Tag Archives: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

The Road: Overview

Posted on by Amanda

Capture

Post-apocalyptic tales, zombie movies—even the Party Rock Anthem video—none of it is my thing.

Also, you know what’s not on my list of characteristics of good writing? Speaking in fragments, letting fly endless streams of invented portmanteaus, and showing signs of a deep, weirdly personal revulsion for the comma.

With The Road, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if I don’t really like stories like this. It doesn’t matter that McCarthy makes up all his own rules about the construction of an English sentence. That’s because The Road is above personal taste and grammar rules.

Tl;dr Synopsis

An unnamed father and young son are travelling by foot through a cold and barren landscape. At first, all you know is that the father doesn’t want to be seen, which seems a little paranoid, given the desolation. But soon, it becomes clear why they need to stay hidden and why they’re never safe in one spot for too long. In an event that’s never really described, the whole continent (and the whole world, the father assumes) has burned. The years after the disaster have required that the small population of remaining humans fight to survive. The struggle has brought out the worst in some.

The winters have become too harsh, and the father’s vague goal is to get him and his son south to a more sustainable climate. But what will they do once they get there? You share the feelings they must have: there’s an uneasy hope that maybe it will be some improbable paradise of safety. But you don’t want to think about that too much, since what certainly lies in wait is death, one way or another.

The Road chronicles a few months of this pair’s journey. Along the way, you experience all the moments of desperation and horror and soaring relief that accompanies them.

Writing Style

First off, know that McCarthy speaks in fragments. There is no careful crafting of complex sentences, no adherence to anything like rules. Words go on paper, and he’s done. But where as I felt like editing the bejeezus out of the last author I read like this (Junot Diaz), I think putting a hand on McCarthy’s prose would be a mortal sin. You do not touch this man’s writing. It would be like trying to add a vanishing point to a Picasso or something—sure, it would make more visual sense, but you’re messing with the inventiveness of the art.  McCarthy, despite disregarding the rules of written communication, communicates beautifully. His writing is never confusing or unclear, and it’s inventive. His unusual twists on standard English do him a great service, in fact. It’s difficult to make devices like simile and metaphor not sound cliche, no matter how inventive the actual comparisons are. But this syntactical defamiliarization throws the reader off-game enough for McCarthy to use these devices without fear.

No one will accuse him of being a man of too few words, though that’s not to say the writing is simplistic. If you like Hemingway’s style, you will love McCarthy. He never tells us what his pair of protagonists are feeling, only what they say, do, and think. You’re left to fill in the emotional blanks yourself, and boy, do you. You live inside the characters.

I think one of the most moving scenes is when the two finally come upon the ocean. They had been trying to get to the shore for weeks, and you almost feel as much anticipation as they do. For what, you don’t know. You’ve just been living in their bleak world with them, looking forward to anything different that might be awaiting them, starving for some kind of hope. When they come upon the ocean, it’s gray, not blue. The sea is “shifting heavily like a slowly heaving vat of slag and then the gray squall line of ash.” The father apologizes that the ocean is not blue. The boy says, “That’s okay.” Then he insists on going swimming, despite the cold. When he comes out, he’s weeping. When the father asks what’s wrong, the boy says nothing. End scene.

You don’t have to describe the emotions, the disappointment of it all. Just what McCarthy says is enough to rip your heart out. Adding any more would be a sin. It’s minimalism at its most perfect.

That’s McCarthy’s best skill, I think. As a reader, you’re extremely active in the story. He carefully places his blanks, never leaving out so much information that you’re frustrated, but always making you do the work of walking with his characters. I think that’s a kind of respect for your audience.

Characters

You’re very much thrown in medias res into the two character’s lives, so you must form a picture of who they are from what you see of them now, not who they have been. The boy and the man are very different, though you understand why. The man is jaded and always on guard. He is the boy’s protector, and he takes that role very seriously. That causes problems between him and the boy. The son is empathetic and is willing to take risks to make human connections with others. But since that will endanger him, the man overrules all his son’s overtures to make friends with the few people they encounter who may not be savages.

Both the man and the boy are characters you understand, and though the focus of the book appears to be on the journey, it’s largely about what the situation is doing to the characters and their dynamic with one another.

Highlights

I’m not going to give it away, but there’s one shining moment of delight and relief in this book where you can almost feel your whole body relax. Straits were dire, and all of a sudden, a miracle.

At the same time, you understand when McCarthy tells us the man hates the luck. The father had accepted death was coming, and he was looking forward to the relief it would bring. He could have finally rested. Now, it was clear he was meant to keep fighting, and it was almost painful to switch back into that mode.

So, yeah, I guess the highlight is kind of depressing. This is why I don’t really like doomsday scenario books. It’s worth the experience in this case, though.

Who Should Read this Book

A beach read this is not. (Unless you’re like me and like to read Beloved while sipping a daiquiri on a cruise.)

But you’ve got to read it, just to watch McCarthy work. It’s an amazing experience. You absolutely go with these characters on the journey, and it’s nearly impossible to put down.

But, I don’t know…if you’re particularly empathetic (which I am, for what it’s worth) or feeling low these days, you might want to pick the right time in your life to read it. No judgement if that time isn’t now. The book is heavy.

For What It’s Worth (A.K.A. My Opinion)

I’m shocked that I loved this. Like I said in the beginning, it does not have the makings of a book I would even finish. The minimalist prose and the bleak apoco-scape are not on my list of favorite things. But it’s a beautiful, haunting experience, and I give so much props to McCarthy for crafting such a thing. The Picasso reference wasn’t thrown out casually. I feel like this author is an artist.

