Francine Prose has a wonderful—and by wonderful I mean articulate and scathing—review of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch in the January 9th issue of the New York Review of Books, in which she points out that the book’s Dickensian aspects are not necessarily Dickens’ ”originality, his intelligence, his witty and precise descriptions…his cadenced, graceful language…”
Perhaps it was this that kept me from feeling fully drawn into the novel—but more likely it was the cringe-worthy inaccuracies about life in 21st century New York (there will be spoilers):
Page 67: ”Unexpectedly the drawer popped open. I stared down at the mess: rusty batteries, a broken cheese grater, the snowflake cookie cutters my mother hadn’t used since I was in first grade, jammed in with ragged old carry-out menus from Viand and Shun Lee Palace and Delmonico’s.”
These ragged old carry-out menus are rather suspect.
Viand: A reasonable choice, but they don’t deliver south of 81st street, and the Deckers live at East 57th.
Shun Lee Palace: I assume the name is meant to invoke your average Chinese takeout, but Shun Lee Palace is a well known white-tablecloth restaurant, where even the Moo Shu Pork and Chicken with Broccoli cost $25. While the Deckers were only poor by Park Avenue standards, this seems a little steep. Yelp tells me they do offer takeaway, though. Their website is a blank page that says “This Account Has Been Suspended For Billing Verification and Policy Violation.”
Delmonico’s: Do you mean the upscale Financial District steakhouse where a cheap dinner might mean a $45 filet mignon? Because they do deliver, but not that far uptown. Or did you mean the nondescript East Side deli Delmonico Gourmet? I know, I know–the latter just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
Page 86: ”In my mind, I went over all the meals we’d eaten in the days leading up to her death: our last visit to the Greek diner, our last visit to Shun Lee Palace…”
They really liked Shun Lee Palace.
Page 150: “‘Listen,’ I said to Andy several days later…’can you cover for me this afternoon?’ ‘Certainly,’ said Andy, taking a greedy swallow of his coffee. ‘How long?’ ‘Don’t know.’ Depending on how long it took me to change trains at Fourteenth Street, it might take forty-five minutes to get downtown; the bus, on a weekday, would be even longer.”
Except Theo neither has to change trains at Fourteenth Street nor does the trip take 45 minutes. Theo wants to get from his school on the Upper West Side, down to Hobie’s on West 10th Street, and then back up to the Barbour’s on Park Avenue.
Leg 1: A straight shot on the 1 train from wherever the school is down to Christopher Street/Sheridan Square. From 86th street, that would be 20 minutes. From 96th even less time if Theo can catch an express train.
Leg 2: Yes, the 4/5/6 that Theo needs to take back uptown runs through Union Square. But that is as close as he can get to West 10th without having to get out and walk–there is no train he could have gotten on at Christopher Street or West 4th that would require changing at 14th Street. Maybe he walked up to the L at 6th Avenue? In any case, the trip averages closer to 30 minutes.
Page 362 (note: This is the worst offense.): “As tired as I was, and cold, still my heart stiffened to see the Park, and I ran across Fifty-Seventh (Street of Joy!) to the leafy darkness.”
First, Street of Joy? Really? Now that that’s out of the way, did Theo bound up a couple of blocks that go unmentioned? Or in this not-so-distant future did Central Park descend two blocks, obliterating Bergdorf’s and the Plaza and nestling up across the street from the Apple Store? It’s called copy editing. The southern edge of Central Park is Fifty-Ninth Street.
Page 562: ”Politely I stood around their antique farm tables, drinking myself into a stupor as they chatted about their country houses, their co-op boards, their school districts, their gym routines–that’s right, seamless transition from breast feeding although we’ve had some big changes in the nap schedule lately, our oldest just starting pre-K…”
How many Upper-East-Side-y New Yorkers are having children while in college? Let’s get some things straight here: Theo is 26. Kitsey is 22. These are Kitsey’s friends. Now, we know that Kitsey hangs around with a slightly older crowd–Theo, Tom Cable–so maybe her friends are closer to Theo’s age than her own. 24 year olds with 4 year old children? 22 year olds with one year olds? 26 year olds already on their second? (A 2000 study conducted by the New York Department of City Planning notes that “residents of Manhattan exhibited a pattern of delayed fertility” with some striking graphics.)
