Tournament of Books Round Seven: LONG DIVISION by Kiese Laymon vs. THE GOLDFINCH by Donna Tartt

"You're so long division," Shalaya Crump tells City. By which she means he "shows his work," he's process-driven and detailed. I would say that City is more homotopic (and not because of his feelings for LaVander Peeler); he splits into two journeys once he finds Long Division the novel-within-this-novel, takes two separate but fairly continuous paths, and winds up back as one boy in the present. The time travel allows City to explore different versions of himself: one where he is notorious for causing a scene at a "sentence bee", and one where he isn't; one where he has a girlfriend, and one where he has vague feelings for another boy; one where he is brave and one where he is less so; one where he is religious and one where he is just scared. City's struggle with the performance of identity is familiar and timeless; he wants to be tough but he is probably the school nerd, he wants to be considered mysterious and attractive but he is chubby and very concerned with what others think of him, he wants to be a YouTube celebrity but he doesn't want to parlay his moment of fame into a reality show appearance. He struggles with the idea that the types of culture presented in a high school english class are not "for" him or people like him, while believing that the rap lyrics written by his friend would never be accepted as a literary text. He is deeply affronted by a group of racists who kick him into the mud, but doesn't understand that in the 1940s a Jewish man would also be a target of the KKK.

City gets co-opted into the adventures of a lot of women around him, including his grandmother, Shalaya Crump, and Baize Shepard. I think I would have liked this novel a lot more if it were told from the perspective of one of them; a lot of the time City didn't understand what was going on or why, and neither did I. I also found it difficult to fall into a rhythm with the novel's dialect; either I wasn't cool enough to understand it or I just got really sick of every beverage being referred to as "drank." It's one thing to have an authentically rendered African-American dialogue (like, I don't know, THE GOOD LORD BIRD?) and another to sound like the narrator is Lil Jon.

From one coming-of-age story to another, I was probably better poised to like THE GOLDFINCH from the beginning, because Theo Decker is cultured and white and a little bit of an asshole, and so am I. Other reviews have pointed out a glaring hole in the novel that actually didn't even occur to me when I was reading it; the bomb that kills Theo's mother and leads him to steal the goldfinch painting was a pretty significant terrorist attack that doesn't seem to have many repercussions on life in New York or Theo's perception of his geopolitical reality. Regardless, Theo has more than enough to worry about. I was particularly sympathetic to his fascination with the painting, as I had seen that very painting about a year earlier at the DeYoung museum in San Francisco, in an exhibit of Dutch treasures from the Mauritius museum. I was just as taken with it as Theo was, even though it wasn't the centerpiece of the exhibition; the bird just pops, looks both realistic and impressionistic, and the painting itself is very different from what you'd normally expect of a Dutch Master. It's on a light background, the composition is very simple, and the subject seems to glow from within, rather than from a carefully considered out-of-frame light source. Is it great enough that I would take it from the wall of a bombed-out museum? Sure, maybe. Theo's action doesn't seem so bad; he's trying to protect the painting because he doesn't know if there are more bombs waiting to go off in the building. Even keeping it for a week, a month, a year, I still believe that if he had gone to turn it in he wouldn't have been in trouble; he was a kid, and a victim of a terrorist attack, and he was understandably shaken and confused.

However, for the plot to hold together, we kind of have to believe that Theo would have gone to jail for turning it in, and soon enough he will because of the various criminal elements who try to blackmail him. There are some convoluted twists and turns surrounding the ownership and importance of the painting, and the genre of the novel veers from Harry Potter-like (the part where Theo gets adopted by the kindly furniture restorer and begins his odd apprenticeship) to Mad Max (Theo and his Russian pal in a deserted exurb, doing drugs and getting beat up and escaping from Theo's dad and the loan sharks who want to kill him) to Great Gatsby (Theo getting betrothed to a girl who is Daisy Buchanan in better shoes, escaping the engagement due to her infidelity with a childhood sweetheart, drinking too much, and going to too many parties). I think the book is ambitious, and I applaud it for that. Theo's struggle to keep from turning into his father is emotionally affecting, even as the reader understands that Theo is bringing all of his troubles on himself, and the happy ending he finally finds seems like the best-case scenario for all involved. Theo does not, after all, drag an otherworldly and innocent woman into his downfall as his father did (and as he very much wants to); he doesn't alienate all of his friends and blind himself from his failures (as his father did and as we are afraid he will by the last third of the book), and he doesn't ruin something beautiful--something that it turns out he never had the ability to ruin in the first place, though he thought for so long that he did.

Round winner: THE GOLDFINCH

Read the official ToB tournament round here.