The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, 2013.

            Won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2014

            The Goldfinch embodies one of the good, engaging and endearing stories that I have found lacking in many of the Pulitzer Prize winning works of fiction for the past decade.  With many of the past winners, I have had to force myself to the read the novel because of my commitment to read the Pulitzer winners.  With The Goldfinch, I couldn’t put it down, thought about it when I wasn’t reading, and am still thinking about it now that I've finished the book.  The fact that it won the Prize tells me that great fiction can still have a compelling, meaningful story.  I knew this all along but it felt good to see that the Pulitzer jury for fiction and the Pulitzer board also viewed The Goldfinch as a great book, worthy of the Pulitzer Prize.  Frankly, I had begun to doubt that I could be carried away by a recent winner of the Prize.  This admission says a lot about me and my taste for a good work of fiction.  But what is wrong with a good story that carries the reader to a place and a situation where interesting characters are dealing with problems in life that a reader can relate to?  I am glad I can enjoy such a work of fiction.  My wife has a cousin who seldom enjoys a meal in a fine restaurant because there is always something wrong with the sauce, the wine, the coffee or the service.  Can such a critic ever be happy with a meal?

                                                

            The Goldfinch is a story about love, the loss of love, and the adjustments, good and bad, to the loss.  It is also a story about fate, how life sometimes gives us bad luck or even tragedy but also manages to give us some good luck along the way.  The central character, 13 year-old Theo Decker, lives in New York City with his beautiful and dearly-loved mother, Audrey.  His father, Larry, deserted them a year ago but they have a happy life without him.  Theo loses his mother in a terrorist attack in an art museum and his life is never again the same.  However, he goes on with life, sometimes wishing it would be over because of how much he misses his mother.  Theo finds a few good people along the way who give him what love and help they can provide so that his life has enough support and meaning to continue.  Theo also acquires a painting, The Goldfinch by a Dutch master named Fabritius, on the same day that his mother is taken away from him.  Without thinking clearly about it, Theo decides to keep the painting and it becomes the focus of Theo’s life and the focus of Tartt’s novel.  Theo’s mother had loved the painting since she looked at it in an art book as a young girl.  She had taken Theo to see it at a museum in New York on the day that changed his life.  The Goldfinch painting, in real life,, is still housed in a New York museum.  It helps Theo get through the loss of his mother as he clings to it to represent something of her.  The Goldfinch makes him feel that somehow his life has meaning, partly because Audrey had loved it so much. The paining is part of the good luck Theo experiences in his life but it also leads to some of his greatest challenges. 

            As I see it, The Goldfinch deals with the issue of how the people in our lives often don’t meet all of our needs but by receiving what love and support they have to offer, and putting it all together, we can make a life that can be satisfying, maybe even happy.  A poor adjustment to loss of the most important person in life could lead a person to reject all other sources of help.  But Theo accepted the help and went on living.  The day Theo lost his mother was also the day he was, by chance, introduced to Pippa, Welty, and eventually  to Hobie, people who would end up being one his sources of love and emotional support.  He also receives help from the Barbour family who end up loving Theo but not being able to show it directly after his mother’s death, when he needed it most.  Pippa is a girl he encountered on the fateful day when Audrey died and Theo loves her through the whole story.

            More ill fate enters Theo’s life when his father comes back after the death of Theo’s mother to claim his son. This father is bad news and bad luck  for Theo.  Larry and his girlfriend Xandra take Theo to live with them in the outskirts of Las Vegas where Larry is a professional gambler.  Theo suffers major culture shock due to the fact that Larry is a poor father along with being a loser and a deadbeat.  He pretty much ignores Theo and ends up in trouble for not paying gambling debts.  Without parents to care for him, in a new environment and school, Theo makes the adjustment we might expect- he finds a friend in a similar situation.  He becomes best friends with a Russian boy named Boris, who is also without a mother but has an alcoholic father  and is essentially living on his own.  They become inseparable friends and assist each other in becoming expert shoplifters and dependent on alcohol and drugs.  All this time Theo has, or thinks he has, The Goldfinch painting hidden in his room.  Fate steps in again to change Theo’s life when Larry is killed in a car crash.  Theo panics and heads out on his own so he won’t be taken in by social services in Nevada, though Boris tries to get him to stay in Las Vegas.       