This could be a clever commentary on Peaches-Geldof-style early breeding, wherein women freed from having to establish careers or pay off student loans have children at considerably younger ages than the rest of the population. But more likely it’s just a major plot oversight.
Page 139: “Andy’s iPhone chimed.”
iPhones exist, which means the story begins no earlier than 2007. And yet…
Page 159: “Half-dazed, we said our goodbyes (there were no promises to write; it seemed she was too ill for that)”
Apparently teenagers in 2007-2009 write letters as their primary means of contact. Or by “write,” are we to assume “write a Facebook message”? It appears not, as Theo follows through with his anachronistic communication strategy…
Page 251: “I only had access to email on the computer at school…Mrs. Barbour dutifully answered the paper letters I sent…I wrote to Pippa in Texas though she was too ill to answer.”
…despite the fact that he had a laptop back in New York.
Page 37: “[Welty] was, I saw, pointing over at a dusty rectangle of board, virtually invisible in the broken beams and rubbish, smaller than my laptop computer at home.”
I can only imagine that Larry and Xandra stole this laptop and pawned it, thereby abandoning Theo to his sad, novel-appropriate letter-writing existence.
*
Tags: books, donna tartt, fact-checking, samantha fox, the goldfinch
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There’s a Viand on 61st and Madison! (Oh god I’m sorry for doing this) (And you’re completely right about the rest of this)
The Central Park bit is ridiculous. I feel like that’s pretty common knowledge.
I was kind of hoping for some drug habit-related fact checking, but this is probably better than that.
The nice thing about living in an area nobody writes about is that I don’t have to be cranky when they get it wrong.
But should a novel set in my hometown ever be published (yeah right), I will have a list of complaints that puts this article to shame.
I’ve been writing a story that takes place on public transit, and I keep having to remind myself to locate it in actual space. Even if I never specify the place in-story, it’s important to have a concrete sense of place to keep the geography consistent.
It annoys me when a movie is set or filmed in my city and many such details are ALL WRONG, but then I think “people who live in New York or LA must feel like this all the time!” Apparently they do!
I can forgive it in a movie or TV show — they only have so much time. (Actually, a million years ago I read a great article about a movie shot in DC that said they actually had shot the full chase sequence so it made sense, and it was in editing for time that they fucked it up, which was highly reassuring.) But in a book? It’s ridiculous!
I get that geography-wise, productions are limited by time, logistics, and where they do/don’t have permission to film. I’m more bothered by crappy dialogue and things that no real human, let alone any *authentic* citizen would ever say. (Yes, I’m the gatekeeper of authenticity! :-p)
That’s a whole nother story!
I was living in central Maine when I saw In the Bedroom, a Maine-set thriller/family drama. Sitting directly ahead of me in the theater was a woman of almost impossible age and, I’m guessing, her mother, who spent the entire film switching (in voices that would have seemed loud in a small party) between complaints about the geography of the film and “Who’s he, now?” At the end of the first act, I murmured to my friend “I just can’t” and gestured to indicate I was moving a few rows back.
At the height of the film’s tension, I heard a screech arise from 6 rows forward as the impossibly old woman’s impossibly old mother pointed out “YOU CAN’T DRIVE THAT WAY DOWN THAT ROAD!”
Ironic afterword: I had so much trouble smothering my laughter that I was afraid I would get kicked out for disturbing other movie-goers.
I kind of love it when people talk really loudly during movies and theatre, in a backwards sort of way. Like when some friends and I went to see War Horse, and during the play’s climactic scene, there was dead silence except for a young woman a few seats ahead of me, who gasped, “oh my god” with such sincerity that I almost died.
