Donna Tartt: The Little Friend

BOOK GOOD, ug. READ BOOK. Also read the totally weird interview with DT in today's .

eugenides' middlesex was a comparison which sprung to mind - both are astonishingly readable epics - but the incredible thing about the little friend is how it creates an epic quality within one child's mind rather than over a period of time.

The Secret History, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.
The Little Friend, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.

Hopes for 2012 publication to hit that "one hot novel every ten year average" dashed.

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/blog/donna-tartt-secret-history-20-year-anniversary/

The Secret History was really disappointing after a great first half or so. It just didn't go anywhere interesting.

she has a new book out next month like it's nbd?

784 pages!

Glowing review:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/17/goldfinch-donna-tartt-review

I'm reading The Goldfinch right now, not having read any of her other books, and it's making my think of my friend who's a YA author (La Lechera's husband) talking about how the difference between "young adult" fiction and "adult" fiction being primarily about marketing. Because this book (so far, I'm like a third of the way in) basically reads like a young adult novel to me. I'm not really into it, for other reasons - it needs serious editing, everything is waaaaay too drawn out.

This is an uberclassic suzy thread.

I disliked the Goldfinch at first (due to reasons described above), but came around at the end. After he jumps to being an adult, it gets A LOT more fun to read. The tacked on didactic "art/life" bit at the end is a bit much, but the characters of Theo, Boris, and Hobie are all time classic and I will never forget them.

It was also really hard to hear about PSH's death today an hour after I finished reading it.

also i can't believe that i read the whole book and NEVER GISed the titular painting. i guess i'll do it now?!

ok, i did it. kinda glad i waited tbh!

About a hundred pages in!

You must be enjoying it.

too early -- a hundred pages and there's debris to clear and lacerated limbs to describe

Name-dropping c-list Britpop dudes to start threads - truly a more innocent (and much less American) time in ILX history.

V is reading the Goldfinch at the mo and really enjoying it. I guess I shoudl get round to reading A Secret History.

page 142. peer-pressured two days ago into purchasing and reading this. i'm liking it more than i figured, having only heard it via the backlash

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2014/07/goldfinch-donna-tartt-literary-criticism

thoughts to far

1. the physical description of the mother matches the author photo on the book jacket

2. roughly the same premise as this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Pyramid_(novel)

down to the mother exploding in the art museum big bang beginning, but minus the magic and egyptian mythology

3. how can someone be in amsterdam and stay inside a hotel room?

4. waaaaaaaaaaaaay too much detail

yeah I couldn't get into it at all and I got roughly up to where you are now and decided I'd circle back later

the amount of detail was really bugging me

I love the details! I'm a glutton for detail honestly. The book really pays off after he grows up a little bit.

I usually like it too, but I couldn't settle in to ever really enjoy it. I do want to give it another shot, because I've loved pretty much everything of hers that I've read

the little painting itself sounds so beautiful I feel like I need to give it another chance

Name-dropping c-list Britpop dudes to start threads

oh come now. Suede is not "C-list," certainly not in the UK. the C list is, like, me. I'm the entire C-list.

don't call yourself that! you're not a c-word!

I knew I was in for a slog when the fate of Theo's mom takes twenty pages of a creative writing exercise in description and Creating Suspense. According to what I've read so far, it contributed nothing to my understanding of Theo.

Y'all are impatient!

hey I loved the Barbour section

except when the Mr. Barbour was like "pip pip old bean come see this nautical flag, now carry on now"

xxxp to aero I found out recently that Madeline, the mechanic at the bike shop I use, is a major fan of a certain band, with two tattoos related to their songs already and thinking of getting a third. She's also miffed that said band's main dude is not coming through Cleveland on his upcoming book tour.

things pick up once mr. silver enters the picture

That's where I'm at!

Boris is wonderful.

the speech patterns crack me up. i have to say the lucius reeve affair threw me for a loop

i forgot that this had both 'eastern european criminals' and 'rich new england types' in it

oh god

i enjoy how messed up the timeline is. try and work out if 9/11 happened in the world this novel presents!!! its difficult!!!

"who was it who said that coincidence was just god's way of remaining anonymous?"

really glad i read this despite initial skepticism. three novels it reminded me of -- harry mulisch's 'the discovery of heaven' and (eastern european criminals galore) david benioff's '25th hour' and 'city of thieves'

after Theo's Christmas season in the Amsterdam hotel room I'm ready to throw this novel in the fire but there's still 50 pages left

so you didn't like the ghost?

are you guys talking about the goldfinch or little friend?

I haven't read any of these. keep meaning to. I seem to remember loads of slag thrown at the first novel but I think that was just because the author was an attractive woman, frankly.

