literature – Christian Overtones

On the Conclusion of Donna Tartt’s “The Goldfinch”

Endings are tough. Especially for novels and their writers. This should probably be expected. After crafting plot and characters and conflict for hundreds of pages, how can one create in a relatively few pages an ending that does all that previous content justice?

Even the best of novelists seem to struggle with the question, “So how do I actually END this thing?” Such is the case even with a writer as talented as Donna Tartt. Previously, when I read the last portion of her first novel, The Secret History, I felt that it simply went on too long: so many elements to tie up, so many things she still wanted to include. Similarly—yet distinctively—her last novel, The Goldfinch, lags towards the finish line.

I was cheering for her to end well, in part because The Goldfinch is so deserving of the Pulitzer Prize that it won. Her descriptions and knowledge and imagery are worth slowing down for:

“The weather had cleared, wintry moon crisp through a gap in the storm clouds, and I began to walk east again, pausing every now and then to try and hail a cab.”

AND

“And with a swell of vertigo I thought of all the places I’d been and all the places I hadn’t, a world lost and vast and unknowable, dingy maze of cities and alleyways, far-drifting ash and hostile immensities, connections missed, things lost and never found, and my painting swept away on that powerful current and drifting out there somewhere: a tiny fragment of spirit, faint spark bobbing on a dark sea.”

So when I began the two-hundred fifty-page approach to the end of the nearly eight-hundred-page novel, I was hoping that she could pull it off: hoping for a plot that not only pulled me towards the end but that also included insightful revelations about life.

But the ending fizzled—at least for me.

There was the scene where the protagonist, Theo Decker, moved closer towards suicide in his Amsterdam hotel room, described to the reader through the hazy reasoning and fuzzy descriptions of the alcohol-and-drug influenced protagonist himself: “Maudlin, self-indulgent, tasteless. My throat felt as if the lining had been scraped out with a razor. Off comes the upholstery. Look here: we have woodworm. We’ll have to treat it with Cuprinol.”

I’ve never cared for depictions of these dream-like and drug-or-alcohol-induced states of hopelessness as the character travels through the depressing darkness of the soul. The words on the page still reflect the work of an immensely talented writer, and other readers may consider the scene as one more reflection of talented writing at work; however, for me I was just trying to get through it.

To its credit, the plot was wrapped up nicely: the case of a missing masterpiece from the art world and how it was “recovered” in an unexpected yet convincing way. But I suppose I wanted more. I wanted to feel regret at having arrived at the end and having nothing more to read.

Sadly, I have come to expect novels and short stories that are otherwise fabulous to have lackluster endings, similar to marathon runners who hang on as they near the end, rather than sprinting to the finish with a burst of energy.

(The exemplar, for me, of a novel that ends well is A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. When I finished that book, I kept reading well into the night as the pacing and intensity kept multiplying. What would happen? How would it reveal the significance of all of those quirky details sprinkled throughout the novel? The ending pulled all of that off and then some. It provided to me the experience of what it is like to be so completely invested in a book that a cliché best sums up my experience: “I couldn’t put it down!”)

To her credit, Tartt attempted to add to the reading experience by injecting big lessons about life in her pseudo-epilogue to The Goldfinch. Here too, though, the result was uninspiring, an amorphous attempt (by Theo Decker, at least) to share some undefined meaning to life through our interactions with objects that outlast us:

That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch. For if disaster and oblivion have followed this painting down through time—so has love. Insofar as it is immortal (and it is) I have a small, bright, immutable part in that immortality.

There is, indeed, a certain nobility in the notion that it is noble to wade through the heartbreak and bleakness and meaninglessness of life, as described by Theo at the end of the novel.

Rather than this well-intentioned, yet unfulfilling, attempt at finding meaning through some sort of seemingly pantheistic flow-and-force-of-life, though, the precision of the Christian gospel is what I as a pastor instead embrace: a personal God who supplies a way for humanity to restore its relationship with the holy and all-powerful God of the universe by means of his one and only begotten Son, Jesus the Messiah, who incomprehensibly dies upon a cross to pay the penalty for the sins of all humanity. A doctrine that, as Anselm of Canterbury wrote in the eleventh century, one must believe before one can understand.

Kudos, nevertheless, to Donna Tartt for a fabulous novel and the Pulitzer Prize that went with it. Unfortunately, a writer as talented as Tartt reinforces the adage that great endings are, indeed, tough to pull off.

On John Milton’s Paradise Lost: Book 1—The Invocation of the Muse

The Prologue:

Having read the first four books (of twelve) from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and having at last begun to feel grounded with it—or perhaps at least gotten used to flights through the cosmos by Satan and the (good) heavenly hosts— it is time to return to the beginning of the poem to re-engage, reflect, and recite.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

As is the convention of the “epic,” Milton not only takes on big topics, but also saves us the effort of discerning those topics by telling us the answer in the opening lines: he will tell of the fall of humanity from grace when Adam and Eve disobeyed God’s command to stay away from the forbidden tree and its fruit:

Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit

Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste

Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,

With loss of Eden, till one greater Man

Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,

Sing Heav’nly Muse (1.1-6a)

And so, Milton does as the great writers of epic tales had done before him: invokes his “Muse.”

