The Internal Chronology of The Goldfinch

Posted on by albrooke

We start with the tentative premise that the novel’s internal timeline makes sense. The premise may be proven wrong, but there’s no point in fussing over a novel’s chronology if you begin by assuming it doesn’t work. You can skip directly to the point where you excoriate the sloppy author and editors without trying to see whether the author might have been careful.

The first good clue to the chronology comes on p. 8, where we read that the explosion in the Met:

  • [It] happened in New York, April 10th, fourteen years ago. (Even my hand balks at the date; I had to push to write it down, just to keep the pen moving on the paper. It used to be a perfectly ordinary day but now it sticks up on the calendar like a rusty nail.)

Theo is writing in Amsterdam just prior to Christmas fourteen years after the explosion. Since April to December is eight months, we can hold open the possibilities that he is recollecting this thirteen years and eight months or fourteen years and eight months later.

The next good clue is that the Met explosion happens after 2001, based on the references to “Osama bin Laden” (p. 58) and the “shoe bomber” (p. 246). While some people knew of Osama before 2001, the shoe bomber’s attempt happened in December 2001.

But that is actually way too early, because by the time Theo arrives at the Barbours’ later that week after the explosion, there is a reference to “Andy’s iPhone” (p. 139). The iPhone was introduced in January 2007 and first sold in June of that year. Even a wealthy child in New York might not have gotten his first iPhone until months later. The first April that Andy could have an iPhone would be April 2008.

We also know that the day of the week that the explosion happened was Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, since Theo laments

  • If only I could go back and change what had happened, keep it from happening somehow. Why hadn’t I insisted we get breakfast instead of going to the museum? Why hadn’t Mr. Beeman asked us to come in on Tuesday, or Thursday?

p. 87. We need a year in which April 10 was a Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, so the explosion happened in 2002, 2006, 2009, 2013, 2015, 2017, 2019, or 2020.

We get another important clue to the timeline on p. 713:

  • “We close early today. Christmas Eve, you know? And we’re gone tomorrow, and the weekend. But we’ll be open again at eight-thirty a.m. on the Monday after Christmas.” “Monday?”  . . .  “That’s right. You get it all together by Monday the twenty-eighth. And then, yes, once the application is in we’ll process it for you as quickly as we can—sorry, will you excuse me a second?” Click.

From 2015 to 2030, there are only three December 28s that fall on a Monday – 2015, 2020 and 2026.

That means we should be looking at

  • Wednesday, 04/10/2002 + 13 years, 8 months, 18 days  = Monday, 12/28/2015
  • Monday, 04/10/2006 + 14 years, 8 months, 18 days = Monday, 12/28/2020
  • Wednesday, 04/10/2013 + 13 years, 8 months, 18 days = Monday, 12/28/2026

We know that the first two are too early, because of the iPhone issue. If Tartt considered such things carefully, only December 2026 works for her chronology.

So, tentatively, the Met explosion occurred on Wednesday, April 10, 2013 and Theo’s trip to Amsterdam must have occurred right before Christmas 2026.

That fits the reference to Osama, the shoe bomber, and the iPhone. What about the many other cultural references that Tartt works in? [1] Are there any true inconsistencies?

It is worth remembering that the book was published in 2013, with a release date of October 22, 2013. See https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/donna-tartt/the-goldfinch/ We can’t fault Tartt for failures of prognostication – she could only have known of events prior to publication. Complaints about the prevalence of newspapers and Blackberries during the novel’s later chapters aren’t her mistakes, any more than Arthur Clarke and Stanley Kubrick should have been held responsible for proposing that Pan Am would be a thriving space tourism business in 2001.

[1] One difficult piece of evidence is on page 743, Boris’ reference to “Everyone loves him—like that man who landed the plane in the river a few years back and saved everyone, remember him?” which is a clear reference to Jan. 15, 2009, when Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger makes an emergency landing in the Hudson River after his airliner strikes a flock of birds. That might be a few years ago from the perspective of Tartt, but it is 18 years ago from Boris’ viewpoint.

