The Goldfinch

We're one for three, people. Or one for eight, and I'll explain why, once I've led you on for a bit. We played poker the other day - remember? You still owe me 100 bucks. One of my hands was a three-of-a-kind, all queens. The rest of the game is fuzzy. My queens were Donna Tartt, Marisha Pessl and Scarlett Thomas, and even though they were all of a kind, Pessl got all the attention, dressed in black and sauntering in with creepy-as-heck film producer Stanislav Cordova on her arm.

Tartt and Thomas got a caption each, I'm embarrassed to say. This writer was too excited about the black diamond to appreciate the other two on behalf of her readers. Rookie mistake.

To recap (this bit stands out of the fog): I read the first novels of all three at roughly the same time. Like any parent will tell you, I loved them all the same. (Even though really I saw Tartt as a professional and the other two as up-and-coming amateurs.) So I loved them all equally, just differently.

I was finishing up my postgrad and internship, and settling into my first full-time job, in magazine publishing. I was still living in Jo'burg. I had the puffed-up naivette of a varsity achiever and the hangdog wariness of an intern (dust-covered, paper-cut, permanent marker-stained and all). Some things just stayed the same, like a troupe of mimes: my friends, social life, family, hangdog wariness and general sense of myself. Some things changed immediately, like a troupe of avant garde performance artists (tautology but anyway).

It was like trying to walk when the speed on the treadmill has been turned up. (Do you ever wonder what your ancestors would say as they watch you use a machine indoors to do something they did for survival and never paid for?) I was disconcerted... disillusioned... distraught... Ok, I'm all of these things on a good day, but add to this disconsolate, disorientated and distraught. (I was tempted to write 'deceased' and blame it on the dictionary, but this is probably not funny, though at the time I didn't think it was funny either.)

Let's get Ms Pessl down the red carpet first. As established, she wrote Special Topics in Calamity Physics and Night Film, and both have wormed their way into my heart (I should probably get a doctor to look at that) - Special Topics more so since I have seen how far Pessl could take improbable themes and twist them (and me) into infinity loops.

Look up a word for feeling isolated beginning with 'dis-' and that was me too. The book in my hand was a) a book club book, b) pink and flowery. But the character inside was neither. She might have been, under different circumstances, but the pink is scrubbed into a wish-washy grey and the flowers turn out to be those garden roses, that bloom quickly before the petals hang loosely for a while and leave behind rosehips. She has a mystery that isn't quite a mystery to solve, symbolism for solving scarier mysteries in your psyche.

 

Scarlett Thomas is next up. She wrote The End of Mr Y - that book that led to every publisher to incur the expense of dusting the block of the book (the ends of the actual pages) black, red and blue, maybe purple, in the hopes that readers would think they were original. Actually, we wondered how much that inflated the price by. Like Special Topics, Mr Y was a mystery solved by - or not solved by - quantum science, since for the last time, quantum physics and the laws of relativity exist on separate scales, unless you're saying you found the Unifying Theory?

I did not know any better either, and either way it is a good book. I read it in the dimmed lights of a house that has already gone to sleep until I was haunted again by the fate of the scribes in Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red: they go blind. (This describes every night, really, but Pamuk is quite convincing.)

Thomas has apparently written seven other novels, of which I have read two: PopCo and The Tragic Universe. If this were a card trick, the cards would all be of one suite. You don't read an author's works for the same magic display; you're looking for their signature style. Personally I don't care where or when we go, just give me more of what you gave me when we met. By which I mean not anything illegal. Both novels felt like the journal of an anthrophobe, even in a crowd of anthrophobes, which is some kind of impressive.

I am also disturbed that the profile photo of Ms Thomas is a selfie. Where is the publicity team (or person) and why does she look like someone I know but don't like?

I wanted to tell you earlier but I don't like to tell you how long it will take to get to My Point because sometimes you wander off. It's dim in here and I only have the one light, so stick close, because we're here. It's dim so you of course can't see anything.