That kind of rare spontaneous utterance of shock or feeling is a great part of seeing performances in public. In high school, I played Blanche DuBois and I still remember someone in the audience crying out “OH NO” during the last act, and how proud I was that we’d moved her to the point where she was crying out.
What I’m talking about was two people speaking at full volume to each other for 90 minutes straight with only the occasional pause, with no concern for the theater full of people whose viewing they were trampling over.
Other awesome things that can happen in movies: I watched Tangled in 3D and at one of the points with the floating lanterns, the little girl in front of us tried to reach out and grab them! And then, when Flynn is like, dead for a bit, the girl was like “Is he going to be okay?” and her sister comforted her.
Mostly I don’t like kids, but sometimes they make me remember that I have emotions other than disdain.
The classic movie Chain Reaction (starring Keanu Reeves and Morgan Freeman) is easily the best/most inaccurate movie set in Chicago. In one tense scene Keanu meets Morgan in the Field Museum and then has to run away from the bad guys at which point he inexplicably runs down a stairway from the Museum of Science and Industry and then reappears in the Field. It’s by far the best part of the movie.
My Best Friend’s Wedding is my favorite “WHAAAA” Chicago geography movie. Julia Roberts flies into what is clearly O’Hare, and they magically drive into the city via south LSD by Soldier Field. Then the wedding takes place at an estate an hour north of Chicago and in a matter of seconds Julia Roberts chases Cameron Diaz southeast into Chicago in a bread truck going north on State Street, only to end up south of the city at Comiskey Park. It’s incredible.
Also Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. That one will make your head spin.
I visited a Chicago friend once who took me on part of a Ferris Bueller drive-by, and it was so hilarious how very wrong things were.
Then we went into the city and stood under the L (Ell? What do y’all say?) and we felt like George Clooney might walk by any minute (this was long ago, back when he was still on ER, and ER was still on TV.)
Oh god, I grew up in the neighborhood where RENT takes place, and during that movie I was just shouting “there’s no subway stop there!” and “that bar is supposed to be 5 blocks in the other direction!” Thankfully we were in her dorm room.
Like how every actor in a movie set in Oregon pronounces it “Or-uh-gone.” Ugh you don’t even go here.
Oh and movies in the Bay Area that refer to “Frisco” or “San Fran.” Just get out..
Has there been a movie set in Oregon since Sometimes a Great Notion? I mean I’m half joking. But anyways . . . there’s nothing here, everyone! Nothing to see! Move along, get out.
The technology issues bugged me the most, probably because I couldn’t figure out when the book was supposed to be set exactly.
I wonder if the author deliberately left out most of the common communication methods available at the time the story was supposed to set in an effort to prevent the story from seeming dated, or if she did it for some other reason.
Yeah, it makes me itchy to read things that I can’t really place in the real world (ha, this is why I never got into genre fiction) and I spent the whole book going “wait, so this part has to be sometime after the housing market crashed but BEFORE xyz. . . .”
By the end, I just concluded that the book took place in an alternate-universe sometime in the 2000s and left it at that.
I think she did it for entirely self-serving ‘but I don’t want Theo to X/Y/Z no matter how much any human in the 21st century with a shred of common sense would do exactly this one tiny, easy, almost reflex communication-related thing’ purposes.
I mean, he wanted to drag Kitsy to the damn Apple store (never mind how obvious that whole reveal was — wait, never mind obvious — it was COMPLETELY TELEGRAPHED by Theo’s earlier relationship) and was shown to check his own phone obsessively when it worked for the plot, but the second his having the slightest use of a phone or CNN World News or even the damn International Herald Tribune they would have left at his door by rote or the damn hotel business center computers or any damn other way people who are obsessed with checking their phones (i.e., Theo & everyone else aged 14-72) go about obtaining contact with the world if something separates them from the phone, suddenly he just… fails to bother.
