The Bullfinch

The Bullfinch
Donna Tartt
2014 Abacus

After two false starts, I am done with The Bullfinch, the 2014 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction. The rather voluminous, in fact 864 pages in the paperback edition, book yielded to me when I was tuck with a digital disconnect for a period of four days. That did the trick. Though a good work, somehow, I felt, it called for an enforced freeze of some kind so that time will yield to it. Perhaps that summarises what I consider to be the problem with the book too. It is a good novel with sloughs of despondency and isles of enchantment, more isles and less the ponds of depression. The reader, like Bunyan's Christian, can progress in his pilgrimage after fighting off a series of temptations, which includes the not so charitable urge to put it down and move off! It was hard to agree with all the eulogies the blurb heaped on it, but equally painful not to, at times.

The narrative with its epic sweep revolves around the  life of Theodore Decker, who loses his mother in an explosion in a museum. The Fabritius painting 'The Gold  Finch' moves out with him as one of the dying persons assigns the work to him. It lands him not just with Hobie, the antique dealer and wood artist, but to a world of shabby charm and wild quiet. The Painting begins to move with him Theo becomes unable to either surrender the painting to the authorities or to get rid of it. As he gets transplanted to the home of his rich friend and classmate Andy Barbour, Theo's life takes off on the long road to drugs, deprivation and desolation. His runaway father returns and takes him off to Las Vegas and in the process he gets his next friend Boris. Boris has been though much and is averse to nothing. As Theo states towards the end of his story, Boris was never scared of anything. He stands with Theo to the end, though how far Boris has contributed to that end is curious.

Theo hits roadblocks whenever he seems to reach a satisfying end to his search for himself. This reluctant Kunstlerroman throws up repeated spanners to his works and Theo is left hanging with this philosophical inertia at the end even though he hits jackpot. He is not after money, he is after meanings. He is after a cause which will find meaning in the loss of his mother. His dabbling in carpentry, antique business and the passionate protection of the painting- all leaves him still in disarray. As always, the woman he is after, is not after him. The woman to whom he gets engaged is engaged with some one else. Between the magical Pippa and the rich, professional wife to be Kitsy, Theo is nowhere.

The Bull Finch has pace, though it fails to maintain it steadily. It does work like a page turner but the same as the urge to see the pages turn, the reader can occasionally feel that she is stuck with too long rumination on life and art, death and love. The tension between the buoyancy of art and drag of life runs through the book and these two cohabit dangerously. The reach of the story is quite panoramic: pathos and passion, crime and drugs, luxury and lack. There are characters memorably etched. Theo, Hobie, Mrs. Barbour, Boris, Pippa.. They stay alive and take their assured place among the many such fictional people who make up the readers' imagined realities. The book is built with a painting as its spine. But Dona Tartt has done enough to counterweight elements so that bird, an original, is made to proudly inhabit an ecosystem of fakes and farces.

The seemingly meta fictional glint of the work towards the end, where the writer tries to acknowledge the presence of the reader in her scheme of things, leaves the reader with a slightly odd feel. The story could have been given the flight which the bird was denied. Do we see a pattern because we have been staring long enough? Or do we see it because there is indeed a pattern?, as Theo wonders. It's Theo versus Boris. The Theo who will end up doing what he never wanted to and the Boris who will willingly do the same because that's the way it has got to be. The pseudo artist and the honest criminal, let us say. The painted bullfinch is home and dry at the end though the human quandary remains.