           

            Theo gets back to New York, as a sixteen year old with no family, and is faced with having to make more adjustments to what life has dealt him.  The Goldfinch has the feeling of a Dickens novel such as David Copperfield or Great Expectations:  boy on his own, facing great challenges, having to face life and deal with difficult situations.  Donna Tartt has loaded Theo down with more than his share of bad luck and undesirable characters but also given him a number of good people who help him along the way. Hobie, an endearing character in the book, takes Theo in, gives him a home and eventually helps him end up in a career as an antiques dealer.  Unfortunately, Theo continues with some of the shady dealings and drug use he started in Las Vegas.  It becomes clear early on in The Goldfinch that Theo is suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder due to what he experienced at the time of his mother’s death.  The effects of PTSD follow Theo into his early adult years and make it hard for him to settle into a stable, drug-free life.  His obsession with Pippa also makes it hard for Theo to go forward with marriage to a daughter in the Barbour family he has known for years.  Then along comes Boris, and the Goldfinch painting, back into Theo’s life and more bad luck takes him down a road he couldn’t have imagined.  Theo has to face a new set of challenges that almost prove too much for him but a will to live and cope, along with some good luck, get him through the crisis.  The Goldfinch doesn’t end with Theo neatly working out all his problems but he does emerge as a more mature and self-aware person who seems ready to get on with a better approach to life.

            It was interesting to me that the incidents in Theo’s life as a 13 year old took place roughly around the time of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York City in 2001.  Many children lost their parents and were traumatized by the attack.  The story of Theo captures much of what likely played out in the lives of children and teenagers as their families and their lives were ripped apart by the attack.  And some of these young people likely went through the same kind of difficult adjustments and PTSD  that we see in Theo.  The love of art, help from good people, and a will to go on living made it possible for Theo to make it to a better place.  One can only hope that the young people affected by the 9-11 attack had the same mix of good luck and good people to help offset the bad luck in their lives.  Some critics and readers may not have liked The Goldfinch for reasons they understand.  I liked it for the reasons I have tried to share:  it touched a place in my heart that wants to see a young kid with a lot of loss and bad luck, along with PTSD, find a way to adjust to life in some effective ways, using the good things fate also gives him, to end up with a life worth living.  

The Orphan Master's Son

The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson, 2012

Won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2013

 

The Orphan Master’s Son took me over a year to get around to reading, mainly because the premise expressed on the dust jacket seemed so strange and foreign:  “The Orphan Master’s Son follows a young man’s journey through the icy waters, dark tunnels, and eerie spy chambers of the world’s most mysterious dictatorship, North Korea.”  North Korea has been a mystery to many of us due to how closed off from the rest of the world it is.  And I have heard very little about the lives people lead in the country other than how the people often go without sufficient food while the government spends large sums on the military and defenses.  Maybe I wasn’t sure I wanted to learn more about all of this, so I put off reading Johnson’s Pulitzer-winning novel.  And to be honest, I have not enjoyed or felt rewarded for having read many of the recent winners of the prize for fiction.  However, I admit that I got caught up in this novel and I am sorry I put off reading it for a year.  I have not written a blog post on any of the more recent Pulitzer winners because of my disappointments with the works but The Orphan Master’s Son was, for me, a rewarding read and a book I want to talk about in this blog.  Please bear in mind that I am only giving my reactions and opinions.  Your take on The Orphan Master’s Son may be different from mine and I would value hearing your views.

