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.
Christian Overtones 