The real star of this show is Donna Tartt (no selfies, thank goodness). Her first novel (and the first one I read) was The Secret History. It is set in a top, uptight university, that in some obscure way reminds me of that of Stephen Daedalus, with more sentences that have objects, verbs and subjects. The mystery here is chilling, maybe because you know it's skulking around and that it will get you the second you least expect it. There is also the circle of friends within which everything happens, this time like the discombobulated voices in The Waves.

Of the list so far, The Secret History and Night Film are neck-on-neck. Don't shout so loudly! You'll burst my microphone. Most people will probably disagree with me, and yes, that's half the joy, but Night Film is well-crafted and delicately paced. I dare you or Ms Tartt or Ms Thomas to find another novel that suspends your disbelief from the moon and tells you to go get it (unfortunately Google stopped investigating the elevator and I'm not setting foot on a rocket not built by NASA or the Russians) and convinces you that you can and that you should because this belief or disbelief has become critical to your existence.

I dare it to do that, while keeping you hooked on the plot and playing with the conventions of Nancy Drew and ilk, through 500-odd pages.

The Little Friend came next and always reminds me of Caspar the Ghost, and actually there is something in the book that reinforced this. This time, the death is right up front. The mystery is the death of a girl's little brother but the ending feels like the beginning, just with three-digit page numbers. This novel is the middle child that will never be as talented or mature as the eldest, and for a long time is the youngest, until a younger child comes along that makes it feel even less talented. (I anticipate some bullying.)

Cue The Goldfinch. I finished this two nights ago. More deaths, upfront, and some more that float around. A mystery, but it only becomes a mystery at the end, although it could have become one earlier. Cryptic enough? The mystery has to do with a painting of the same name, but in French, I think. A boy is in a museum when a bomb goes off and pretty much everyone but him is hit by falling and flying things, including his mother. The remaining family members are nonplussed, so he is passed around a bit, gathering more, unlikely family members.

My favourite character is his best friend, Boris, as to be expected because he is the underdog. The type of dog that will always be under. The type of dog that chooses to be under, even when you pull his blanket out and put it somewhere warm.

My description is cryptic because this feels like three novels in one, except that the sentences are long and loose, and as an editor I find this irritating. As we are told in the narrative (another irritation), the story is compiled from journal entries, to justify the style but the style isn't immature enough to need explaining. Just annoying. Holes gape through the plot as they do when I attempt to knit.

My reviews always get meaner when I am disappointed. Or hungry. Or breathing in fishy cat breath especially when I don't feed said cats fish.

What I am really irritated by is the ending. (Don't worry, I won't spoil anything. Wouldn't know where to start.) The main character is fairly disillusioned with some deep emotional scars and minor nihilistic psychoses (but it seems like everyone in the book is at different stages bipolar). Suddenly he trips over a moral! Look, another one! Granted some of them are projections, because logically they can't exist in the real world. He's not exactly pulling out Hawaii shorts and tiny umbrellas, but he may be sporting a golf shirt.

Another dud. Which means it is probably a good book, but cannot possibly have been written by the same person who wrote The Secret History, unless it's the reader that maketh the book? Not buying it? Anyway, we have eight books from three authors with chocolate biscuits going to the three first-generations and one second-generation. While I stand by my reviews, readers' experiences make for capricious reviews. Who knows how I would feel about Night Film if I weren't binging on sci-fi and horror right now, and if I didn't get such joy from being contrary.

But as I pointed out, I am always varying proportions of various 'dis-'s, even words I'm just making up now (the ones in this post are real though, honest). Every story is a quest story (even yours, Mr Eggers) - which is an hour and a half or 400 pages of a human life. We roleplay a crisis, snatch up the resolution and discuss the thing to pieces. The crisis is half our own. So, I suppose, a great (according to me) novel is one I live. I can take that.

PS. You knew, didn't you? The book the conclusion alludes to? I'll give you a hint: it's set in Siberia, and features a cannibal and cult of castrates. Couldn't resist.