 

The Orphan Master’s Son is the story of Pak Jun Do who was the son of the orphan master at the Long Tomorrows orphanage in North Korea.  Jun Do’s mother was stolen away by the North Korean government to Pyongyang to be a singer.  That’s all he knows of her.  However, the Orphan Master sees his lost wife’s face in Jun Do and, therefore, takes out his loss and hurt by being cruel to his son.  It is Jun Do’s job to give a name to each orphan boy, usually taken from the list of honored martyrs of North Korea.  Though he is not an orphan himself, Jun Do is taken for one his whole life because he is named after a national hero and he grew up in an orphanage.  Orphans are at the lowest level of society and most of them end up in the army.  At age 14 during a severe famine, Jun Do and the other orphans at Long Tomorrows are trucked to an army base where they are trained to be tunnel fighters.  The North Korean army digs tunnels under the demilitarized zone into South Korea.  The tunnel fighters are trained to sneak into the South and kidnap people and bring them back to North Korea.  Jun Do moves on from tunnel fighter to be a kidnapper in the Navy.  His job is to go by fishing boat to the shores of Japan, sneak into the country in a small raft, grab an unsuspecting Japanese citizen, and bring the victim back to North Korea.  One of the kidnapped persons was a famous Japanese opera singer whom a North Korean Minister wanted for his own.  Jun Do was particularly good at carrying out these raids because of his knowledge of taekwondo and his ability to fight in the dark.  After a number of successful kidnappings, Jun Do is rewarded with schooling to learn English and is then assigned to a fishing boat where he has the job of monitoring English radio transmissions and reporting them to the North Korean government.

 

 

Kim Jong Il

Supreme Leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea

1994-2011

 

The story told in The Orphan Master’s Son is strange and hard to believe but it’s also compelling to read.  The events in the life of Jun Do strike me as rather implausible but the context of these events, occurring as they do in North Korea, was interesting and informative. Not knowing much about North Korea, I became fascinated by the story Johnson tells in this novel.  In preparing to write The Orphan Master’s Son, Johnson travelled to North Korea in 2007 and read numerous testimonies of defectors from the country.  I believe that Johnson gives a reasonably accurate description of the bizarre dictatorship of the Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, over the nation of 23 million North Koreans.  This nation is believed by many to be one of the most backward and repressive countries in the world today.  Johnson drives home this point.  As I read the novel I kept trying to decide whether Johnson was giving the reader an expose’ of how things are in North Korea or a parody of North Korea and the Dear Leader.  I thought of how the movie and TV series “MASH” was a humorous parody, often exaggerated, of how it was for a U.S. Army medical unit in the Korean War.  Yet, MASH had a ring of truth that made the episodes entertaining, poignant and educational at the same time.  My opinion is that expose’ and parody both apply to The Orphan Master’s Son.  I see parody in how truth is handled in Kim Jong Il’s regime.  While the citizens are taught over loudspeakers in their homes and places of work that North Korea is the greatest, most democratic nation on earth where there is no hunger, the citizens are also warned over the loudspeaker to not start snaring song birds and gathering acorns until the proper seasons for these activities.  A central point in The Orphan Master’s Son is that the people are kept in the dark about how life is outside of North Korea.  For example, a central female character in the story, Sun Moon, asks a captured American woman about the evil imperialistic country she comes from:  “I wonder of what you must daily endure in America, having no government to protect you, no one to tell you what to do.  Is it true you’re given no ration card, that you must find food for yourself?....What plays over the American loudspeakers, when is your curfew, what is taught at your child-rearing collectives?....How does a society without a fatherly leader work?...How can a  citizen know what is best without a benevolent hand to shepherd her?”  Keeping the people so ignorant about the outside world and what North Korea is lacking compared to other countries is an effective way to maintain power and control.

