80 pages into The Goldfinch

True confession: I never read Donna Tartt's The Secret History. I wanted to. I didn't.

There. I've done it. Unmasked myself.

But today I find myself 80 pages into Tartt's new novel, The Goldfinch—loved by some, not loved by others, on many lists and shelves. Michael Pakenham, my first book review editor at The Baltimore Sun, taught me this important thing: Have no opinion about a book until you've read it through. Especially have no shared opinion.

So don't expect opinions in this particular blog post. Just take in this paragraph below, a description of a character named Mr. Barbour. It's the first time we meet him.

I can see him. Can you? It's that teleported Continental Congress image that snags my mind's eye.

It was Mr. Barbour who opened the door: first a crack, then all the way. "Morning, morning," he said, stepping back. Mr. Barbour was a tiny bit strange-looking, with something pale and silvery about him, as if his treatments in the Connecticut "ding farm" (as he called it) had rendered him incandescent; his eyes were a queer unstable gray and his hair was pure white, which made him seem older than he was until you noticed that his face was young and pink-boyish, even. His ruddy cheeks and his long, old-fashioned nose, in combination with the prematurely white hair, gave him the amiable look of a lesser founding father, some minor member of the Continental Congress teleported to the twenty-first century. He was wearing what appeared to be yesterday's office clothes: a rumpled dress shirt and expensive-looking suit trousers that looked like had had just grabbed them off the bedroom floor.

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Unfinished Desires: One Reader's Early Experience

This morning I was working my way through Gail Godwin's Unfinished Desires. Working my way through.

It's a dense book, but I've never been opposed to that. It incorporates multiple points of view, multiple storytelling sounds. It centers on one particular year—1951—at Mount St. Gabriel's, an all-girls school, but it weaves across time and through repercussions as that year is recollected in an elderly nun's purposefully dry, "official" memoirs. The cast of characters is rather gigantic, and the tangents are so multitudinous that I found myself setting the book down and wondering how the author (a three-time National Book Award finalist) managed to keep track of them all. Perhaps I also wondered how we readers are expected to, and whether or not there'll be sufficient pay-off in the end.

But what is stopping me more, is the sound, in this novel, of the young teens about whom it is mostly about. "Well, unlike Tildy, I never needed to have just one special 'best friend' I could tell everything to," one 16 year old says. "Probably Mama has filled that role for me. We're still girls together, giggling in the darkroom about how interchangeable most boys are." This 16 year old has a sister who is 14. The sister often sounds like this: "We can entertain ourselves. Chloe is a very interesting person to be with, and she finds me interesting."

A long time ago, when I was a frequent reviewer for the Baltimore Sun, Michael Pakenham, the editor, cautioned me against having an opinion about a book until I had in fact finished reading it. I didn't pronounce mid-course opinions then, and I'm not pronouncing an opinion here, but I am describing one reader's experience. I will continue to work my way through, for many readers have enjoyed this book, and sometimes stories just need time to unfold. I'm 130 pages in, and I've got 263 pages to go.

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Perfect Memoirs

I've been trawling through a part of my own history this weekend—through file folders stuffed with xeroxed passages, quotes, and lecture notes, with old book reviews and essays, with pitched-forward questions. I wanted to see, as I prepare to teach at the University of Pennsylvania this fall, just what I'd once been thinking. I wanted to measure my progress since then.

The exercise is bittersweet. It involves recalling books that I could not live without—but have, for a decade or more. It evokes wonder at my own wonder. It settles me into a slower unit of time. It reminds me of the power that books still have over me.

I was a frequent contributor to the Baltimore Sun, years ago, when Michael Pakenham was at the helm. In the big pile of things that I've been sorting through this weekend, I found a Sun piece I'd written on memoir. Tucked within were thoughts on memoirs. I share a few of passages from that essay with you, my book-loving blogger friends. I cherished these books then; I cherish them now:

I might not have learned to love the memoir form—or begin to write it—had I not happened upon Natalie Kusz’s miraculous Road Song in 1990. The story of the author’s long recovery from a ferocious attack of a pack of Alaskan dogs, Road Song was, for me, the revelation of a form. Here was the past delivered with equanimity and respect. Here was a terrible tragedy gentled by words, a book in which the good is everpresent with the bad. Kusz writes to comprehend, and not to condemn. She writes her way back to herself, and as she does, she broadens the reader’s perspective, disassembles bitterness, heals. Road Song begins in the spirit of adventure, not with despair. Road Song begins with an “our” and not an “I” and reverberates out, like a hymn. There is no selling out here. Just a hand reaching out across the page.

