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.

Night Film

Yesterday I posted on Facebook that I was suffering from a "serious book hangover", because every strong emotion must be validated on a social media network, followed by a couple of memes, because memes explain how we feel better than we do and they are usually funnier and have pictures. Within minutes, notification of the first comment rang from my smartphone, always a boost for the self-esteem. Then another and another. Yay! The memes worked! And my friends have been well-selected and therefore shall never be cullled. (Don't get any ideas of starting a competing blog, you.)

In a ripple effect, I will now explain myself here and then post the link on Twitter, thereby closing the circle (get it?). The book is Night Film by Marisha Pessl. In my mind the release of this paperback is linked with that of Donna Tartt's Goldfinch, because they have both come out at the same time and I read the previous releases of both authors at about the same time (which may have been years apart, actually, because memory plays poker with distance and then doesn't bother to put the cards back in the correct order) and they are both very thick.

Which brings me to Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas, which also belongs in this card suite of time.

To make this brief (and leave more time for meandering during which I contemplate My Point), the original books I read were: Special Topics in Calamity Physics (Pessl), The Secret History (Tartt) and The End of Mr Y (Thomas). My memory deals me a three-of -a-kind, all queens, when reminiscing about these books. Even if they weren't actually dealt in the same hand, I am jealous (in the words of a friend) that someone else (you, maybe) gets to read them for the first time, because they demanded my attention and rewarded me with something like the feeling of wielding magic, from somewhere around or in my intestines.

Context explained, let's waddle back to Pessl, because she is starting to kick up a fuss. (She is very famous now and doesn't have time to waste playing poker. Also, I am kicking her ass.)

Topics was a pink trade paperback (that understudy for the new-release hardcover, which broke its spine falling through our wallets), the cover textured (I think? My memory needs to be de Bono-ed), with a rose bundled with branches of leaves on the cover. It was a bookclub (yes, you heard me!) book, so the cover was fraying into sheets of paper. This cover is almost everything the book isn't, except for a sentimental corner of the protagonist's personality.

Night Film is a Kindle ebook, black and white. The paperback cover is cascading squares of black and white anyway, with a portion of a face starting back at us from the middle. It doesn't do the book any justice, except in the way the plot of the book sounds when summarised in the blurb. The book is more multimedia than 'hard copy', except that the price of the paperback poked holes in my wallet looking for lose change. (Always justifying my choice to download a book - oh, I admit it, I am guilty! And thrifty.)

Both books are murder mysteries, but Night Film develops and rediverts the acrobatics with quantum physics that Topics performs (perhaps because Pessl was lectured by a professor who explained the laws of atoms and Newton, and the different mystery of the Grand Unifying Theory). No, I am not going to tell you where it rediverts it, because that will ruin half the fun.

Night Film is about a disgraced journalist, Scott McGrath (great Scott!), who investigates the suicide of a young woman, Ashley Cordova, the daughter of the same man disgraced himself to get near. Stanislas Cordorva is a film producer with a cult following, in more ways than one. Both this man and his daughter are like fairytale animals appearing before you: they would fascinate, scare and probably disgust you.

In a Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys twist, McGrath teams up with two youngsters who have both had encounters with Ashley. All three are desperate to catch that fairytale animal, as if it would foretell their fates. As a young'un, I would angle my open Nancy Drew into the crack of light escaping from the door or lie on the carpet before the threshold, ready to run back to bed when the real world came to check I was asleep. Night Film is like that Nancy Drew paperbook: it demanded my attention and then... left me. Gutted.

It has more in common with Nancy Drew novels: the three unlikely sleuths follow a cooling trail, each lending some trait to the investigation, smelling out even the cold leads. The mystery comes to seem mysterious, as if some dark magic is involved. Shadows hitch on splinters, children's toys are desecrated and then replaced, entire buildings of people vanish. Their lives are threatened, again by people who seem to have supernatural powers. When the mystery seems solved, the solution so simple and the one lead they didn't smell out, it isn't.

Loose ends flail like live electric wires.

Occasionally, I have recommended someone read Topics, but only half-heartedly. The power it had over me seemed like an anomaly. Because, you see, these novels have a plot. A Nancy-Drew plot, with post-modern Nancy-Drew characters and leads. Everyone knows that a Substantive Novel has no plot. Plots are for sorbet reads, classics or pseudo-substantive novels. Not Literature. The heart of these books are what made me desperate to investigate alongside my single-minded, justice-bound sleuth as a child and the questions without answers I am interested in as an adult.

If you have not read a Nancy Drew novel (bringing tears to my eyes), find the children's section in the nearest shop or library, and pretend it is for a younger cousin. Or don't pretend. Hold your ignorance and your willingness to rectify it as an adult, high. (Tell them I sent you. They won't care. But tell them anyway.)

I miss Scott McGrath (platonically, trust me) as if he were a neighbour who had moved away. I feel separations between the other characters just as keenly. The mysterious of the mystery doesn't bother me, though I would prefer if its pieces were sorted in piles and catalogued. The ending feels... right, even as it feels like a betrayal. What doesn't feel in balance is that I have been left behind.