I’ll tell you what else. Taking a hot shower and feeling your hair dry all fluffy, curling up under a down comforter, throwing a delightful spinach/goat cheese/raspberry vinaigrette salad into your face—none of it will ever feel as good as it does after you finish The Road. Every little luxury in my life I appreciate now as privilege. Considering the season, it might be an appropriate thing. I don’t know the last time I’ve been so thankful for what I have.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: Overview

Posted on by Amanda

51wOaYkRSfL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_I’ve got several bones to pick with Mr. Junot Diaz about the title of his 2008 Pulitzer winner.

1. A spoiler in the title? Really?

2. I’m not sure “wondrous” is the word I’d use. All things considered, “cursed” is more appropriate.

3. You need a comma. But more about that (and how I’m wrong while being technically right) in a bit.

Tl;dr Synopsis

Curse

Writing Style

No, just kidding. I’ll actually give you a Tl:dr.

Tl;dr Synopsis

This book is about much more than Oscar De Leon, though it begins with him and ends with him. Each chapter is a vignette that serves as a puzzle piece. Through it, the story of the De Leon family and their horrifying multigenerational battle with the Fuku come together.

The Fuku was a curse believed to be a brought upon the Dominican Republic by Trujillo, a fearsome (and historically real) dictator in the 20s, 30s, and 40s. And while the author is quick to point out when Dominicans are being superstitious, it’s hard to believe Oscar’s family is just dealing with a few decades of bad luck.

You don’t learn of the initial source-Fuku (“Poor Abelard,” indeed) until a good way into the book, but you’re so distracted by all the stories in between that it doesn’t matter. There’s the story of obese, awkward Oscar and the roommate who wants to help him get it together. There’s the story of Beli, who is easy to hate until you realize she’s perhaps the biggest victim of all. And then there’s Lola, who we find out at the end is the reason the book is written. It’s the narrator’s love for her that causes him to try to counteract the curse by writing down the De Leon story.

Writing Style

Diaz is somewhat difficult to read, though perhaps that’s a failing of mine. If you’ve ever tried to read a Zora Neale Hurston book and plow through the literary attempts to record speech patterns of southern black folks, you’ll have an idea of the difficulty I’m talking about. First, there’s tons of jargon (or, in this case, Spanish). Second, there’s very little concern for grammar or propriety. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is filled with fragments, comma splices, improper capitalization, and speech not offset by quotation marks. That’s why I said maybe it’s a failing of mine. That’s kind of the stuff I focus on for work, and it’s my fault if I can’t look past it. I mean, I looked at the title and didn’t process much except, “huh, wonder who let that missing comma slip by.” If I were Diaz’s editor, I would have spent a year on this book. But I think I may be in the wrong for that. There’s certainly places where his first-draft-feeling book could have benefited from some editing for the sake of clarity. But I have to realize some editor somewhere made a choice to consider these things part of Diaz’s (or the narrator’s, anyway) voice. At times like these, I wonder how to not let myself as a person get in the way of me blogging for others’ sake.

Anyway, I’d sum up the writing style as casual. There’s a lot of strong language and personality in the writing. Those who liked The Catcher in the Rye in high school will probably also like this book. The voices are similar, though the story is less narrator-centered. (And this story is much better than bratty Caulfield’s.) However, if the thing you liked about The Catcher in the Rye was that it’s short, well, this isn’t for you–Oscar is pretty epic.

Also, be prepared to have you current knowledge of Spanish be taken to the next level. You will be able to, ahem, express yourself more fully once you’re done with this one.

Characters

The narrator is the best character, especially when you find out who he is. He’s got a distinct voice, but it doesn’t take you out of the story when he tells you what other characters are thinking and feeling. I think it’s to be understood that the narrator is taking a stab at what they’re going through, but Diaz does a good job of never making you feel confused about perspective. There aren’t constant reminders that your narrator is unreliable, and he so seldom inserts himself into the plot that it’s pretty easy to get lost in the story without being jarred out of it.

Oscar is a morose perpetual virgin who loves games and comic books and science fiction. He is an irredeemable dork, and not in the ironic, hipster way. His life is a major part of the book, but the book is about many others, as well. Lola is his headstrong, beautiful sister who’s there for Oscar whenever she’s needed. Beli is his wretch of a mother, so commanding and so scarred, both literally and psychologically. Yunior is his roommate, who tries and fails to encourage Oscar to be healthy and/or cool. When he fails, Yunior writes him off for as long as he can, but there’s something about Oscar won’t let Yunior’s forget about him. There’s a strong-willed grandmother, a great uncle who struggles to keep his family from the reach of Trujillo, and lots more. They are easy to read about, and they’re believable, though I don’t really find anyone remarkable. Maybe that’s a good thing. We do see how the different characters evolve, but this book is story-driven, not character driven,

Highlights

I really loved the chapter about Oscar and his roommate. I also really loved the ending. It was clear that the book was building to something with Oscar, and when it happened, it seemed right. It made sense. By the way, “it” is him dying. Normally I’d feel bad about telling you that, but, again, the title is a spoiler.

At the time, I was a little annoyed when it kept going after the closure we got with Oscar. it felt a bit like that last Lord of the Rings movie, just fading from one closing scene to the next, ad-seeming-infinitum. But now that I’ve gotten to the very end, I know exactly why it was there. It’s awesome.

Who Should Read this Book

I think that if you like historical fiction, interesting cultural pieces, or, again, The Catcher in the Rye, you will dig this book. It was a good story, and many times, it was a page-turner. It was also quite raw. Oscar is whatever the polar opposite of poetry is. If you like elegant prose or you’re squeamish about vulgarity, this probably isn’t your jam.

