NP:The Goldfinch

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Has anyone here read Donna Tartt's new book? I read it recently and thoroughly enjoyed Tartt's wonderful ability to evoke specific settings though characters and  details - from the bedrooms in a snobby Upper East Side apartment, to a cross-country Greyhound bus ride. It's a dense, satisfying novel about love and loyalty on a personal level. It's certainly not a novel of social criticism, or any deeper themes. Still, it has a couple of points of comparison to Bleeding Edge.

First, for the large sections of the novel set in Manhattan, we're solely in the company of the wealthy - the Upper East Side old money, as opposed to Upper West Side newer-monied set. Despite Maxine being somewhat of a critic of the yupster culture, and her sons quasi-preterite, by virtue of their relative innocence, Maxine is a solid participant in that culture. In The Goldfinch, the protagonist's mother, who lives on Sutton Place and sends him to an exclusive private school, is a Midwest transplant, and therefore an outsider to the culture, while enjoying its perks. Like Maxine, the protagonist of Goldfinch critiques from the inside. But while Pynchon's descriptions of Manhattan are oddball and precious, Tartt's are spot-on - the smell in the back seat of a scrungy cab, one character's predilection for stumbling out of Bloomingdale's and into the Subway Inn - and, however elite the settings, they're much more authentic.

Second, they're both 9/11 novels. Tartt has an interesting way of evoking 9/11, using a fictional act of terrorism as a proxy. The one flight of fancy in the book is that the time period - which spans 14 years - seems oddly frozen in the soon-to-be-present, or even a parallel time. Pynchon describes the day, without the terror. Tartt describes the terror, without the day.

Third, lovable Russian (well, Ukrainian) mobsters get trotted out in the Goldfinch, as well. If that's the new face of NYC, as seen from the literary world, then it's our new mayor's role to change that.

Laura
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l