MountainMornings

My Ivy Farm Book Club is reading it. My MIL Ada just finished it. And the Bride wants me to send it to her, the book that’s all abuzz right now, The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. I finished the last six pages of the book yesterday, in the middle of the day because I couldn’t wait until bedtime when I barely have enough energy to keep my eyes open…and I was afraid of that white space; the blank white space at the end of a book. I knew that I’d have a lot of feelings to process in that white space, and my mind wouldn’t be up to that at midnight.

The Goldfinch is a coming of age story, in the tradition of Catcher in the Rye. We are drawn into the life of Theo Decker, a typical New York teenager who grew up around Sutton Place and went to a private school. He’s being raised by a beautiful and kind single mom, one we imagine is like Holly Golightly, except instead of being a call girl she married the wrong guy, a drinker who disappeared one day. They are a happy couple, son and mother, until one day a terrorist happens to set off a bomb at The Met, just as Theo follows a pretty red headed girl into a hallway.

Tartt sets off the bomb and the motion of her book early on, and so we are hooked, wandering around with Theo who is trying to recover his connection to the world. The cast of characters is familiar. The trust fund kids, the socialite/philanthropist types, the doormen. But it’s the stolen painting, Fabritius’ 1654 Goldfinch,  that glues this epic journey together, through a few lost years in Vegas with the wandering father and Boris the Ukranian best friend, and finally back to the Big Apple. I haven’t been so drawn to a book in ages. In some ways, it’s the small Dutch masterpiece that propels our protagonist forward – his mother’s love for it, a dying man’s plea for its survival.

In the last six pages I wanted more, and I suspect that Tartt was hoping we would. Ms Bean startled me by barking at the window. A lonely hawk was spreading its wing on a tree too close to the house.  I remembered one of my earliest teenage rules for living, like never stay where you are not wanted, or never cry in public. Never, ever keep a bird in a cage. It was a sort of pre-feminist, Ibsen-like decision. Live free, or die! And I wondered what would happen to Theo Decker. Will he be pulled into a life of crime and drug abuse, or more crime and more drug abuse, by Boris and end up in prison? Did he settle in at Hobart and Blackwell and become a respectable antique dealer like this guy? http://www.themillions.com/2014/01/my-not-so-secret-history.html                           Will he marry damaged-goods Kitsy or Pippa of the morphine lollipop?

As you know, my sister Kay lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She raised her only daughter alone, sending her to the Convent of the Sacred Heart with ambassador’s children. I used to visit them all the time as a teenager, and we’d often walk to the Met for a special exhibit or just for lunch. Later, I would always meet Kay for our mutual September birthday celebration in the City. After 9/11, we roamed around the streets in the Village, trying to find a place that was open for our birthday lunch. Determined not to let the terrorists “win.” 

Fifth Avenue is magical in every season. I told Kay that we  need to see the Goldfinch at the Frick Museum. I want to see this little bird who is chained to her food box. The bird that really did survive an explosion in Delft that killed its painter. Is it serendipity that art is reflecting the current literary scene, in the same city this MS author has captured so well? http://www.frick.org/exhibitions/mauritshuis/605