“Have you read The Goldfinch yet?” Consider it the cocktail-party conversation starter of 2014, the new “Are you watching Breaking Bad?” Eleven years in the making, 784 pages long, the book has re-ignited the cult of Donna Tartt, which began in 1992 with her sensational debut novel, The Secret History. When The Goldfinch came out, last fall, recipients of advance copies promptly showed off their galleys on Instagram, as if announcing the birth of a child. Her readings sold out instantly. New York’s Frick Collection, which in October began exhibiting the painting for which the book was named, hadn’t seen so much traffic in years. The novel is already on its way to becoming a movie, or a TV series, made by the producers of The Hunger Games. It’s been on the New York Times best-seller list for seven months, sold a million and a half print and digital copies, and drawn a cornucopia of rave reviews, including one in the daily New York Times and another in the Sunday New York Times Book Review. In April it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the judges of which praised it as “a book that stimulates the mind and touches the heart.”
It’s also gotten some of the severest pans in memory from the country’s most important critics and sparked a full-on debate in which the naysayers believe that nothing less is at stake than the future of reading itself.
For the few uninitiated, The Goldfinch is a sprawling bildungsroman centered on 13-year-old Theo Decker, whose world is violently turned upside down when, on a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a terrorist bomb goes off, killing his mother, among other bystanders. At the behest of a dying old man, he makes off with a painting—the 1654 Carel Fabritius masterpiece, The Goldfinch. For the next 14 years and 700 pages, the painting becomes both his burden and the only connection to his lost mother, while he’s flung from New York to Las Vegas to Amsterdam, encountering an array of eccentric characters, from the hard-living but soulful Russian teenager Boris to the cultured and kindly furniture restorer Hobie, who becomes a stand-in father, to the mysterious, waif-like Pippa, plus assorted lowlifes, con men, Park Avenue recluses, and dissolute preppies.
Michiko Kakutani, the chief New York Times book reviewer for 31 years (and herself a Pulitzer winner, in criticism), called it “a glorious Dickensian novel, a novel that pulls together all [Tartt’s] remarkable storytelling talents into a rapturous, symphonic whole. . . . It’s a work that shows us how many emotional octaves Ms. Tartt can now reach, how seamlessly she can combine the immediate and tactile with more wide-angled concerns.” According to best-selling phenomenon Stephen King, who reviewed it for The New York Times Book Review, “ ‘The Goldfinch’ is a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade, a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind.”
Reading Like a Critic
But, in the literary world, there are those who profess to be higher brows still than The New York Times—the secret rooms behind the first inner sanctum, consisting, in part, of The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The Paris Review, three institutions that are considered, at least among their readers, the last bastions of true discernment in a world where book sales are king and real book reviewing has all but vanished. The Goldfinch a “rapturous” symphony? Not so fast, they say.
“Its tone, language, and story belong in children’s literature,” wrote critic James Wood, in The New Yorker. He found a book stuffed with relentless, far-fetched plotting; cloying stock characters; and an overwrought message tacked on at the end as a plea for seriousness. “Tartt’s consoling message, blared in the book’s final pages, is that what will survive of us is great art, but this seems an anxious compensation, as if Tartt were unconsciously acknowledging that the 2013 ‘Goldfinch’ might not survive the way the 1654 ‘Goldfinch’ has.” Days after she was awarded the Pulitzer, Wood told Vanity Fair, “I think that the rapture with which this novel has been received is further proof of the infantilization of our literary culture: a world in which adults go around reading Harry Potter.”
In The New York Review of Books, novelist and critic Francine Prose wrote that, for all the frequent descriptions of the book as “Dickensian,” Tartt demonstrates little of Dickens’s remarkable powers of description and graceful language. She culled both what she considered lazy clichés (“Theo’s high school friend Tom’s cigarette is ‘only the tip of the iceberg.’ … The bomb site is a ‘madhouse’ ”) and passages that were “bombastic, overwritten, marred by baffling turns of phrase.” “Reading The Goldfinch,” Prose concluded, “I found myself wondering, ‘Doesn’t anyone care how something is written anymore?’ ” Across the pond, the highly regarded London Review of Books likened it to a “children’s book” for adults. London’s Sunday Times concluded that “no amount of straining for high-flown uplift can disguise the fact that The Goldfinch is a turkey.”
