Goldfinch Week:
Boris
24 October 2013
Not being a fan of Charles Dickens, as a writer or in any other way, I hesitate to praise Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch for its “Dickensian” magnetism and sweep, especially lest I imply that these attributes come at the expense of full-bodied characterization. But Tartt openly invites the comparison. There is the girl called Pippa, for instance. The name alone would be a challenge, even if Theo Decker’s crush on her, metamorphosed into romantic obsession by the catastrophe that wounds them both grievously but in different ways, did not crystallize into the kind of impossible dream that spins the turbines of much lesser literature. But the girl in question no more chose the name “Pippa” for herself than she elected to undergo a terrorist ordeal. When she does speak for herself, she is not a doll out of Dickens but a young woman of character who, we see clearly if ruefully, is never going to fit into Theo’s dream.
The following passage comes from late in the book, right before the climax rolls in like a storm surge. Theo is by now in his twenty-something phase, engaged to a smart Upper East Sider whom he does not love but might be happy enough with, especially once he discovers that she doesn’t love him, either. Pippa is in town, paying a surprise visit to Hobie, the Greenwich Village furniture restorer who has overseen the welfare of the two victims (Theo and Pippa) without ever appearing to put them in the same sentence in his mind — another bit of resistance to the Dickensian grain. Pippa agrees to go out with Theo to see a movie and then maybe dinner afterwards. Theo has high, unrealistic hopes. The movie is not a success, for complicated reasons that Pippa and Theo discuss, along with many other things, in a long conversation at a wine bar to which they repair. Here is the ending of this tender scene.
Silence. Her eyes on mine. But unlike Kitsey — who was always at least partly somewhere else, who loathed serious talk, who at a similar turn would be looking around for the waitress or making whatever light and/or comic remark she could think of to keep the moment from getting too intense — she was listening, she was right with me, and I could see only too well how saddened she was at my condition, a sadness only worsened by the fact that she truly liked me: we had a lot in common, a mental connection and an emotional one too, she enjoyed my company, she trusted me, she wished me well, she wanted above all to be my friend; and whereas some women might have preened themselves and taken pleasure at my misery, it was not amusing to her to see how torn-up I was over her.
Not Dickens.
***
So, The Goldfinch shows as an author making nimble use of Dickensian elements while avoiding Dickensian shortcomings. It took me a long time to see the most flagrant of these for what it was, doubtless because I was so engaged by the story that my critical faculties were muzzled. Also, Boris Volodymyrovych Pavlinsky reminded me of Gary Shteyngart, not Charles Dickens. Theo meets Boris at high school in Las Vegas — I must pause here to applaud the author for pulling off the Dickensian feat of transforming Las Vegas into an interesting setting for a substantial portion of her novel — and, notwithstanding the fact that Theo is a well-mannered Upper East Sider at heart, and Boris a social anarchist, the boys forge a bond of brainy, orphaned exiles. Both have lost their mothers; both are saddled with abusive fathers. School, they discover, is a prison without warders.
Before Boris, I had borne my solitude stoically enough, without realizing quite how alone I was. And I suppose if either of us had lived in an even halfway normal household, with curfews and chores and adult supervision, we wouldn’t have become quite so inseparable, so fast, but almost from that day we were together all the time, scrounging our meals and sharing what money we had.
In New York, I had grown up around a lot of worldly kids — kids who’s lived abroad and spoke three or four languages, who did summer programs at Heidelberg and spent their holidays in places like Rio or Innsbruck or Cap d’Antibes. But Boris — like an old sea captain — put them all to shame. He had ridden a camel; he had eaten witchetty grubs, played cricket caught malaria, lived on the street in Ukraine (“but for two we3eks only”), set off a stick of dynamite by himself, swum in Australian rivers infested with crocodiles. He had read Chekhov in Russian, and authors I’d never heard of in Ukrainian and Polish. He had endured midwinter darkness in Russia where the temperature dropped to forty below: endless blizzards, snow and black ice, the only cheer the green neon palm tree that burned twenty-four hours a day outside the provincial bar where his father liked to drink. Though he was only a year older than me — fifteen — he’d had actual sex with a girl, in Alaska, someone he’d bummed a cigarette off in the parking lot of a convenience store. She’d asked him if he wanted to sit in her car with her, and that was that. (“But you know what?” he said, blowing smoke out of the corner of his mouth. “I don’t think she liked it very much.”