(And then there are some other things I would rant about, but my rage threshold is nearing, and I’ve got to go sip some calming tea.)
She wrote the book over a really long time period, so it might just be that different bits were written at different times and never totally reworked for consistency.
Despite people having laptops and iPhones, he used the white pages to look up “Hobart & Blackwell” instead of Google. These anachronisms kept pulling me out of the book, and I couldn’t help but wonder if 10 years was too long to spend on a novel, the technology gets away from your plot.
But then the geography was bad too! He took the bus to Hobie’s (which was a weird choice already, as Samantha notes), and Tartt specifies that he got off at Washington Square. The shop is on W. 10th Street. Why did he stay on the bus 3 blocks past his stop? You’d think Tartt and her editor would both have a better sense of Manhattan.
Also he ages in the book, but the time period seems to stay exactly the same. (Second also- I am embarrassingly not done this book yet).
Lately I play this game with Veep and House of Cards recognizing all the Baltimore places that are standing in for DC since I actually know both of those cities well.
It is not embarrassing. I finished it, and was appreciative of many things about it, but the things that bring about my rage are a towering burning tire-fire of noxiousness that has overwhelmed most of that appreciation.
CATHEDRAL HEIGHTS METRO. We see you.
They’ve filmed in the real Metro in the past, right? I figured WMATA wouldn’t let them film that particular scene (similar-enough things happen way too often on Metro) so they had to improvise.
Not embarassing. I wouldn’t have forced myself through if not for my pathological inability to not finish books.
While I dig the literary detective work, I have to say that in New York, it is completely possible to accrue a staggering number of takeout menus from restaurants you’ve never ordered from. The creeping proliferation of untouched menus was a constant feature of my own Manhattan childhood.
But you are BEYOND right about the tech and transport-related inconsistencies. I definitely spent like, 20 minutes poring over that passage to figure out how Theo was getting to West 10th. Is your school on Central Park West? Are you getting on the B/D to 14th and transferring to the west-bound L? Why didn’t you just take the A/C? Which bus?!? YOUR COMMUTE IS GIVING ME NIGHTMARES.
I reread that paragraph on page 150 so many times! I had too much faith in Donna Tartt, so I was trying to make it work in my mind but I just couldn’t. But I’m glad I wasn’t the only one who was disturbed by this.
I am finding, the more I think about it, the more curmudgeonly I become about The Goldfinch. (See: everything I’m posting in the Tournament of Books commentariat these days.) It’s so much to do with expectations v. reality, but it’s INFURIATING that there were so many little things wrong (the NYC geography stuff is new to me, but not at all surprising) not because the publishers failed to enforce some decent copy-editing (though, really, how hard would it have been to make her basic geography correct? This isn’t ImagineLand; she draws so heavily on the “character” of Manhattan, very deliberately using Park Avenue / UWS / etc. as stand-ins for everything she had to say about class and art and character and values, so it’s egregious to put the Park on the wrong corner, and all else you point out.)
…wait, where was I? Oh, yeah – infuriating not b/c of the failure of copy-editing but because that’s part of the systemic problems with the book’s structure and inability to make Theo a whole character, believable, or at least consistent in anything (except his habit of substituting drugs & fever dreams for any actual action on his part).
I love Hobey, I love Boris, I’ve got a teen crush on Pippa, but Theo? Pfffffft. The puzzle pieces existed, but they were scattered to the floor, ignored, while Tartt just scribbled an approximation of maybe what the picture would have looked like, had it been completed.
BORIS
He made the book for me. Theo, I could take or leave.
I noticed that someone in the Tournament of Books comments was complaining about the inaccurate Burger King in Grand Junction, CO, and the discussion even touched on “but people would be mad if you were that wrong about New York”–but no one brought up ANY of these things! The Toast, continuing to be the best.
I didn’t really love Hobey or Pippa, and Theo bewilders me. Early Boris seems like an edgy teenager written by a teenager who wishes they were edgy and Russian, but he amused me.
