Writing and editing

Aug 14th, 2016 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog

On Saturday Review yesterday they talked about a novel, The Summer That Melted Everything. One of the participants said it was quite good but there was a great deal too much of it, and added with much passion that Americans really need to learn to edit their novels and take out a lot. That resonated with me because I’m reading Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. I found it at a Little Free Library the other day, and was surprised 1. that it was so heavy and 2. that there was a huge heavy Donna Tartt I’d never heard of before. Now, having googled it, I’m surprised all over again about 2, because there was a huge fuss about it in 2013. Lots of mass media critical acclaim, and not quite so mass media critical not-acclaim.

My view is that it’s decidedly one of those novels that need a lot taken out. It’s fairly gripping, but in my case it requires a lot of dancing ahead to keep up the gripping quality. There’s just way too much of it for what there is. There are very long novels that need to be that long because there’s a lot going on. This isn’t that. There’s way too much moment by moment detail, that doesn’t add anything and isn’t all that amusing or beautiful or explanatory or anything else that would justify its presence. Cut cut cut.

And then – I’m finding it fairly gripping but it never occurred to me to think of it as a literary work of art. It’s not. The writing is ok but it’s nothing to make your hair stand on end – and there’s way too much of it, and when there’s way too much, quality becomes hard to discern among all the padding. It’s just the protagonist telling us stuff, often in way too much detail. His voice isn’t particularly distinctive or brilliant.

So it appears there was a to and fro about it back in 2013. Vanity Fair reported on the to and fro.

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.”

Meh. No it isn’t. It’s interesting but overstuffed.

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.

Wait. First, nobody considers the Times highbrow. Second, few people consider the New Yorker highbrow. The New Yorker and the NYRB don’t go in the same category.

But on to the backlash:

“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?’ ”

Exactly. The writing is only adequate. Dickens too was an overstuffer, but at the same time, he was a genius with the language. Stone cold genius. At his very frequent best he’s a hair-stand-on-ender. There’s nothing at all like that in Tartt’s book.

I find these controversies interesting.

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