For What It’s Worth (A.K.A. My Opinion)

I can see why this won the prize. It’s a fascinating glimpse into Dominican culture and some of the awful things that happened there. In a lot of ways, this book deals with human rights violations, and I appreciate the light that it sheds. Junot Diaz is in the news a lot lately after criticizing the actions of Dominican Republic’s government, with the blowback of being stripped of awards back home. He’s an active advocate for the disenfranchised, and that shows in Oscar.

While I’m not squeamish (see above) or addicted to Victorian-style pomp and circumstance in language (see also above), this wasn’t my favorite. I respect it; I even like it. But it didn’t capture me quite the way other books have. I probably wouldn’t read something of Diaz’s again unless it was strongly recommended to me. I have too many other possible reads and only one life in which to read them. But this will be some people’s favorite book, and I understand why. To each his/her own.

Olive Kitteridge: Overview

Posted on by Amanda

Nothing like a two-week jaunt, especially with a few transatlantic flights thrown it, to give you the chance to catch up on some reading. I polished off three books on my beautiful trip to France, the first being Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (which I talk about here). The second book I polished off is part of my Pulitzer journey: Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, winner of the 2009 literature prize.

Coincidentally, a few days after finishing it, I saw that a show of the same name was taking the Emmys by storm. I had no idea they had made it into a show. Has anyone seen it? Opinions? (And what’s up with them making a show from A Visit From the Goon Squad? I’m over here tapping my foot, staring at my watch…)

Anyway, if they keep to the book at all, it’s bound to be a wonderful show. Olive Kitteridge was a sober, minimalist book, but don’t let that keep you away. It’s excellent in every way.

Tl;dr Synopsis

 

Speaking of A Visit From the Goon Squad, Olive Kitteridge is hybrid novel and series of short stories in which every chapter is tied to the last one via characters, without strict regard to chronology or continuity. But that’s really where similarities between the two Pulitzer winners end.

Olive Kitteridge takes place in a small Maine town, focusing on the residents there. It’s a beautiful book full of snapshots. Each chapter is a snippet of a life. You’ll encounter recurring characters in the chapters, especially Olive herself; she is involved in some way in nearly all of the stories. You’ll, in some ways, follow Olive from middle age to her twilight years and watch how she deals with the disappointments of everyday life. (Hint: with grizzle.) In other ways, you’ll just watch pieces of the townsfolks’ lives pass you by. You’ll be plopped in the middle of their story and in some ways be left to wonder how they got to where they were before you met them and what will happen to them later. That information usually never comes, but Strout manages to make this lack of information okay by resolving each chapter in a satisfying way.

Strout captures the essence of a rural small town perfectly. This seems like a book set oddly in the past, as if the town is still stuck in the thirties even as it’s clear that at least some of the book takes place post-9/11. When teenagers Tim and Nina storm on the scene with their phones and parties and modern vernacular, it seems as if they are aliens from the future come to throw the book completely out of whack, which is exactly how I imagine every person in the Maine town would feel about such people. These are simple folks who live simple lives, and the appropriately simple writing emphasizes that. Yet Strout still deals with the complexity of the human experience–depression, disappointment, humiliation, and even sometimes joy–without short-changing it in Olive Kitteridge.

Writing Style

Olive Kitteridge, as I said above, is quite somber. It takes a bare-minimalist, Hemingway-like approach to writing that really works for Strout. (Can I say, too, how many wonderful women writers they’re awarding Pulitzers to?) The author does a great job of showing and not telling. Melissa Bank from NPR says it well when she says, “The writing is so perfect you don’t even notice it…it’s less like reading a story than experiencing it firsthand.”

A short example is from one of the times we first meet Olive. A couple is over for dinner, and the very sweet, somewhat dopey, and rather abused Henry Kitteridge knocks something over at the table and Olive berates him in a way that makes you cringe for the houseguests. Strout knows she doesn’t have to say anything about how awkward anyone there felt. You can just feel it from the events alone, and there’s the added bonus of starting to see what it’s like to be around Olive.

I think one of the key examples of the simplicity of the story is later on, on the day of Olive’s son’s wedding. Olive has made herself a dress from scratch for the occasion–a bright print dress that she’s very pleased with. She looks at it several times with pride. Then, later, when she’s tired and goes to her son’s bedroom to lie down, she overhears her new daughter-in-law and other girls talking about how embarrassed for Olive they were that she could wear the dress in public. The author doesn’t do what many other authors might: talk about Olive’s anger or her self-loathing or sadness, or even something as subtle as heat rising to Olive’s face. Instead, the author stays fairly far out of the narrative other than to describe Olive’s delicious act of taking a permanent marker, finding one of the daughter-in-law’s cream sweaters near the bottom of a folded pile, and putting a bold mark across it, and folding it back into the pile. That’s pretty much all you get, and it’s more than enough.

Olive Kitteridge deals head-on with a lot of tragedy and loneliness, but it’s written in the least sentimental way possible. It lends the book a rawness and authenticity that’s striking. This is a book that stays with you, and it doesn’t use any cheap tactics to burrow its way into your heart.