'the goldfinch'. it's the only one i've read and she was new to me. i went into it extremely reluctantly because the first i'd heard of her is the highbrow backlash i linked to in 'vanity fair' above, and i was more or less obligated by someone to read this rather long novel, at a time when i'm otherwise extremely busy. i'm guessing here but i think part of the slagging is she's part of the bennington mafia, having gone to school up there (the most expensive in the country!) with jonathan lethem and brett easton ellis, whom apparently she dated, to boot. rumors of family money don't exactly help reps in this post bush-crash world the way they once did

and i should add that despite my reluctance (and hang ups about bennington types) i appreciate having been obligated to read this, because i ended up really appreciating it

is her purported membership in a Bennington mafia still mentioned in reviews?

not sure. for some reason i haven't read any of the reviews, aside from the 'vanity fair' thing. i went from never having heard of her to being told i HAVE to read her almost immediately, and since finishing the only place i've bothered to look strangely enough (besides 'the onion' . . . which didn't review this?) is the amazon reader review section

The Goldfinch is the first of her books I've read, and while I enjoyed it (terrific story, memorable characters, goes by much quicker than most 800-page novels), I'm not sure it's quite as profound as the last few pages are reaching for.

One thing bothered me from early on though ***MINOR SPOILER AHEAD*** - we see Theodore blaming everyone and everything for his mother's death except the terrorists who carried out the bombing in the first place. We see his thought processes and evolving feelings about the disaster from so many angles and in so much depth but the fact that there might be individuals out there who are directly responsible for his mother's death doesn't seem to occur to him, nor does he feel any anger or even mild curiosity about them. The novel basically deals with them over the space of about three lines.

Here's the part where I concede that the actual reality of such a situation is unimaginable to me, and that everyone deals with trauma and grief in different ways, but this didn't ring true with me at all. I kept expecting the issue to be revisited at some point and it just wasn't and for some reason it bothered me that a book that devotes so much detail to everything else would just handwave away such a major element of a pivotal plot and character moment. This is leaving aside the question of why, of all the targets in the New York City, anyone would bomb an art gallery gift shop, other than the fact that the entire plot demands it. Why even make it a terrorist attack in the first place, why not some other kind of random disaster?

An unsatisfying, prolix, and endless novel, and, yeah, OTM about the forced profundity of the last half dozen pages. .

I agree about that too -- I think I said it before but it should've ended as the story wrapped up, not after we were pummeled with the Meaning of Art.

The Little Friend is AWFUL. Stop describing everything! Have something happen! I dunno, just bogged down abt 150 pgs in and had to stop. Good prose bt atrociously bad writing.

Blocks and blocks of Haddad trucks on 10th Street for filming of The Goldfinch. Think she may do a pretty good job reading audiobook of True Grit. This is all I have to say for the moment.

Directed by, um, John Crowley/wrongdude

The last section certainly seemed like it was written for a movie. Kinda surprised no-ones attempted The Secret History, although maybe murderous adolescent classics snobs would have seemed 1000x more insufferable on the screen than they were on the page.

I’m 140 pages into the secret history. This is pretty ridiculous but gripping.

A better written Bret Easton Ellis novel.

Yes! Very good comparison

lolz

The Secret History (which has the ring of truth to it, from my POV of being at a similar type of college) you are going to be really impressed.
― suzy (suzy), Friday, October 18, 2002 3:18 PM (sixteen years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol. i went to an east coast liberal arts college too and i wish. people were normie as hell.

ILX, where some things will never change

that's why i love this board

All of these kids better fucking go to jail

I have a very, very loose running list of books I missed and/or mean to catch up with, and there's really no rhyme or reason why one or another pops up to the top of the list. A few weeks ago that book was "The Goldfinch," and oof, what an embarrassment that thing was. I think Alfred's take upthread was pretty otm. It's like a parody of a YA novel, except, I suspect, accidentally so. Though at times it's so self-aware in its echos of Dickens and Salinger and ... all sorts of shit that maybe she's doing it on purpose. But if that were the case, then exhaustingly overwritten and steeped in such a mix of winking whimsy and phony pathos seems like a bad way to get there. Anyway, I skipped "The Little Friend" because the reviews were so negative, but how in the world did *this* dumb doorstop manage to bamboozle so many people? At least the movie apparently flopped and disappeared.

i had a student whose favorite book it was—maybe some of them read it when they're young?

I dunno, I found the Goldfinch incredibly engrossing on plot and character alone. The little friend I simply couldn't finish; I disliked almost everyone, and had a feeling we were never going to find out who killed the kid.

It's many years since I was a student and it's my favourite novel of all time as well.

xp

I loved The Little Friend, and enjoyed Goldfinch but the end where she whacks readers with her art bat was very boring and unnecessary.

I'm not sure I remember much of the book as being particularly boring, per se, but I did think huge hunks of it felt unnecessary.

i don't even remember this ending to Goldfinch that made so many people upset.

anyway, I was saddened to see that the film of this is apparently so fucking terrible because the cast all looked right; but a 2 hour movie seems far too short for this book, it really should be a limited series. They could even use the same cast and just jettison Crowley.

Her books don't bore me, but they are boring.

i watched the movie last week (having not read the book, mind), its not terrible, tho has several overt oscar-bait flourishes as one would expect

As the read the book I kept thinking of how the movie might be, and I hypothesized it would be similar in vibe to a Wes Anderson movie. Is that at all close?

nah

ok I made myself watch the Goldfinch movie last night and while I thought the first half was alright, the last third is terrible, and overall the movie just ditches the thing that made the book interesting to me, which was it's examination on grief and why he held on to that painting to begin with. what a mess.

also kid who played young theodore is the nephew of someone I went to elementary and middle school with, who I still occasionally talk to. so weird.

omg did not expect Sarah Paulson and Luke Wilson