 

Ultimately, I think The Orphan Master’s Son is a story about love.  Jun Do didn’t have the love of a mother or father, for that matter.  People in North Korea were taught to not seek and cultivate familial love but rather to feel the love of the Dear Leader and the State.  Under the surface, however, Jun Do longs for love.  Though he has never had a wife or even a girlfriend, he has the face of North Korea’s major female movie star, Sun Moon, tattooed on his chest while he is working on a fishing boat.  He has to do this so he will appear to be a fisherman since they all have their wives’ faces on their chests and Jun Do doesn’t want to be taken for a spy if their boat is captured by the U. S. Navy.  In a hard-to-believe plot twist, Jun Do is sent to Texas on a mission to recover a piece of Japanese radiation-detecting equipment that the U. S. has taken away from North Korea.  This is where the novel starts getting even more unbelievable rather than being a serious look at life in North Korea.  The mission fails and Jun Do gets thrown into a prison mine after returning to his homeland.  He manages to survive the terrible conditions and harsh treatment and eventually escapes.  Jun Do ends up being the replacement husband of Sun Moon and finally finds love.  The movie Casablanca and the actions of Rick serve as a model for Jun Do in how to make the ultimate sacrifice for his loved one and, in the process, play a good trick on the Dear Leader.  What an inventive, unique story- much better than a MASH episode.

 

  I have tried to not give away too much of The Orphan Master’s Son but I hope that my thoughts might create an interest in reading Johnson’s award-winning novel.  I learned a number of things about North Korea and Kim Jong Il but I was also entertained and touched by the story of The Orphan Master’s Son.  As to the accuracy of the descriptions Johnson gives of the Dear Leader and conditions in North Korea, I have become more convinced of this since reading a February 17, 2014 piece by John Heilprin of the Associated Press which reports that a United Nations panel has sent a formal warning to North Korea’s current leader, Kim Jong Un, son of Kim Jong Il, that he may be held to answer for continuing crimes against civilians of that nation.  These crimes include mass starvation, executions, torture and rape.  The U.N. investigation also found that North Korea is guilty of lifelong indoctrination of its citizens, political prison camps, and state-run abductions of North Koreans, Japanese and other nationals.  I’m impressed that Johnson describes all of the above U.N. findings in The Orphan Master’s Son.  What first struck me as hard to believe is now documented by an U.N. investigation of North Korea.  Thanks to Adam Johnson for bringing to us this look at life under the Dear Leader.

 

 

     

 

 

Dragon’s Teeth by Upton Sinclair, 1942, Won the Pulitzer Prize in 1943 

Dragon’s Teeth is the third book in a series of Lanny Budd novels by Upton Sinclair which chronicles world history from around 1914 until the beginning of the Cold War Era.  The Lanny Budd series includes the following novels: 

World's End, 1940

Between Two Worlds, 1941

Dragon's Teeth, 1942

Wide Is the Gate, 1943

Presidential Agent, 1944

Dragon Harvest, 1945

A World to Win, 1946

Presidential Mission, 1947

One Clear Call, 1948

O Shepherd, Speak!, 1949

The Return of Lanny Budd, 1953 

Sinclair used the Lanny Budd character to be an eye-witness to history and tell the story of what happened in Europe prior to World War I and on to World II.  Lanny was the illegitimate son of a Connecticut arms manufacturer, Robbie Budd, and his mother who was called “Beauty.”  She was an American beauty who had posed nude in France for some paintings before she and Robbie got together.  Robbie’s father would not let him marry Beauty because of her sketchy past, so she lived outside Cannes, France in a villa and that was where Lanny grew up.  Lanny had opportunities to travel through Europe and pick up all the languages so that he could move between the countries and cultures much like an insider.  This all sounds a bit like an old-fashioned “soap opera” but it makes a good vehicle for Sinclair to give his account of what transpired in Europe during the era. 

Dragon’s Teeth gives an account of the rise to power of Socialism, Communism and Fascism in Europe as a result of the bad way the reparations for WW I were imposed on Germany and Italy.  It begins with the 1929 stock market crash and ends in 1934 after the Nazi’s have solidified their power in Germany and Adolph Hitler has been elected Chancellor. Lanny has encounters with Mussolini and Hitler as well as many other important figures of the time. He also has Jewish friends who are beginning to see what is in store for them in Nazi Germany.  But the reader of Dragon's Teeth needs to start at the beginning of the Lanny Budd series in order to understand the characters and events that are described in the third novel. That means reading the  600- page World’s End and the equally long Between Two Worlds before launching into Dragon’s Teeth (630 pages).  For me, this meant about a year’s worth of reading.  You need to be interested in world history, Europe, World War I and II, and fighting Fascism to get through these three novels.   