“A book like The Goldfinch doesn’t undo any clichés—it deals in them,” says Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review, perhaps the most prestigious literary journal in America. “It coats everything in a cozy patina of ‘literary’ gentility.” Who cares that Kakutani or King gave it the stamp of approval: “Nowadays, even The New York Times Book Review is afraid to say when a popular book is crap,” Stein says.
No novel gets uniformly enthusiastic reviews, but the polarized responses to The Goldfinch lead to the long-debated questions: What makes a work literature, and who gets to decide?
The questions are as old as fiction itself. The history of literature is filled with books now considered masterpieces that were thought hackwork in their time. Take Dickens, the greatest novelist of the Victorian period, whose mantle writers from John Irving to Tom Wolfe to Tartt have sought to inherit. Henry James called Dickens the greatest of superficial novelists … “We are aware that this definition confines him to an inferior rank in the department of letters which he adorns; but we accept this consequence of our proposition. It were, in our opinion, an offence against humanity to place Mr. Dickens among the greatest novelists. . . . He has added nothing to our understanding of human character.” Many future offenses against humanity would follow:
“It isn’t worth any adult reader’s attention,” The New York Times pronounced concerning Nabokov’s Lolita.
“Kind of monotonous,” the same paper said about Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. “He should’ve cut out a lot about these jerks and all at that crumby school.”
“An absurd story,” announced The Saturday Review of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, while the New York Herald Tribune declared it “a book of the season only.”
That said, for all the snooty pans of books now considered classics, there have been, conversely, plenty of authors who were once revered as literary miracles and are now relegated to the trash heap. Sir Walter Scott, for example, was considered perhaps the pre-eminent writer of his time. Now his work, reverential as it is to concepts of rank and chivalry, seems fairly ridiculous. Margaret Mitchell’s Civil War blockbuster, Gone with the Wind, won the Pulitzer and inspired comparisons to Tolstoy, Dickens, and Thomas Hardy. Now it’s considered a schmaltzy relic read by teenage girls, if anyone.
For many best-selling authors, it’s not enough to sell millions of books; they want respectability too. Stephen King, despite his wild commercial success, has nursed a lifelong gripe that he’s been overlooked by the literary-critical establishment. In 2003, King was given a medal by the National Book Foundation for his “distinguished contribution to American letters.” In his acceptance speech, he took the opportunity to chide all the fancy pants in the room—“What do you think? You get social academic Brownie points for deliberately staying out of touch with your own culture?”—and to ask why they made it “a point of pride” never to have read anything by such best-selling authors as John Grisham, Tom Clancy, and Mary Higgins Clark. Harold Bloom, the most finicky of finicky literary critics, went into a tizzy, calling the foundation’s decision to give the award to King “another low in the process of dumbing down our cultural life” and the recipient “an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis.”
Bloom’s fussing had little impact. King was already on his way to the modern canon—his essays and short stories had been published in The New Yorker—and thus he was now in the position to announce who he thought was garbage: James Patterson. “I don’t like him,” King said after accepting a lifetime-achievement award from the Canadian Booksellers Association in 2007. “I don’t respect his books, because every one is the same.” To which Patterson later replied, “Doesn’t make too much sense. I’m a good dad, a nice husband. My only crime is I’ve sold millions of books.”
War of Words
In the long war over membership in the pantheon of literary greatness, no battle had quite the comical swagger of the ambush of Tom Wolfe after the publication of his 1998 novel, A Man in Full, which became a call to arms for three literary lions: Norman Mailer, John Updike, and John Irving. As the English newspaper The Guardian gleefully reported, they were adamant that Wolfe belonged not in the canon but on airport-bookstore shelves (between Danielle Steel and Susan Powter’s Stop the Insanity). Updike, in his New Yorker review, concluded that A Man in Full “still amounts to entertainment, not literature, even literature in a modest aspirant form.” Mailer, writing in The New York Review of Books, compared reading the novel to having sex with a 300-pound woman: “Once she gets on top it’s all over. Fall in love or be asphyxiated.” (Mailer and Wolfe had a history: Mailer had once remarked, “There is something silly about a man who wears a white suit all the time, especially in New York,” to which Wolfe replied, “The lead dog is the one they always try to bite in the ass.”) Irving said that reading A Man in Full “is like reading a bad newspaper or a bad piece in a magazine. It makes you wince.” He added that on any given page out of Wolfe he could “read a sentence that would make me gag.” Wolfe later struck back. “It’s a wonderful tantrum,” he said. “A Man in Full panicked [Irving] the same way it frightened John Updike and Norman. Frightened them. Panicked them.” Updike and Mailer were “two old piles of bones.” As for Irving, “Irving is a great admirer of Dickens. But what writer does he see now constantly compared to Dickens? Not John Irving, but Tom Wolfe . . . It must gnaw at him terribly.”