Waiting

Posted on by albrooke

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch (2013).

A rich tapestry of a novel which moves from childhood tragedy to misdemeanors and felonies, art and antiques. Some most memorable secondary characters, especially Hobie and Boris.

One of my “top fifty” because of passages like these:

  • Things would have turned out better if she had lived. As it was, she died when I was a kid; and though everything that’s happened to me since is thoroughly my own fault, still when I lost her I lost sight of any landmark that might have led someplace happier, to some more populated or congenial life. p. 7.
  • . . . I was worried that my exuberant drug use had damaged my brain and my nervous system and maybe even my soul in some irreparable and perhaps not readily apparent way. p. 380.
  • And yet I was grateful for the work because it kept me too mentally bludgeoned to think. The shame that tormented me was all the more corrosive for having no clear origin: I didn’t know why I felt so tainted, and worthless, and wrong — only that I did, and whenever I looked up from my books I was swamped by slimy waters rushing in from all sides. p. 392.
  • It didn’t occur to me then, though it certainly does now, that it was years since I’d roused myself from my stupor of misery and self-absorption; between anomie and trance, inertia and parenthesis and gnawing my own heart out, there were a lot of small, easy, everyday kindnesses I’d missed out on; and even the word kindness was like rising from unconsciousness into some hospital awareness of voices, and people, from a stream of digitized machines. p. 470.
  • “Accidents, catastrophes — something like seventy-five per cent of disaster victims are convinced there were warning signs they brushed off or didn’t pick up on correctly, and with children under eighteen, the percentage is even higher. But that doesn’t mean the signs weren’t there, does it?” pp. 615-16.
  • Something in me had gone dead at the sight of him, almost like with my dad when I was a kid, long hours alone at home, the involuntary wave of relief at his key in the lock and then the immediate heartsink at the actual sight of him. p. 731.
  • “. . . good doesn’t always follow from good deeds, nor bad deeds result from bad, does it? Scary idea!” p. 745.
  • “Can’t good come sometimes through some strange back doors?” p. 758.
  • Shock and aura. p. 760.
  • [We always hear] “Follow your heart.” Only here’s what I really, really want someone to explain to me. What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can’t be trusted — ? p. 761.

This is the best of her three once-a-decade books, and here’s the kicker — it has been 10 years since it was published.

Reading, 2017

Posted on by albrooke

This was a full year of reading for me, 38 volumes of (more-or-less straight) fiction, another 28 science fiction novels, and 28 volumes of non-fiction. Some could slide from one category to another, I suppose (is Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology science fiction?).

InterpreterofmaladiescoverI read three books by Adam Roberts (The Real-Town Murders, Bethany, Jack Glass); three by C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, The Abolition of Man, The Weight of Glory); three by Neil Gaiman (Norse Mythology, The View from the Cheap Seats, and with Terry Pratchett, Good Omens); three by Peter Heller (The Dog Stars, Hell or High Water, Celine), and four by William Gibson (The Peripheral, Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow’s Parties).

The best new finds in fiction I read this year included Peter Heller, The Dog Stars (The Last 1956 Cessna 182); Adam Roberts, The Real-Town Murders, (R!-town) and Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies (a marvelous series of short stories).

Undoing ProjectTwo excellent new non-fiction offerings were Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project and Philip Allen Green, Trauma Room Two.

TraumaRoomTwoI think that Martin Luther King, The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, and Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem should be required reading, but I had read neither of them before 2017 (see Jerusalem and Birmingham).

In 2018, I am hoping for some new fiction from Donna Tartt and Neil Gaiman (no novels since 2013); William Gibson, Emily St. John Mandel and Stephen Carter (no novels since 2014); and Mary Doria Russell and David Mitchell (no novels since 2015).* Indeed I have Agency, Gibson’s next, on pre-order from Amazon.

But there are lots of great books out there already.

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*David Mitchell wrote From Me Flows What You Call Time, but that won’t be published until 2116, so I need something in the interim, I think.