Upton Sinclair does not tell this story from a neutral point of view.   He was, in fact, a devoted Socialist and social activist (some called him “muckraker”) known to many readers as the author of The Jungle in 1906.  In The Jungle he exposed the horrible conditions which surrounded the meatpacking industry in Chicago in the early 1900's and his novel actually led to improvements.  In 1906 the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act were made laws in the U.S.  Sinclair ran unsuccessfully for election to the U.S. Congress in 1920 and 1922 as a Socialist.  He also ran as a Democrat for governor of California in 1934 but was not elected.  He gained close to 900,000 votes which suggests that he was a viable candidate. 

With some of Sinclair’s political point-of-view in mind, it is not hard to imagine that in the Lanny Budd series, he is a strong proponent of the working class both in Europe and the U.S. Lanny comes from a wealthy, WASPISH background but also becomes very sympathetic to the poor working people around him.  In the novels, Lanny has an uncle, brother to his mother, who is an avowed Communist and he teaches Lanny a great deal about the party and its crusade to help the worker.  Lanny never joins the Communist Party but he contributes to it and to his uncle’s campaign to be elected as a Communist to the French national assembly.  It seems evident that Sinclair tried to use his influence as a writer of historical fiction to promote the social causes that he had been committed to for decades.  One interesting point from Dragon’s Teeth is that Fascism was developed as a means of opposing and stopping Communism.  The wealthy industrialists of several European nations were threatened by the workers' movement happening in the 1920’s and 1930’s so they supported the Fascist movement.  Many believed that Hitler and Mussolini could put down the Communist movement and then be controlled and used by the industrialists.  Anti-Semitism became a useful tool for the Fascists in rallying middle class workers and in eliminating many of the wealthy Jewish bankers who were blamed for much of the hardship that had befallen Europe after WW I.   

Lanny is caught between the worlds of wealth, fashion and capitalism on the one hand and the plight of the working class and also the Fascist movement that he sees clearly as a threat to world.  By 1934 Lanny has married a woman who has inherited $24 million from her father.  She is not as sympathetic toward the plight of the working class or the Jews in Europe as is Lanny.  She clearly represents the wealthy class that does not become alarmed by the rise of Fascism.  Lanny, with his “Red” leanings, is now convinced of the great evil that will come from Fascism but he wrestles with the problem of what he can do about it.  He ends up trying to rescue his Jewish friend from the Dachau concentration in Germany as Dragon’s Teeth ends.  To do this he poses as a sympathizer of the Nazi’s, makes a deal with Herman Goering, and tries to use his wealth and status as a means of bringing about the liberation of his friend.  This makes for an engaging story. 

A point to keep in mind is that Sinclair was writing the Lanny Budd series as history was unfolding.  The series was begun in 1940 and Dragon’s Teeth came out in 1942.  Sinclair seems to be trying to warn the world, as he did in The Jungle that a great evil was being perpetrated on the world and that something needed to be done about it.  The title “Dragon’s Teeth” is explained at the end of the novel.  In Greek mythology, the teeth of a dragon, planted in soil, will grow into fully armed warriors.  Sinclair was giving a warning that the events surrounding World War I and the poor way reparations were inflicted on the losers of the war in Europe was the sowing of dragon’s teeth that would lead to horrible armed conflicts for the world.  At the time of the writing of Dragon’s Teeth, Sinclair did not know that Fascism would be defeated in Europe but he was making a good effort to warn readers of what was at stake.

 I am now faced with needing to read the next Lanny Budd novel, Wide is the Gate and the seven other novels, to find out what Lanny does as he tries to save the world from the dragon’s teeth.  Though Sinclair’s Lanny Budd series of historical novels has become “old history” and rather unknown in our present time, I believe the books are worth reading for enjoyment and for education about a past time that has greatly changed the world we live in.  Are dragon’s teeth still being sown that we will have to deal with in our future?