Reading Note: Three Coins in the Fountain
I’ve just finished Goldengrove, the new novel by Francine Prose, and I’m riven by a double vision. Is it sentimental? Or is it vital? Narrated by a bright but healthily vernacular thirteen year-old girl, Goldengrove takes the concept of the unreliable narrator to a degree of fine-grained transparency that only the most sophisticated novel could attain. For starters, aren’t all thirteen year old narrators ipso facto unreliable?
At the end, that narrator, Nico, goes to Rome.
I loved the arches, the Colosseum, the monumental reminders of how time layered over everything, cementing in the gaps, reparing or covering what was cracked or broken, pressing it down into the earth and building on top, and on top of that. At every moment, or, to tell the truth, every other moment, I thought how Margaret would have loved it. But Margaret had never been there, and no matter how hard I tried to see it through her eyes, I was the one who twisted throught the dark alleys and squinted when a plaza went off like a flashbulb. by the time I blinked, the open space had become a circus. Fried artichokes, mosaics, incense, the spires and the domes of churches. Even the car exhaust was sexy. I felt that the city was revealing itself in glimpses that I alone saw — sights saved for me, intended for me, as if the city knew me, because I was someone who could be known, who would love certain things and not others.
“Even the car exhaust was sexy.” Is that the sort of preciously cute thing that women say to drive men away? Or is it exactly the clasp of loving being alive? Plazas going off like flashbulbs? Goldengrove reminds me of the box that the Reverend Mother, in Dune, wants Paul Atreides to stick his hand in.
In the end, I cast my vote for the novel, and because of just this passage. At the beginning, Goldengrove is a novel about what the living lose to death: by dying, the loved one steals a part of ourselves, the part that we shared. At the end, Goldengrove is about what happens in the end: by living, we keep a part of the late lamented with us. And that is sexy.