Characters

The sheer number of characters you meet is rather daunting. Check the Wikipedia list. I count 94. You only hear about many of them once, though, and there isn’t a lot of pressure to remember them or confusion when they come back into the picture. It’s your own, personal little Easter egg if you remember, for instance, that the Daisy who nurses anorexic Nina is the same Daisy that Henry Kitteridge greats at church in the beginning of the novel. It’s a lot like how you can watch a random Law and Order episode and it really doesn’t matter much if you’ve been keeping up with the personal lives of the detectives. (Unless, of course, it’s SVU, which has devolved into a bit of a soap opera. Today’s blog post is turning into “Amanda’s Thoughts: T.V. Edition.” I’ll try to get back on track.)

The characters are all individuals. No one is going to be confused with the other, and you get the feeling that all 94 of these people are fully-formed individuals that the author has fleshed out before writing the novel. It’s amazing.

The characters are not necessarily likable. They waver back and forth. I changed my mind every chapter about how I felt about the Kitteridges. Sometimes I thought Henry was so sweet, sometimes I thought he was an absolute idiot, then I would feel bad about that and think he was sweet again. It’s really a lot how real relationships go, with a kind of ebb and flow to how you feel about the person as both of you grow and change and have interactions.   

Highlights

You know, I found the first chapter to be a little jarring. There’s a serious feeling of being dropped out of a plane into the middle of a story, and you feel a little bit like someone may have torn out the first few pages of your book and you’re missing something. But looking back, I think the first chapter was my favorite. Olive sure isn’t cast in a good light in the beginning, but that first chapter is full of wonderful nostalgia and human connection and longing and remembrance. Oh, and you’ll learn more about Olive and feel for her later. The things she says in the beginning come from a place that you’ll understand, and you’ll be given the freedom to respect her, I think. See, I’m talking about these people like they’re real. They feel real.

Another highlight is all the chapters that portray people in love. Look for the chapter on Daisy and Harmon, for instance. There’s some sadness in it, but I mostly think it’s a beautifully hopeful chapter. There aren’t many of those, but the ones that exist are an experience akin to stuffing your face with Noodles & Co.’s mac and cheese. They feel indulgent and comforting. The book closes on that kind of note, and it’s pretty great.

Who Should Read this Book

I hate to say this because this book really is a masterpiece. But I don’t think it’s for everyone. It’s heavy. There are few moments of happiness in Olive Kitteridge, and the ones that exist are tinged with something undefinable that makes your heart ache. I think this is undercover one of the saddest books I’ve ever read. I say undercover because it isn’t like the reader’s constantly dealing with death after death after brutal heartbreak, etc. Olive Kitteridge mostly just deals with insidious disappointments that quietly accumulate day by day. When faced with it like this, in digestible book format, forced to acknowledge it over a few sittings, it’s hard not to feel like life itself isn’t something quite sad altogether.

So. If you’re a beach-reader who prefers lighthearted stuff and mainly uses books as a happy escape (no judgement here on that), this book might not be for you.

But if you’re okay with heavier stuff, it’s worth it to experience the craft of this book. The writing is executed in a way that stuns me. Strout does everything right. If I were teaching creative writing, which I am utterly unqualified to do, this book would be on my required reading list. It’s an example of writing at its best. And, despite the sadness, I really loved reading it. The book is gorgeous.

For What It’s Worth (A.K.A. My Opinion)

Wow, I think I already got it all out of my system.

If you can, you should at least try to read this. The writing stands in a category by itself, and the stories are gripping. It’s an experience that I think you should have, if it suits you.

 

St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves: Overview

Posted on by Amanda

So I read this collection of short stories in lieu of a 2012 winner. Yes, it is called St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, and yes there is a story about girls raised by wolves in there. It’s by Karen Russell, who was absurdly young when she assembled this. It has officially ruined my Pulitzer adventure.  Why? Now my Kindle is loaded with every Karen Russell book in preparation for my upcoming read-a-cation in the Caribbean. Forget my Pulitzers. I found my new favorite author.

This book was outrageously creative–fantastically quirky–but so stirring. It is wild and other-worldly, feral and foamy and vivid. Karen Russell is my age, and she makes me feel both years younger and years older than her.

Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky talks about defamiliarization being the key to good literature. In essence, those authors who can take the everyday and mundane and show it in a fascinating new way are those who succeed at their craft. It’s funny–I think what makes Russell so great is the mirror image of what Shklovsky says. She creates these mysterious, completely foreign worlds that are startling and disorienting, but she adds such a human vulnerability to them that they have a heart-aching resonance. She takes the unfamiliar and re-familiarizes you with it.

Have you ever seen an abstract piece of art that was not a recognizable reflection of the world we live in and yet pulled at something deep inside of you? Picasso’s Guernica is good for that. I know some people feel that way about Dali. Magritte does it for me…LaBelleCaptive

Russell’s story reminds me of these images. They themselves are kind of whimsical and kooky, but there’s a real element of sadness or striving or connection in it all–a familiarity in all the creative rainbow swirls and shards of surrealism. Anyway, this book. For real.

Tl; dr Synopsis

There are a series of ten very imaginative short stories, taking you places you only dream of but solidifying the details that would be fuzzy in your sleep. There are manufactured blizzards for adult playtime. There are minotaur/human families. There are sleep disorder camps and learn-how-not-to-be-a-wolf-child camps. There are giant shells set up like a tourist trap, seaside version of Stonehenge. There are communications with the phosphorescent ghosts of fish. It is outrageous but not confusing, because there’s always a very familiar human element keeping you grounded. The stories aren’t just nonsense. They’re meaningful. And they’re over way too quickly. Perhaps my only complaint is that every story left me wanting more and almost feeling cheated.

Writing Style

Vivid! Fast moving. Never stilted. Full of colors and flashes and metaphor. Easy to follow.  Almost as good as her stories, which is saying a lot.

