NP:The Goldfinch

[Jack Waters]

I finished it a few weeks back and loved it. Certainly one of my favorite
reads of the year, and will re-read Bleeding Edge to see which one I liked
better -- I'm actually leaning toward The Goldfinch as the best new book I
read last year. Tartt's NY, as you said, was incredibly portrayed. I'm out
West, and she wrote about the settings out here better than many outsiders
have been able to.

I saw Theo acting like Hamlet in Dostoyevskian binds. I've recommended the
book to many others; I'm glad to see others have enjoyed it. "Pynchon
describes the day, without the terror. Tartt describes the terror, without
the day." --- you nailed it.

Best,

Jack



On Fri, Jan 3, 2014 at 11:00 AM, <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:

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



-- 
______________________
Jack Waters
Mobile: 801-615-9579
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