Goldfinch Week:
Young Adult
22 October 2013
“Young Adult” is a marketing term used by publishers to frame certain books. What books these are, I can’t say, never having looked into the matter; almost everything that I know about it was learned in a conversation with Dot McCleary (recently retired and much missed from Crawford Doyle) about Peter Cameron’s Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You. And most of that conversation, I’ve managed to forget. I can’t remember whether Cameron’s novel was repackaged as YA when it didn’t sell in the trade market, or the other way round. It’s nice merely to know that anyone in publishing thought that it might be a good book for serious, sensitive teen-aged readers. It gave me a great deal of hope to think so! There’s nothing in Someday that’s inappropriate for a young reader, or unlikely to be understood, even if, like all good literature, it will mean more when that reader gets older. What’s useful about the “Young Adult” category is its implication of an inverse class of books, “Overgrown Adolescent.” I can think of lots of books to list under that rubric, many of whose authors were middle-aged guys writing for other middle-aged guys. Suffice it to say that I do not place The Catcher in the Rye in the YA class, but in the other one.
Whether Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch will ever be recognized as a young-adult classic, I read it as if it were one. That’s because, within three quick pages, I was carried into the imagination of the thirteen year-old Theo Decker, on a magic carpet of sagaciously drab prose. Drab? Drab is the very color of thirteen. We begin with a twenty-something narrator in a hotel room in Amsterdam, apparently on the run from some crime (the news is all in Nederlands), looking back to the day he lost his mother, the nightmare between Before and After. He takes us back, then, to the last moments of Before. These — the magic-carpet ride — cover roughly twenty-five excruciating pages. What I’ve extracted appears a few pages in.
I like to think of myself as a perceptive person (as I suppose we all do) and in setting all this down, it’s tempting to pencil a shadow gliding in overhead. But I was blind and deaf to the future; my single, crushing, worry was the meeting at school. When I’d called Tom to tell him I’d been suspended (whispering on the land line; she had taken away my cell phone) he hadn’t seemed particularly surprised to hear it. “Look,” he’d said, cutting me off, “don’t be stupid, Theo, nobody knows a thing, just keep your fucking mouth shut”; and before I could get out another word, he said, “Sorry, I’ve got to go,” and hung up.
In the cab, I tried to crack my window to get some air: no luck. It smelled like someone had been changing dirty diapers back there or maybe even taken an actual shit, and then tried to cover it up with a bunch of coconut air freshener that smelled like suntan lotion. The seats were greasy, and patched with duct tape, and the shocks were nearly gone. Whenever we struck a bump, my teeth rattled, and so did the religious claptrap dangling from the rear view mirror: medallions, a curved sword in miniature dancing on a plastic chain, and a turbaned, bearded guru who gazed into the back seat with piercing eyes, palm raised in benediction.
Along Park Avenue, ranks of red tulips stood at attention as we sped by. Bollywood pop — turned down to a low, almost subliminal whine — spiraled and sparkled hypnotically, just at the threshold of my hearing. The leaves were just coming out on the trees. Delivery boys from D’Agostino’s and Gristede’s pushed carts laden with groceries; harried kindergartners behind them; a uniformed worker swept debris from the gutter into a dustpan on a stick; lawyers and stockbrokers held their palms out and knit their brows as they looked up at the sky. As we jolted up the avenue (my mother looking miserable, clutching at the armrest to brace herself) I stared out the window at the dyspeptic workaday faces (worried-looking people in a raincoats, milling in grim throngs at the crosswalks, people drinking coffee from cardboard cups and talking on cell phones and glancing furtively side to side) and tried hard not to think of all the unpleasant fates that might be about to befall me: some of them involving juvenile court, or jail.
It’s perfect. It’s not fun, it’s not lovely, but it’s absolutely right. I don’t mean the descriptions merely, or even the fact of the descriptions — these are indeed the things that you notice on a bad day in New York, a city with an usual ability to reflect and intensify whatever mood you’re in — but also the sheer drag of time. Theo is dreading a meeting at his school; we’re dreading something much worse. Our ignorance of what’s going to happen, though, is just about equal — something terrible is going to happen, but what? Is Theo’s mom going to be hit by a car, or something else?
Just beneath the surface lies the bedrock of what I take to be the young-adult environment, the lack of autonomy that torments thirteen year-olds. Theo has no say in what’s happening to him. He got caught, but he’s not sure doing what. Now he has to go to school, not for class, but for an administrative meeting, and his mother, the love of his life, is in for a disappointment. Everything about Theo’s situation is confined, unfree. He doesn’t catch the irony of “speeding” along Park Avenue in a taxi, flanked by the homes of people who can do almost anything they please when they please to do it, because he’s never known different. (And his older, narrating self is a gifted withholder of back-dated commentary.)
Tartt creates an early teenager so convincingly that you don’t wonder if you like him, or if you’re going to life him. Who likes anyone of that age? Who can feel anything but pity for the wretchedness of the worst year in most people’s lives? Give the kid a pass. As long as the spell holds, Theo is a child not to be judged. And the spell does hold, right up to the moment when, a few years older, Theo discovers that the apartment building where he used to live — the one that he left, unwittingly for good, the last day his mother was alive — is being gutted and converted into luxury condominiums. We are considerably more than halfway through the book, and, when we turn the page, eight years will have passed, darkening the novel’s complexion.
When we turn the page, Theo is an adult, or at any rate the bearer of adult franchise. He is free to make adult mistakes, for which he must be judged as an adult. Because he has crossed the line into his majority, we hold him to different standards. We regard him differently — but with a twinge, because we knew him so well when he was a kid, when we wanted, against the odds, things to work out well for him. But things haven’t “worked out”; they’re still “working out.” Spools of suspense set spinning in the earlier part of the novel are still unwinding. In no time at all, they’re humming as tensely as before. The Goldfinch does not bog down. But the temperature drops a bit, and our brows knit in concern where before they rose in alarm. The story of twenty-something Theo is one that we might not care to read; we very well might dislike him — if we were to meet him now. But of course we’re caught in the coils of his story, and can’t get free. Earlier, we were eager to know more. Now, we are eager to say goodbye. But the old eagerness has been replaced with a compulsion to know how things turn out. It’s as if — and this is the genius of the novel, if I’m right — Donna Tartt were pushing us through the awful business, in so many ways even worse than adolescence, of becoming complete, adult human beings. We’re still with Theo, all the way.
Young adult — yes.