The audiobook Boris was a lot of fun, for me. (Except over at TOB – or wait, was it here? – someone pointed out where Tartt said Boris’s accent was more Australian than anything because she wanted to use all kinds of Aussie lingo or whatever, and first of all, I never noticed the Australian influence on his language, and second of all, the narrator (David Pittu) gives him an entirely Slavic accent.)
Friday will be interesting in the TOB – I didn’t expect to end up appreciating so much about The People In The Trees, but it was so much more satisfying than The Goldfinch. I guess I really prefer a despicable narrator who takes action to a flat one who lets everyone else take care of stuff while he’s busy with his fever dreams.
Thank you, Samantha Fox; this is delightful and spot-on. So many things about this book made me insane, and you’ve spotlighted an especially infuriating crop of them.
It almost makes me sad for Donna Tartt, who is clearly at the center of an outbreak of Too Big of a Deal to Be Edited-itis (other sufferers include Tom Wolfe and Alice Hoffman), but there’s no way to know how complicit she is in letting herself look careless and clueless. It also made me want to punch everyone at Little, Brown who could have saved her from either herself or her overly deferential editorial team.
I HATE IT when authors get “too big to be edited.” EDITING IS YOUR JOB, EDITORS, I DON’T CARE HOW MUCH MONEY THEY’RE BRINGING IN. Plus, you’re supposed to have a good enough relationship with your authors that they will be receptive to your edits to begin with.
I’ve never run the numbers, but I’d bet my job that there’s a direct correlation between those who most need to be edited and those who refuse to take edits.
As a reader, I 100% agree with you. It drives me FUCKING BANANAS to see a book that’s poorly or timidly edited. As an editor, well, I have a lot of books on my plate, and so sometimes I have to give in on shit because I simply do not have the time to fight about it. Where I work, we don’t/can’t change text without the author’s agreement, unless it’s libelous, slanderous, or otherwise legally problematic.
I think it’s her m.o. to make something up when it’s too much trouble to research something more realistic/accurate. Remember the “Vanderfellers” in The Secret History? That’s kind of eye-rolling. Sounds like a name out of the Flintstones or something. Or the made up Middle Eastern kingdom Julian had ties to . . . I forget the name, but it was like some silly imaginary principality you would expect from a formulaic romance novel. There were certain things in that book too that prevented me from taking it entirely seriously.
Isrami. That fictional country was just one of many things about The Secret History which I found highly irritating. I rolled my eyes more than Liz Lemon.
Gee, Donna Tartt wrote another badly-edited book with an unbelievable main character? *gasps in disbelief*
I have not read The Goldfinch but I have read a book set in my hometown area and, yeah, the inaccuracies just had me drove. Telling myself ‘poetic licence’ or ‘alternate universe’ could not keep me from grumbling at everything that was wrong with the setting.
hey guess what, The Goldfinch is a work of fiction! everyone can calm down now, you’re welcome.
But he wore the same pair of glasses for 15 years! During all the drugs and alcohol, no less! I will not calm down!
I refuse to read Jim Butcher’s “Dresden Files” in part because of his lack of familiarity with Chicago’s geography. Look at a fuckin’ map! It’s not that damn hard! Conversely, Jack Fredrickson’s mystery series set in Chicago is intimately familiar with Chicago and its quirks (takes an hour to get anywhere!), but you can tell he lived in/visited certain areas about 10-15 years ago because what he’s remembered and written is different. Or you can tell if you live in the area now, I guess.
p 266 “they name their kids like Apple and Blanket and Blue and Bastard ”
Too specific a reference for a time that seems not possible. Apple was born in 2004 and Boris makes this quote in Vegas, only a year or so after the explosion. Drove me to wikipedia to check dates.
This, on top of the technology inconsistencies drove me nuts. Were cell phones so ubiquitous in NY in the early 2000s? All jr high kids had them then?