Did you?”
“God, yes. Although, I’m telling you, I know I wasn’t doing it right. I think was too cramped in the car.”)
Boris’s English is fluent but not flawless; it is inflected with the Slavic habit of dispensing with pronouns. Boris himself dispenses with every inconvenience that he can clear out of his way, and is not nice about the ethics. But that he is a lovable scamp is never in question. For about a hundred pages, the adventures of Boris and Theo fill The Goldfinch with the restless recklessness of two very disenchanted adolescents. They drink a lot of vodka and do a lot of drugs, but, being young, they pass out, wake up, and recover quickly. The idyllic part lasts for about a year, and then Boris “meets a girl”: yet another loss for poor Theo.
It was Boris I missed, the whole impulsive mess of him, gloomy, reckless, hot-tempered, appallingly thoughtless. Boris pale and pasty, with his shoplifted apples and his Russian-language novels, gnawed-down fingernails and shoelaces dragging in the dust. Boris — budding alcoholic, fluent curser in four languages — who snatched food from my plagte when he felt like it and nodded off drunk on the floor, face red like he’d been slapped. Even when he took things without asking, as he all too frequently did — little things were always disappearing, DVDs and school supplies from my locker, more than once I’d caught him going through my pockets for money — his own possessions meant to little him that somehow it wasn’t stealing; whenever he came into cash himself, he split it with me down the middle and anything that belonged to him, he gave me gladly if I asked for it (and sometimes when I didn’t, as when Mr Pavlikovsky’s gold lighter, which I’d admired in passing, turned up in the outside pocket of my backpack.
There’s more to it than that.
And yet (this was the murky part, this was what bothered me) there had also been other, way more confusing and fucked-up nights, grappling around half-dressed, weak light sliding in from the bathroom and everything haloed and unstable without my glasses: hands on each other, rough and fast, kicked over beers foaming on the carpet — fun and not that big of a deal when it was actually happening, more than worth it for the sharp gasp when my eyes rolled back and I forgot about everything; but when we woke the next morning stomach-down and groaning on opposite sides of the bed it receded into an incoherence of backlit flickers, choppy and poorly lit like some experimental film, the unfamiliar twist of Boris’s features fading from memory already and none of it with any more bearing on our actual lives than a dream.
Aside from the infelicitous repetition of “lit,” this passage is a demonstration of uncommon virtuosity, perfectly blending authorial discretion with juvenile confusion. The point is not to suggest that Theo and Boris are lovers — rather the reverse, if anything. No, what Tartt is showing us here is just how extended a vacation these boys are taking from the business of assuming the identities that seem to lie ahead for each of them inevitably. What they get up to late at night is no more sustainable than the drinking that gets them there; their very friendship is a long-term impossibility. As it happens, Boris’s desertion into the arms of a slutty fellow-student advances him in masculine stature toward Theo’s father, a narcissistic petty con man whose charm and good looks no longer provide the necessary lift — a not-good-enough Boris. As this former actor spirals toward destruction, Theo and Boris forge a nw and darker bond, in which each of them is more accomplice than friend.
Of Boris’s reappearance at the climax, I shall say nothing, except that one of the stronger emotional residues of my crash-reading of the novel was the conviction that Boris embodied a critique of something bogus in the American character, something self-kidding but paralyzed, enchanted by a persistent but inauthentic conscience. This “something bogus” is represented by Theo’s possession of the famous Fabritius painting, rescued from the wreckage, in the very first moments of After, at the instance of Pippa’s dying uncle. The painting embodies Before — what life was like when Theo’s mother was still alive. Theo’s inability to let it go threatens to derail his journey to adulthood. It is Boris who deals with the problem, but, being Boris, he does so in a way that doesn’t help Theo out of his jam until the last minute, when Theo is poised to take a step that will poison the rest of his life. Boris is certainly ambiguous, but the rescue is real enough.
Dickensian.