For Milton, though, the muse is not Calliope, but the same Holy Spirit who gave inspiration to Moses, writer of the Pentateuch:

That Shepherd who first taught the chosen Seed,

In the Beginning how the heav’ns and Earth

Rose out of Chaos . . . I thence

Invoke thy aid to my advent’rous Song (1.8-13)

And divine aid Milton will need, for he boasts of doing one better—nay, infinitely better—than Homer, Virgil, or the writer of Beowulf, writers who told tales of the origins of a people or nation. In contrast, Milton shall narrate the event that affected not one, but all peoples and nations: when Satan succeeded in turning our first parents away from God. We await, then, “Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhyme” (1.16)

Milton prepares by reminding himself of the need to be virtuous (“And chiefly Thou O Spirit, that dost prefer Before all Temples th’ upright heart and pure” 1.17-18), and thus worthy of receiving inspiration from the Muse, which will enable him to accomplish his task to “justify the ways of God to men” (1. 26). No grander goal has ever been undertaken by mere mortal writers! Note, though, the quid pro quo that Milton assumes is necessary for him to receive this inspiration. Surely, he must be good enough before the Muse will reward him with its gift. It is ironic, then, that as Milton is about to embark on a tale of unmerited grace given from God to sinful humanity through Jesus Christ, he himself must be good enough to receive the free gift of inspiration. Is he perhaps demonstrating the same vice that got Adam and Eve into trouble, namely, pride in himself and his own efforts?

Nevertheless, it is not surprising that Milton cries out to the Heavenly Muse for inspiration, for whom among us have not cried out in hope or anxiousness or frustration for a neatly arranged and quickly delivered package of interesting thoughts and clever words, a package of inspiration that provides us with the material we need to fill up the page?

On Having Read a Good Portion of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch

This writer and book are what one reads to enjoy the craft of writing, as confirmed by Tartt’s 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Goldfinch. Her descriptions are what catch my attention, along with her encyclopedic knowledge of furniture restoration, New York City, the art world (and what to do with a famous painting that one walks away with) and the dark shadows of alcohol and opioid dependency that drapes the directionless protagonist, Theo Decker, as he struggles through his teen years and early twenties, trying to find meaning and get on with his life after his mother is killed by a terrorist bombing of an art museum which Theo somehow survived but nevertheless carries with him through claustrophobia and anxiety when he is unable to avoid small spaces or large crowds. Tartt does not seem to be trying quite so hard to sound encyclopedic, though, as she did in her first novel, The Secret History, published in 1992. The result is a greater smoothness in her work:

Individual pedestrians floating up strangely isolated and lonely before my eyes, blank faces plugged into earbuds and staring straight ahead, lips moving silently, and the city noise dampened and deafened, under crushing, granite-colored skies that muffled the noise from the street, garbage and newsprint, concrete and drizzle, a dirty winter grayness weighing like stone.

Page after page of wonderful prose—Tartt’s novels are monstrously large, with The Goldfinch clocking in at 771 pages—but unlike the time I spent slogging through Middlemarch, reading The Goldfinch has been the literary equivalent of enjoying a Toblerone chocolate bar, though a good reading lamp, plush chair, cup of quality coffee, and the abandonment of everything digital are all I bring when I escape from the push of daily tasks and settle in to enjoy Tartt’s writing, the final 250 pages of which still await me.

On Creating a “Great Books” Reading Club

11 April 2026

Last week, a lady who will be a future parishioner of mine asked me if I miss being in academia. (Previous to becoming a pastor, I worked at various colleges and universities for a couple of decades as an English and Humanities instructor.)

I answered that one slice of academia I did NOT miss was all of the grading, but that I did miss the rewards of reading challenging works filled with complex ideas and then discussing them with others who have read those works as well. (One of the shortcomings of digging into great works of literature within a college course, however, is that too many of the young-adult students in the class would be so obsessed with getting good grades in school in order to find good jobs after graduation that they underappreciated the intellectual opportunities to uplift one’s mind and open new ways of understanding—and thereby better appreciating—the universe around us, which for me means appreciating the Kosmos, the orderly, nuanced, and complex everything that God has created both for His glory and for our awe.)

I also shared with the parishioner that I am fortunate to be in a Great Books Reading Club, which provides me with mental challenges from the ideas contained in the literary and philosophical works followed by rewarding discussions about those works with others who are members in our reading group.