So begins the Australian critic and essayist Clive James’s poem about the writer’s best friends, Schadenfreude and his twin brother, Envy. Leon Wieseltier, the longtime literary editor of The New Republic (where James Wood was a senior editor before moving to The New Yorker), suggests there might just be a smidge of this at work in the criticism leveled against Tartt. “Tartt has managed to do something that almost never happens: she has created a serious novel—whether you like the book or not, it is not frivolous, or tacky or cynical—and made it into a cultural phenomenon. When a serious novel breaks out, some authors of other serious novels have, shall we say, emotional difficulties.” Curtis Sittenfeld, the best-selling and acclaimed author of Prep and American Wife, similarly observes that critics derive “a satisfaction in knocking a book off its pedestal.”
It’s a theory that holds appeal for authors who feel they’ve been unfairly ignored by critics, and it can lead to surprising, some might even say contorted, rationales. Jennifer Weiner, the outspoken mega-selling author of such “women’s books” as In Her Shoes, Good in Bed, and Best Friends Forever, theorizes that Wood’s review may have been a response to the public’s tepid reception of The Woman Upstairs, by his wife, Claire Messud. “[Messud’s] writing was gorgeous. It was like beautiful carpentry. Everything fit. Everything worked. There wasn’t a single metaphor or simile or comparison you could pull out and say, ‘This doesn’t work,’ the way you can with The Goldfinch. But not many people read that book . . . . The world doesn’t think what she’s doing is as worthy as what Tartt is doing.”
From the beginning, Tartt’s work confused critics. When The Secret History, about an erudite group of classics majors who turn to murder at a small New England college, was published, in 1992, it was greeted with a kind of wonder by writers, critics, and readers—not just because its author was a mysterious, tiny package from Greenwood, Mississippi, who dressed in crisp tailored suits and revealed little about herself, but because few could place it on the commercial-literary continuum. Lev Grossman, the book reviewer for Time and author of the best-selling fantasy series The Magicians, recalls, “You couldn’t classify it easily into high literature or genre fiction. It seemed to come from some other literary universe, where those categories didn’t exist. And it made me want to go to that universe because it was so compelling.” Jay McInerney, who’d had a splashy debut similar to Tartt’s a few years earlier with Bright Lights, Big City, and became friends with her early on, recalls, “I loved it on many levels, not least because it’s a literary murder mystery, but also because it initiates the reader from the outset into a secret club, which is probably what every good novel should do.” In recent years it has been discovered by new readers such as Lena Dunham (creator of HBO’s Girls), who found in Tartt not only this cool persona—“She reminded me, style-wise, of my mother’s radical-feminist photographer friends in the 80s”—but a master of the tight-group-of-friends tradition.
It took 10 years for Tartt to come out with her next book, The Little Friend, but it was a disappointment to both critics and readers. Was she a one-hit wonder? To prove otherwise she spent the next 11 years, head down, spinning the adventures of Theo Decker, going down byways for as long as eight months that she would ultimately abandon. After the disappointment of her last book, everything was on the line.
The verdict among her fans? Perhaps too long in parts, but the story was as gripping as ever. She is “the consummate storyteller,” says Grossman, who is a new voice leading the charge that certain works of genre fiction should be considered literature. “The narrative thread is one you just can’t gather up fast enough,” he explains.
How Fiction Works
‘There seems to be universal agreement that the book is a ‘good read,’ ” says Wood. “But you can be a good storyteller, which in some ways Tartt clearly is, and still not be a serious storyteller—where, of course, ‘serious’ does not mean the exclusion of the comic, or the joyful, or the exciting. Tartt’s novel is not a serious one—it tells a fantastical, even ridiculous tale, based on absurd and improbable premises.”