Characters

Mostly children. It makes sense–these feel like children’s worlds, and readers wade through the intricacies of these strange new places in an appropriately hesitant, childlike way. What are the rules here? Russell writes very sympathetic children, or at least has a way of making us feel the way they feel.

Highlights

“From Children’s Reminiscences of the Western Migration” is so beautiful. This short story was the least cosmic, but it stuck with me the longest. It does a lot better of a job bringing the Oregon Trail to life than the game where all your friends drown in three feet of water. Oh, but the family patriarch in this story is a minotaur. It’s a gorgeous story about family and stubbornness and the slow, ugly, mob-like behavioral turns inherent in group dynamics.

Who Should Read This Book

Literally every person on the planet. Literally. It’s a fantastic time. It isn’t just that I appreciated the book and all its qualities. I had an absolute blast reading it.

Get on my Christmas list before December because everyone I know is getting this book.

Tinkers: Overview

Posted on by Amanda

I love diving deep into books and focusing on specifics like motifs, character development, and author technique. But after a bit of feedback from a fellow blogger, I realized that I may be alienating readers a bit (who, of course, won’t have the exact same reading itinerary as me) with these posts. So I figure that, in addition to my more in-depth examinations, I’ll do an introductory overview post for each book I read that caters to those who haven’t read it.

So here it is: an intro to 2010’s Pulitzer The Tinkers by Paul Harding. (I skipped 2011’s A Visit From the Goon Squad because I’ve already read it. If you haven’t, go buy it right now. It’s absolutely spectacular.)

Tl;dr Synopsis

An old man is sick and dying in his house. His father was a rural merchant who sold things out of a cart. It alternates rather rapidly back and forth (every few pages) between the son’s last moments and stories from his father’s life. The two stories don’t really intertwine until the end. It’s a fairly quick read and can be tackled in hours rather than days.

Writing Style

Harding has a Dickens-meets-fantasy style with long, rolling sentences that meander from the fantastic to the curt and realistic. Fans of the prose will call it poetic, deep, and imaginative. Critics will call the prose long-winded and claim that any creativity found inside has been far too diluted by the word count to have any potency. Here’s a sentence typical of the book:

“Cold hopped onto the tips of his toes and rode on the ripples of the ringing throughout his body until his teeth clattered and his knees faltered and he had to hug himself to keep from unraveling.”

Characters

The son is sick and nervous about dying. He turns out to be a bit of a swindler. He works on clocks. Yep…that’s about it for him. His father is epileptic and a dreamer, kind but unpredictable. He makes a living (barely) by toting around a cart and selling sundries to countryfolk. We get to know him a little better than his son, but not by much.

Highlights

At one point, the dying son thinks the ceiling, roof, clouds, sky, and whole universe is falling on him, one by one. It’s surreal and imaginative, and it’s very well done.

There’s also a charming dynamic between the merchant father and a hermit. They only meet briefly in the book, but the section that detailed their interaction was the part I remember most fondly.

Who Should Read this Book

This is a solemn, slow-moving book with a lot of abstraction. Harding thinks nothing of making use of four or five coordinating conjunctions in a sentence, and he thinks nothing of making a sentence an entire paragraph. He also experiments with short, Hemmingway-like descriptions in the passages that describe the father’s life, but he eventually throws that experiment in simplicity by the wayside. This is a book that is attempting to be high art, and if you’re looking for plot or easy reading, this is not your book. This book is more longform poetry than novel. So if you love poetry, this might be your jam.

For What It’s Worth (A.K.A. My Opinion)

Certainly, the novel has some imaginative parts, but they almost always fall flat. This book, to me, has all the flavor of a communion wafer. It’s sterile. Most who know my taste would probably imagine I’d love Harding’s flowering, abstract style of prose. I’m not 100% sure where this went wrong.

I think I’m getting an “art for art’s sake” vibe coming off this book, and the “art” of his prose just doesn’t cut it–in fact, most of his passages don’t work at all. His description and metaphor have the ring of a student in a fine arts grad program trying to find the ground under him. He’s struggling to be deep and haunting, but he’s just creating passages that don’t make any sense and aren’t poignant in the slightest. Here’s an example of this:

“When his grandchildren had been little, they had asked if they could hide inside [his grandfather clock]. Now he wanted to gather them and open himself up and hide them among his ribs and faintly ticking heart.”

Uh.

Or how about this? In the story, the son’s leg muscles stiffened as he got closer to death, spawning this passage from Harding:

“When his wife touched his legs at night in bed, through his pajamas, she thought of oak or maple and had to make herself think of something else in order not to imagine going down to his workshop in the basement and getting sandpaper and stain and sanding his legs and staining them with a brush, as if they belonged to a piece of furniture.”

What.

This sort of passage just doesn’t work. It isn’t just that his wife (nor anyone, for that matter) would actually think of that. It also doesn’t add anything to the story. It’s just words and imagery for their own sake, and that imagery isn’t good enough to stand alone as art. The problem with empty, nonsensical passages is that you run the risk of losing your audience. When your words aren’t worth much, people will start scanning.There isn’t enough reward to justify the work of reading.

This isn’t so much the case in the beginning–it’s easy enough to follow the cadence of present/deathbed to past/father’s life to present/deathbed. But then things start switching from third person to first person and back again. It reminds me of the end of Beloved, except the confusion caused there by the switching from person to person and viewpoint to viewpoint reflects the madness that’s taken over the house, blurring the lines between individual delineations. In Tinkers, it just seems like Harding is trying to be experimental without much of any direction.

