rather jolly time gabbing at them across some B+ Italian food.

Reverend Cal footed the bill but did not make an appearance. I suppose that means more people are going to be fired after Xmas.

I like Seraphina, a big booming woman with a big booming voice who grew up in Queens and went to SUNY New Paltz, and ran away to California for a couple of years, and owned a Little Store of her own for a decade and a half in Kingston -- it sold accessories -- another one of those pedigreed Hudson Valley towns that's sunk into 21st century squalor. "Well, you know, Patrizia," she remarked at the meeting where we pitched her the Smoothie Cart Project back whenever that was. "Customers are really dumb. You gotta tell them what to do."

Zach is a hunter and fisherman who spends every spare moment kayaking on the Hudson and is filled with fascinating naturalistic facts such as the location of every nesting pair of American Bald Eagles in the Hudson River Valley. After many decades of invisibility, coyotes and bears are now quite a common sight in the smaller villages and towns, he tells me, a fact that Zach blames on encroaching civilization although I'm inclined toward an explanation that's quite the opposite -- surely the population of these towns is diminishing, isn't it? (I'm too lazy to check.) So the wildlife is moving back into the margins.

Charlotte is a quiet woman, a little bit older than I am, whom life has not treated particularly well, with a sweet, passive disposition. She's actually the one I would start socializing with if I had transportation. We have similar tastes in travel destinations (Tuscany, Provence) and indie movies.

But socializing did not put me in a better frame of mind toward the organization itself. I'm over Pollyanna. I don't want to put out any kind of real energy toward them.

I'm off this morning for two days with Swain 1. I really like Swain 1 and we have entertaining activities planned, so it's perplexing to me that I am literally sitting here thinking, Maybe I can call him and tell him I've gotten sick... Is it that my hermit-like tendencies are accentuated by the dark and the cold or am I really turning into Ted Kazinski sans explosives? But today is the official solstice (I think), marking the plateau on the other side of which the days start to grow longer. There's a psychological benefit to that. Maybe I'll start to feel more social.