For Wood’s crowd the measuring stick in determining what’s serious literature is a sense of reality, of authenticity—and it’s possible even in books that are experimental. In Lorin Stein’s view, best-sellers such as Mary Gaitskill’s Two Girls, Fat and Thin and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall may stand the test of time “not because a critic says they’re good, but because . . . they’re about real life. . . . I don’t want stage-managing from a novel. I want fiction to deal in the truth.”
It’s a view he may have inherited from his former boss Jonathan Galassi, the president of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, which, along with Alfred A. Knopf, is arguably the most prestigious of publishing houses. (Galassi edits, among others, Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides, Marilynne Robinson, Michael Cunningham, and Lydia Davis.) Determining what’s serious literature isn’t a science, says Galassi, who hasn’t yet read The Goldfinch. The response isn’t fully rationalized, but ultimately a book must be “convincing in some way. It can be emotionally convincing, it can be intellectually convincing, it can be politically convincing. Hopefully it’s all those things. But with someone like Donna Tartt, not everyone is convinced on all levels.”
To Grossman, this slavish devotion to reality is retrograde, and perhaps reviewers like Wood should not be reviewing people like Tartt in the first place. “A critic like Wood—whom I admire probably as much or more than any other book reviewer working—doesn’t have the critical language you need to praise a book like The Goldfinch. The kinds of things that the book does particularly well don’t lend themselves to literary analysis.… Her language is careless in places, and there’s a fairy-tale quality to the book. There’s very little context in the book—it’s happening in some slightly simplified world. Which to me is fine. I find that intensely compelling in a novel. Every novel dispenses with something, and Tartt dispenses with that.” As for Francine Prose’s query “Doesn’t anyone care how a book is written anymore?”: Grossman admits that, with story now king for readers, the answer is no. Wood agrees that that’s the state of things, but finds it sad and preposterous. “This is something peculiar to fiction: imagine a literary world in which most people didn’t care how a poem was written!” (Tartt was not available to comment, but Jay McInerney says she doesn’t read reviews, and isn’t “losing any sleep” over the negative ones.)
Wieseltier has come to a rather more expansive definition of serious literature. “Tartt’s novel, like all novels that purport to be serious, should of course pass before the bar of all the serious critics, and receive all the judgments that they bring forth,” says Wieseltier, who has dipped into the book enough to put it in the serious category. “But if a serious book really catches on, it may be less important that its strictly literary quality is not as great as one might have hoped and more important that it’s touched a nerve, that it is driven by some deep human subject and some true human need.” Ultimately, he thinks, the success of The Goldfinch is a step in the right direction. “When I look at the fiction best-seller list, which is mainly an inventory of junk, and I see a book like this riding high, I think it’s good news, even if it is not The Ambassadors.”
Indeed, we might ask the snobs, What’s the big deal? Can’t we all just agree that it’s great she spent all this time writing a big enjoyable book and move on? No, we cannot, say the stalwarts. Francine Prose, who took on the high-school canon—Maya Angelou, Harper Lee, Ray Bradbury—in a controversial *Harper’*s essay, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read,” argued that holding up weak books as examples of excellence promotes mediocrity and turns young readers off forever. With The Goldfinch she felt duty-bound in the same way. “Everyone was saying this is such a great book and the language was so amazing. I felt I had to make quite a case against it,” she says. It gave her some satisfaction, she reports, that after her Goldfinch review came out she received one e-mail telling her that the book was a masterpiece and she had missed the point, and about 200 from readers thanking her for telling them that they were not alone. Similarly, Stein, who struggles to keep strong literary voices alive and robust, sees a book like The Goldfinch standing in the way. “What worries me is that people who read only one or two books a year will plunk down their money for The Goldfinch, and read it, and tell themselves they like it, but deep down will be profoundly bored, because they aren’t children, and will quietly give up on the whole enterprise when, in fact, fiction—realistic fiction, old or new—is as alive and gripping as it’s ever been.”
Is Donna Tartt the next Charles Dickens? In the end, the question will be answered not by The New York Times, The New Yorker, or The New York Review of Books—but by whether or not future generations read her. Just as a painter can be castigated by his contemporaries and still wind up the most prized painter at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a writer can sell millions of books, win prizes, and be remembered as no more than a footnote or punch line. It’s a fight that will be settled only on some new version of the Kindle, yet to be designed.
