Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch and John Ford's Upstream

The Goldfinch is a book I found quite compelling and enjoyable but one I would only recommend to some people, particularly those who like Salinger and Robert Goddard (John Major's favorite writer):  the style and first-person narration remind me of Holden Caulfield and Seymour Glass while the stolen-art plot reminds me of many Goddard novels.  Theo Decker, who narrates most of the book as a thirteen-year-old, is very much like a member of the Glass family, though he is on the East Side and, as he tells his mother early on, "Franny and Zooey was the West Side." And he is rather like Holden Caulfield (on drugs, which Decker starts taking after his mother dies) in his puncturing of adult pomposity and his observant similes:

He looked partly like a rodeo guy and partly like a fucked-up lounge singer.

Like a pair of weakling ants under a magnifying glass.

With svelte lines like a 1950s spaceship.

Everything seemed slow like I was moving through deep water.

Streets gray like old newspaper.

The book has a wealth of intelligent references to everyone from Tacitus to Walt Whitman and shows an understanding and appreciation of New York, including Film Forum, my favorite place to see movies (they have movies worth seeing).  As the book moves from New York (where Theo's mother dies) to Las Vegas (where his father dies) to Amsterdam (when he is in his twenties) Theo keeps his thoughts on Carel Fabritius's 1654 painting The Goldfinch, which he rescued from an explosion and is the one permanent thing in his life, and Tartt keeps the narrative going with the appearances of Theo's friend Boris, a strange and helpful personality.



John Ford's Upstream (1927) was recently shown on TCM, part of the series of films found recently in New Zealand, one of the 11 films now known to exist of the 60 or so films that Ford made before 1928.  As Tag Gallagher says, in his thorough and excellent John Ford The Man and His Films (1986, University of California Press): "Many mysteries would be clarified, were fewer early films lost."  Upstream looks backward to D.W. Griffith, with its emphasis on subtle and low-key acting, and forward to the sound films, with its emphasis on group camaraderie (in this case, in a theatrical boarding house).  Ford's ability to convey a great deal within a single shot is very much in evidence here, especially the shot where the elderly drama coach, who tried to teach the importance of the play itself, wearily climbs the stairs behind the celebration for the actor who values his own acting more.