I’d be interested to hear from anyone who disagrees with this assessment. I’m easily swayed. Meanwhile, if you haven’t read the book, there’s your essentials plus my bonus peanut gallery comments. Hopefully readers can feel a little more included in the conversation if I pop off posts like these when I finish a book.

Did you know 2012 didn’t have a Pulitzer winner? One of the books in the running was Swamplandia by Karen Russell. Since I happen to have bought her St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves on recommendation from a former professor, I think I’ll read that as my stand-in for 2012. Yes, I just read 2010’s and I’m totally out of order. Yes, that isn’t even the Russell book that was nominated. I’m a free spirit.

The Orphan Master’s Son…Not Sure I Can Make It

Posted on by Amanda

I’m 10% into Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son. I’m not sure if I can take it much longer.

It’s a good book. It’s next on my list — the 2013 Pulitzer winner. It’s matter-of-fact. It’s Orwellian.  It’s easy to read, despite the vastly different cultures being portrayed. In fact, the culture is so amazingly, authentically, vastly different, it’s awkward to read in English. (Though the primary text is presumably written in English, I, like the writer of this Guardian review, assumed the author simply had to be Korean. But the author is an American that teaches at Stanford. The authenticity is incredible, at least to my ignorant, American eyes.)

The problem isn’t the quality of the writing or the story. It’s just too awful for me right now. There are horrible injustices and human violation rights perpetrated, even ten percent in. Ten percent. I don’t know if I can take the ninety percent more that’s in store for me. And you know what’s funny? It isn’t the human rights violations that made me put the book down and write this. It’s the sharks. The poor, poor sharks. Let’s just say they’re being abused and I cannot, cannot, CANNOT deal with animals being hurt.

The sharks were just icing on the “nooo, I can’t deal” cake, though. I googled a bit to see if I could look forward to more bearable material further in, and I see some developments in character are fleshed out later in the book. I’d look forward to reading about that. There’s an empathy and weakness for love in the main character that’s so far only been hinted at. More of this comes later. It also sounds like there is an attempt to escape this cultural prison, and I’d look forward to that as well. But I also read some quoted passages in reviews, and it warns me about going forward. I haven’t hit the worst of it, and frankly, I don’t really want to. It’s already so very, very awful.

This book reminds me quite a lot of Slaughterhouse 5. It’s got a matter-of-fact way of dealing with horrors that the human psyche simply can’t handle without shutting down, to some degree. That’s authentic, and it’s good writing. But man. I don’t know. It isn’t easy to handle, if you’re an empath.

The Goldfinch in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (+ Final Thoughts)

Posted on by Amanda

Mauritshuis_Fabritius_605

Here it is: Fabritius’ goldfinch. Funny. After reading this book twice now, I imagined that the picture would have a eerie kind of bioluminescence–a living glow that would flow through the rectangle in Google images, bounce around some rods and cones and register in my brain as a masterpiece so bright these mortal eyes should be averted. (Also, was I wrong to think the goldfinch would be bright yellow?)

But maybe the reason it doesn’t have that effect was because Google handed me a screen that looked like this:

Capture

Professional deep thinker Walter Benjamin wrote a rather dense piece called “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in the 1930s. It explores the role of art in an era capable of producing film, photography, and — most interestingly (to me) — machine copies. He posited that a work of art has an aura, and that that aura is based in its uniqueness. Therefore, every time a student puts up a poster of The Persistence of Memory in their dorm or every time someone sips coffee out of a mug imprinted with Monet’s lilies, the original’s aura is depleted.

Benjamin isn’t saying this is necessarily bad, and there’s a lot more to the essay — most of which I’m too obtuse to really wrap my head around, even after reading it several times. But seeing all these reproductions on my computer screen…is that what takes the magic out of the painting? Not according to Tartt’s The Goldfinch.

I was struck by how many twists on Benjamin’s essay come rolling in at the end of The Goldfinch (novel). When Theo is in the Netherlands, escaping from the scene of a heist-on-heist, he knows that the painting is authentic the moment he looks at it during the car ride to Amsterdam. It glows with an ethereal light he knows so well. The entire book seems to imply that The Goldfinch (painting) has a soul inside it, defying all of Benjamin’s claims that a painting’s aura is depleted in an age of mechanical reproduction. Surely the painting has been photographed thousands of times, as indicated by my Google image search. In Tartt’s book, Theo sees reproductions of the painting in art books, newspapers, and even a photograph of Welty in a room with a counterfeit. (Which, by the way, is an image of an image of an image of an image. The last image is the bird itself. Intense.)  Yet the soul of the thing doesn’t seem the least bit damaged by all its reproductions, at least not to Theo.

Even the painting is a reproduction, as Theo knows. He has no doubt that the artist had a live subject, and Boris mentions his certainty that, in a cage full of goldfinches, he could point out with ease the goldfinch. Theo and Boris both seem to believe that they know the bird, as presumably do the many others bewitched by the painting: Welty, Theo’s mother, Lucius Reeve. And yet, at the end, Theo comments that the painting is a trick, a “joke” — these globs of paint and scratches into the canvas and brushstrokes that, as you stand back, transform from what is really just deposited paint into a very convincing representation of a bird. One might point to the painting and say, “It’s a bird,” though really all the viewer is seeing is patterns of paint.

How can this reproduction not be a thing that takes from the soul of the bird? How can the painting have a aura its own, if Benjamin is correct?

