Tournament of Books Round Twelve: THE GOLDFINCH by Donna Tartt vs. THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES by Hanya Yanagihara

You already know where this review is going. The difficult one is going to be next week, when THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES goes up against THE SON. Oh, my heart. But, we still have a bit to talk about with respect the THE GOLDFINCH, and the ToB commentariat...

The missing plot point in THE GOLDFINCH may well have been that the Russian gangsters who steal the goldfinch painting towards the end of the novel are part of a terrorist organization that also orchestrated the bombing of the Met that killed Theo's mom. This is the conspiracy theory I choose to believe; it explains why Boris came into the story in the first place, aside from being an entertaining set piece, and it explains why we are never told more about the bombing (so as not to ruin the surprise of the latter third of the book). Maybe Hobie is in on it too. Maybe Mr. and Mrs. Barbour have inadvertently funded terrorism through their hedge funds. Any of these editions would make THE GOLDFINCH more worldly, more committed to ideals outside of the baroque sadness and inward, cringing shame of Theo Decker. But it isn't; THE GOLDFINCH is a long character study of a man falling into his own worst impulses because he believes he merits no better.

For all that commenters and judges of the ToB keep alluding to some structural flaws in THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES, I haven't seen any explicitly mentioned. Maybe when a novel is a first novel reviewers feel obliged to describe it as undercooked because they have to maintain hope that there are greater surprises awaiting them in the second novel. I just don't see it; THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES read as finely as any nth novel I've encountered, and I couldn't tell you a structural flaw. I enjoyed the biographical footnotes, I enjoyed the framing device that we are reading Norton Perina's memoirs, I enjoyed the anthropologist who disappears into the forest and is never seen again, and the feral children populating Perina's mansion of horrors. This novel is about the struggles of one man, but it reaches out again and again to bring in worldly themes. The destruction of paradises. The ills of globalization. Man's colonizing impulse over man. Our fear of our own mortality and infirmity. Society's obsession with the rites of puberty. The treatment of women in science. The treatment of young people in science. The treatment of human and animal subjects in science. I've tread these lines of argument before, but I want to stress that there's something for almost everyone in THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES--maybe nothing for someone who deeply identifies with Ruth Ozeki, but almost everyone.

One aspect of the commentary in the Tournament with regard to THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES that I take issue with is the idea that the memoirs don't read as though they could be written by a scientist, or that Perina's disregard for ethics committees makes him an idiot and not recognizably a scientist. I completely disagree on both fronts, having spend the last five years around many scientists. I believe that scientists can be adept at writing and observing, and also that they can be entirely uncaring about the welfare of their research subjects. I've seen both. And it could be that my personal experiences bias me toward loving a novel that "exposes" the dark side of the worship of scientists, but…

My winner and ToB's: THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES

Read the official tournament judgment here.