It is the same with The Tender Land: A Family Love Story, a book by first-time author Kathleen Finneran. With The Tender Land, Finneran is asking vast, impossible questions about love and loss. She is restoring a long-lost brother to the page, a boy named Sean, who kills himself at the age of fifteen for reasons no one can fathom. Why did Sean swallow his father’s heart medicine? Who was responsible for his sadness? What should Finneran herself have known to protect this brother from his fate? These are personal questions, certainly, very particular details, one family, one love, one loss. But as Finneran tells her story, she urges her readers deep into themselves, asks them to consider those whom they too love, and whether or not they have loved fully enough. Finneran’s fine prose operates as a prayer—not just for both her brother, but for her readership.

Susan Brind Morrow’s The Names of Things: Life, Language, and Beginnings in the Egyptian Desert is another exquisite example of the memoir form—a book of escape and discovery, exhaustion and surrender and relief. Morrow’s book takes readers out far beyond where most have ever been—to the sands of Egypt, to the company of exotic beasts and plants—and somehow yields up passages that speak directly to the experience of humankind.

“I thought of memory as a blanket,” Morrow writes of her traveling days. “I could take a thing out of my mind and handle it as though it were part of some beautiful fabric I carried with me, things that had happened long ago, the faces of people I loved, the words of a poem I had long since forgotten I knew. This was something any nomad or illiterate peasant knew: the intangible treasure of memory, or memorized words.” Morrow’s readers don’t have to go to Egypt to make this discovery. Morrow has made it for them, and has loved it with words, for their sake.

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Sunday Prose

If all the clocks and calendars vanished, children would still know when Sunday came. They would still feel that suck of dead air, that hollow vacuum created when time slips behind a curtain, when the minutes quit their ordering tick and ooze away, one by one. Colors are muted, a jellylike haze hovers and blurs the landscape. The phone doesn't ring, and the rest of the world hides and conspires to pretend that everyone's baking cookies or watching the game on TV. Then Monday arrives, and the comforting racket starts up all over again.

I have begun, as you can see, to read the Francine Prose novel Goldengrove. The wind is howling outside, and I spent the day's first waking hour hovering over The New York Times Book Review, admiring the work of David Barber, say, who, in his review of William Logan's new poetry collection, Strange Flesh, writes: "A hard-boiled formalist with a redoubtable aptitude for tersely fastidious diction and sinewy prosody whipped into fighting trim, he's a poet who wouldn't be caught dead trying to dazzle or beguile, recoiling from anything that might smack of lyrical extravagance or bardic pomp."

I mean: Look at that sentence.

Imagine the thought and the knowing that lives behind that sentence.

I digress.

I have begun to read Goldengrove, and though Michael Pakenham, for whom I wrote countless reviews for the Baltimore Sun, once cautioned me never to express an opinion about a book until I was actually finished reading it, I already know and can express two things: This Francine Prose paragraph about Sunday, quoted above, encapsulates a thought I've had since I had the capacity to formulate thoughts (such as they are). I was that child looking out a Sunday window—waiting, waiting, waiting for something to happen. Where is everyone?, I wanted to know. What are they doing? Why have I been left alone, to Sunday?

But then there is this second thought: Not counting the lines that I've italicized above (which are tight and telling and so quintessentially Prose-esque), there is unexpected space between the words in Goldengrove, and I'm not referring to the typesetting. Sentences that feel not yet fully slashed or tightened. I've been spoiled by reading Liz Rosenberg's Home Repair, I know, which is at once taut and affecting, chiseled and heart big. Spoiled by Aleksandar Hemon and David Barber. But still, reading Goldengrove, I want to scrunch up many of its passages—clump them together, break them apart, pound out some of the air.

True: I feel that way every single time I read something that I've written.

Also true: It may be that such airiness is precisely what Prose needs to tell her story. I am intrigued. I am reading on.....

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