Theo even sees the glow of the painting in a forgery, placed on a wall in an old photograph of Welty as a child. It’s difficult to get further away from the original goldfinch (or original goldfinch painting, even) than this image four times removed. But Hobie, the book’s good-hearted creator of forgeries that he never intends to sell, has an answer for Theo. He guesses that it isn’t the originality or uniqueness of art, as Benjamin suggests, that gives art its aura. It’s the beauty of line. If there is a particularly beautiful shape, it doesn’t matter if the object is reproduced or original. That’s why his lovingly created reproductions of antique furniture were so charming — he was reproducing a thing that had beauty, and he was able to preserve the thing that made it beautiful. It seems that Hobie doesn’t buy into Benjamin’s theory at all. But both believe that the original goldfinch painting in itself would lack the mystic quality Theo assigns it.

If Hobie or Benjamin speak true on the subject of the original piece of art lacking a soul–in Hobie’s mind, because it’s the beautiful image of the goldfinch, not the object that is the painting, that’s important; in Benjamin’s mind, because the painting has been reproduced enough to have had its soul depleted)–why is it that Theo so passionately felt that if The Goldfinch (the painting) was destroyed, the world would have lost something important? Why was it so necessary that what he held in his hand was the real thing on the way back to hotel in Amsterdam? I don’t have an answer for this, and I certainly don’t think the novel does, either. And, on another subject, that might be one of my few complaints about the book.

I connect so wholeheartedly to this novel. Just about every page of The Goldfinch absorbs me fully. But there is a lot of incoherence in it. That’d normally be fine with me; life is rather incoherent. But it seemed so important to Tartt, especially at the end, to become some sort of lecturer/philosopher. You have to have a special kind of brain for that. A Walter Benjamin brain. One capable of working out a theory, however crazy, to a certain level of completeness. A brain that can reach beyond bland platitudes and reach a hypothesis that, for instance, isn’t so broad that it can’t be wrong. Tartt is a glorious, deep feeling, intelligent author, but she doesn’t have that brain.

The end of The Goldfinch could have saved if Tartt stayed in-novel. The parts where Boris and Hobie sit down and start talking about “You know, maybe bad deeds can result in something good” is pretty cheesy in a folksy, from-the-mouths-of babes, “Well, little ‘ol me don’t know much about ____, but I’s been thinking…” type of way. But it was tolerable. The whole meta-lecture from Theo at the end, on the other hand, (which goes on for pages and pages) is insufferable. I just went tearing through it the first time, since it was two in the morning and I could see I was close to finished. But this time I sat through every word, focused. It isn’t horrible writing, but it’s patronizing, and it takes you waaaaaay out of the novel to treat you to some “big thought,” stoner ending. The end of the book meant well–it meant to bring us closure after all these pages filled with Theo’s ongoing, unspeakable sadness. But it was reminiscent of–horror of all horrors–John Galt’s speech (a.k.a. Ayn Rand’s excuse to bluster incoherently about her personal world view for a sickening number of pages) in Atlas Shrugged.

Ending aside, I remain firm after my second reading.  The Goldfinch is a spectacular book, full of aching feelings and beautiful intricacies. It contains endless starting points for conversation with others, but it will at the same time be a deeply personal experience for the reader to have. It brought to my mind many philosophies of which I’ve read–not just those of Benjamin, but also those of aesthetes and critics from many fields and varied time periods. It’s a great introduction to ways of thinking about art. as well as to good literature.

Theo’s Spiritual Connection to Objects in The Goldfinch

Posted on by Amanda

To lift one of my favorite introductions (Simon Jarvis, from an essay in PMLA), “Reader! No time for pleasantries!”

It’s easy to assume Theo is attached to the goldfinch painting because it’s his last connection to his mother. And that may be so. But I think there’s more there.

I’m really struggling for a word here–totemism comes to mind, but it’s not exactly right. It might do for our purposes here though, if you’ll allow for some flexibility. Totems are symbols of one’s spiritual connections to things of the earth. The term is mostly used in reference to animals. But here, Theo connects to manmade objects the way tribes have connected to a specific creature or element. His goldfinch painting is the most obvious example–and it isn’t the animal he connects with as much as it is the painting. He feels differently with it around, looking at it, holding it. He obsesses over the weight and feel of it, and he feels as if it glows in a way that’s almost unearthly. But he does this with other things, too, starting from a very young age. About Welty’s ring, he says this:

For reasons I would have found hard to explain, I had taken to carrying the old man’s ring with me almost everywhere I went. Mostly I toyed around with it while it was in my jacket pocket…I ignored [Mrs. Barbor’s] advice to put it in a safe place, and continued to carry it around in my pocket. When I hefted it in my palm, it was very heavy; if I closed my fingers around it, the gold got warm from the heat of my hand but the carved stone stayed cool. Its weighty, antiquated quality, its mixture of sobriety and brightness, were strangely comforting; if I fixed my attention on it intensely enough, it had a strange power to anchor me in my drifting state and shut out the world around me…

And Theo, especially after his trauma, continues to find objects, not people, his anchor. He feels utterly lost when he realizes he no longer has access to his painting. He immerses himself in the touch and feel of the furniture he works on with Hobie. Certainly he finds solace in a few people here and there, but what he finds the deepest connections with are not people, but things.

There is one exception. The way he describes Pippa in the book is very similar to the way he describes the objects he attaches to. He notes her attributes, like her hair and clothing, with the same sort of fetishism with which he describes his totems. I wouldn’t probably go as far as to say Theo sees her as an object. In fact, I think part of what draws him to Pippa is the fact that he cannot possess her like he can an object. Theo’s a deep-feeling, intensely spiritual person, even from childhood, so it makes sense that he doesn’t objectify people quite in the context that we’d usually use the term.