There are only three of us in our Great Books Reading Club and all of us are pastors in a small Wisconsin town (in the United States). The other two pastors majored in Philosophy as undergraduates, while I majored in English. We all eventually attended theological seminaries, then began working as pastors, and we now make time within our schedules to meet once a month to discuss those “Great Books.”

In the past two or so years, our little group has read Plato’s Republic, Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy, and Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals; we are currently working our way through Milton’s Paradise Lost. I plan to share some reflections on these works in my future WordPress posts, thereby doing my small part to extend the discussion on what Mortimer Adler defined in the mid-twentieth century as “Great Books” participating in a “Great Conversation” about “Great Ideas” that have contributed to culture and society, and that continue to influence our ideas, identities, politics, and worldviews even today.

Stop back for more of this discussion later . . .

On Reading Middlemarch

Two-and-a-half years after starting it, I finally finished reading Middlemarch, the mammoth novel by George Eliot (pen name of Mary Ann Evans, 1819-1880). It sat on my dresser for most of that duration, sometimes undisturbed for a month or two even though it was always readily available, until the challenge—or the guilt—of finishing a “classic” finally pushed me back to “pick it up and read” (the same conviction that Augustine silently heard before his conversion experience as he describes it in his Confessions). As I returned to the book, the quip by Mark Twain more than once swirled around my brain: “A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.”

I began reading Middlemarch as my “I’ll read this while traveling” book when I was finally able to visit Paris for the first time in May 2023. Note to myself (and you): don’t lug around a 650-page book when you travel! Instead, select one around 200 pages. (The Great Gatsby comes in at about 188 pages. Perfect.) To those of you who read books on Kindl or whatever digital machine you prefer, I cannot relate. I need the feel of material reality when I read, the feel of paper and the smell of a book (even the musty ones—maybe especially the musty ones).

Perhaps what I like best, though, is the control I have with a book with paper pages versus one that boasts of its “digitality.” When I read, I thumb my nose at the social expectation to be accessible 24/7. I give myself the luxury of reading slowly, thinking deeply, and making connections mentally. O.K., I confess that I also need to turn off the volume on my I-phone and stick it in my dresser amongst my socks so I cannot hear the buzzing when a text is sent to me, because my willpower is only as strong as the absence of my temptations.

Augustine asserted that we mere mortals are no match for temptation—he listed avarice, ambition, and lust as the big three—and writers during the Enlightenment, even with its celebration of the rational, knew that our logic and our willpower could not overcome temptation. We need a hedge, we need a double hedge, to avoid being controlled by our impulses and vices, which is why the Founding Fathers, those celebrators of Enlightenment thinking, admitted the inadequacies of the rational mind when they created a Constitution for these United States that incorporated a system of checks and balances. Our system of government was never meant to do things quickly; it was meant to do things deliberately, cooperatively, and well.

Some people praise Middlemarch as the best novel ever written in the English language. I don’t. The plot takes so terribly long to unfold, and when it does it doesn’t startle or pull you in. (Although, to be fair, perhaps it had more of a pull in the 1870s when it was first published.)

I do, however, feel that it is a worthwhile read: it is impressive how the author created an entire English village with a large cast of memorable characters, spanning the breadth of social classes as well as human virtues and vices. Two characters, Edward Casaubon, the sour clergyman and inept scholar, and his much-younger, kind-yet-naïve wife, Dorothea, are two such examples.

Why did I keep plugging away at the book, though? I think it came down to the physical challenge of deciphering the extremely dense and archaic writing style (double negatives abound), along with the intellectual joy of eventually comprehending the subtle sociological and psychological insights that Eliot/Evans reveals, as exemplified here:

“But indefinite visions of ambition are weak against the ease of doing what is habitual or beguilingly agreeable; and we all know the difficulty of carrying out a resolve when we secretly long that it may turn out to be unnecessary.”

We long to do yet are relieved not to have to. Truer words were never spoken regarding the actions of a writer when faced with the task of writing, of needing to get thoughts down on paper, yet finding ways to justify the necessity of spending one’s time and energy doing almost anything else. Jesus himself informs us that “the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Matthew 26:41 ESV).

I also kept reading because the writer’s thoughts are, at times, incredibly uplifting, especially when describing the kindness of Dorothea and her desire to help make the world a little better place, whether through patient words spoken during tense conversations or by means of a plan to build affordable housing for the poor. At the conclusion of the novel, the narrator has this to say about Dorothea while providing encouragement for those reading the book to fight the good fight:

Certainly, those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed results of a young and noble impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion . . . Her finely-touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible . . . But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

In this way, Middlemarch did for me, the reader, what a daily reading of the Bible does: it reminds us that virtue is still a good in itself even when it seems overpowered by those who are “vicious” (as in its original meaning of “being filled with vices”), that God is still in control even when we do not have eyes to see Him, and that there are still people out there who trust that compassion is still superior to money, power, selfishness, and greed.