He does not always know why he experiences the attachments he does–he just records his feelings and leaves them unsorted and unanalysed. I find it understandable, this reluctance to wonder too hard about the reasons behind his emotions. I don’t quite think of him as psychologically insightful, but that’s one of the great things about this character and about the book. It allows the reader to do the psychological work.

Theo in some ways reminds me of a character from a book I haven’t read in a long time: Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Theo is an aesthetician (an old-school one, not the kind you find at the Clinique counter), but there’s a desperate quality to his appreciation of beauty. When he learns that people can be lost, he connects instead with objects. Then, when he realizes objects can also be lost even when the greatest care is taken to preserve them, well, that’s pretty rough.

The Goldfinch: Also…

Posted on by Amanda

There are a lot of negative reviews of The Goldfinch out there from those who find contrarian delights in raging against the literary machine. There are accusations of juvenility and uninventive language. Props to them for their reluctance to accept a well-acclaimed book simply because it is well-acclaimed, but in this case, they’re just bitter. The book makes us take a juvenile seriously, and any moments of cliche (“tip of the iceberg,” for example) add an element of conversation and authenticity.

Take this as a clearly biased report from Camp Goldfinch. “Think for yourself; question authority,” as the great band Tool advises, but read the book. You’ll decide.

Here is a much better synopsis than my own from the New York TImes‘ Book Review.

The Goldfinch: All it’s Cracked Up to Be

Posted on by Amanda

As a loud and proud feminist, this is the worst thing I will ever say. (Yes, leave it to me to think of the worst thing I will ever say and then immediately put it on the internet.) I finished The Goldfinch before even looking to see who the author was, and I was shocked to learn it was written by a female.

I had a discussion with a very forward-thinking teacher once about why I don’t like female writers as much as male ones, historically. He, too, very much resented himself for feeling like male authors seemed to create more depth in their work. But, as ashamed as it made us, it just seemed true. There are glowing exceptions, of course (Eliot, Chopin, the Brontes), but even they seemed to have heteronormative-relationship-driven plots, with romance being at least one of the major (if not the) key theme. In fact, I think this is why I resented Anna Karenina. It seemed to me a very “female author” book–all about man-woman pairings and dynamics. I think about Whitman’s claim that he contained multitudes, and it seems to be the anti-anthem of the novelists I don’t like (who, unfortunately, often tend to be women). “I contain the potential for romance” seems to be the driving force behind it all.

We have been and are entering a new era of women writers. I don’t know why, after reading books from Jennifer Egan and Toni Morrison, I still have lower expectations. But The Goldfinch solidifies it. This is a deep and rich book that explores so many facets of human existence, with an absolutely riveting plot the whole way through. It’s multidimensional and complex psychologically while carrying with it a story that captivates. The climax of the book went on forever, and I got four hours of sleep one night because I couldn’t put it down. In fact, this whole enormous book was enrapturing the entire way through. In fact (x 2), the reason I haven’t posted about it yet is because I accidentally started reading the whole thing again. I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to be back in this world of multitudes.

Have you heard anything about the book? There was a lot of hype around it. Let me say, the Pulitzer will not lead you astray here. Every bit of the hype is well-founded. I can’t say enough about how good this book is. It’s the realest, freshest thing I’ve read since…oh…well, since Crime and Punishment. But still…

First off, this book even the sentence level is fresh. You know what’s really hard to do without entering cliche-land? Similes. Try writing a simile that doesn’t sound like bad poetry. Do it, right now. I’ll wait.

It was bad, wasn’t it?

This book is filled with similes that are gorgeous and vibrant and don’t stick out as similes. Here is where I would put examples, but I’ll just make that another post if need be. This sucker’s gonna be long enough.

Second of all, the book paints so many beautiful portraits of people, and it does so by showing, not telling. The main character is a prime example of this.We get to know him so well, and yet we don’t even understand what the goldfinch painting held so dear by the narrator means to him. Not even he knows, really. It just does, for reasons seemingly obvious but that will escape articulation if we try to explain it. Again, deserves an entire post in itself. Every one of the characters is complex and yet understandable, even the bit players like Tom Cable.

Third, author Donna Tartt does the passage of time so amazingly well. There is an “eight years later” jump at one point, but I think it helps character development. All of a sudden, our poor hero is in an unexpected place, and we learn how he got there. It all makes perfect sense, yet it’s surprising. The most amazing example of the passage of time is the way the author explains the development of what winds up being the extremely close friendship between the main character and Boris in Las Vegas. It develops naturally and beautifully. Speaking as someone who has a friendship very much like the one described in the book, the coverage of the time was so natural and the closeness that developed made so much sense. It all rang authentic in my mind. That, like the non-cliched simile, is very, very hard to pull off.

But my main takeaway from this book is that, even though the world of The Goldfinch is a fairly sad one, it’s a place I love to be. It envelops me. It rings true and real and beautiful. It’s heartbreaking without being sentimental, and it’s raw without being dramatic.The Goldfinch doesn’t pull any punches. It’s as complicated and involving as it is without gimmicks.

Clearly, this is a vague overview. I haven’t really said much of anything about the book. This is a real challenge for me to write about because it’s like someone asking me to try to describe my existence on this planet in a blog post. I’d just be left dumbfounded. There’s too much, far too much. The Goldfinch contains multitudes, and all we can hope to do it examine it piece by piece, I think. The whole of it is too far beyond words. That the author created these multitudes in the 700+ pages of this book is an impressive feat in itself. 700 pages wouldn’t be enough for me.