Tournament of Books Round Fifteen: THE GOLDFINCH by Donna Tartt vs. THE GOOD LORD BIRD by James McBride

Zombie Round! I find that my judgment in this round, between two books I enjoyed but didn’t love, is colored by my anticipation of, and excitement for, THE GOLDFINCH—I expected more from it, and it fell short of my hopes. I hadn’t heard anything about THE GOOD LORD BIRD, on the other hand—when I first saw it I thought it was going to be about the hunt for this thought-to-be-extinct woodpecker—and so when it turned out to be funny, and educational for someone who knew next to nothing about John Brown and Harper’s Ferry, I was surprised and pleased. For that matter, the sections that those who found THE GOLDFINCH charming cite (the Las Vegas interlude, and those scenes with Boris) I didn’t find particularly amusing. I loved Popchik, and I was glad that Theo got away from New York for a while, but I certainly wouldn’t have spent time with Boris on my own. He seemed like far more of a caricature than the similarly expedient Hobie. I liked Hobie, and I would read a short story about his life, but for Theo to remain loyal to Boris while screwing Hobie over with unnecessary deceit was too painful and unmotivated for me. I can’t see why Theo would have continued to create forgeries after the initial thrill of succeeding with one, and I think it happened simply because Tartt wanted to show that Theo continued to give in to his worst impulses like his father before him, without being overly tedious with the descriptions of drugs and drugged stupor and a few pills, and some drugs hidden under the bed.

I understood Onion better, even though his lived experiences are much farther removed from mine than Theo’s life of privilege and self-doubt. Onion’s motivations were clear to me: self-preservation is something we all have in common as a species, and wanting to avoid violence, as a theme I identified in the first review round, is very relatable. Onion didn’t have much regret for his father’s death, which I found strange, but he also got swept up into half-captivity half-adventure immediately afterward, and was understandably preoccupied with learning how to please his new master (and learning that he no longer had a master, no matter how important it was to stay with John Brown’s army.)

As much as I hate to level this judgment against any novel, I think THE GOLDFINCH was too long. THE GOOD LORD BIRD had the benefit of being constrained by the timelines of an actual event, John Brown’s life, but at least it had the good sense to stay within those constraints, keep the action moving, and introduce us to a broad enough range of characters that if we grew tired of the moralizing orator we could stay interested in the double-crossing prostitute. THE GOLDFINCH kept bringing me back to the same characters, whether likeable or not, and it ended up backfiring; even if I had had enough of the Barbours, they kept coming back, and even if I thought Boris was destined for an early grave, he escaped scrape after scrape. But not even by becoming a zombie can these characters survive this round…

My winner and ToB’s: THE GOOD LORD BIRD

Read the official Tournament judgment here. 

Tournament of Books Round Fourteen: THE SON by Philipp Meyer vs. THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES by Hanya Yanagihara

Noooooooooooooo.

This round pitted two books I loved against one another, so I really couldn’t have been happy (and I would have either of these trade spots with THE GOOD LORD BIRD in a heartbeat). It confuses me that there are people who don’t like either of these books—I have never felt that I need to love a main character, or approve of him; I probably need to empathize with him, but he doesn’t have to be a good person, and I feel I was let into the hearts and minds of both of the main characters of these novels.

Why might one choose THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES over THE SON? I still remember the scenery and the islands of Ivu’ivu. I would happily go there for vacation, and its demise through colonization and predation hurt me, as though I were losing a paradise I would otherwise have had access to. The novel had a deeper understanding of, and relationship with, animals than THE SON did, despite THE SON’s explorations of hunting, of pets, of the love of horses and the use of horses, and of the Native American practices of making bowstrings and blankets from animals. The latter part of THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES became a strange Phillip Roth pastiche, with a moneyed non-traditional suburban family exploring every conformation of dysfunction. Is there ever a situation in which a single father—and one who has a career outside of the home that he is very much dedicated to—successfully raises forty adopted children in rapid succession? Is this ever not an unregulated and unsupervised orphanage? What are we to make of the adult children who come home from college to wash the dishes and thank Norton for raising them? Was that even true? We may believe in our hearts that love is more important than money, and that a teenager who can’t go to college because he can’t afford it but who has his parents’ undying love and support will go farther than one given a trust fund and completely ignored growing up. But we also have to imagine, reading this narrative, that the unimaginable gap between growing up on a tiny island—I can’t even call it rural because there’s nothing like a city near Ivu’ivu to position itself against—and growing up in a rich American suburb is only bridgeable with a great deal of privilege, and private tutors, and strongly held expectations. I would read the memoir of one of Norton’s adopted daughters with great interest.

Of course, I would also gladly read the memoir of one of Eli’s Comanche brothers, even for the scenes in which the Comanches are decimated by a disease that Eli was vaccinated against—in his previous life, the life that he has entirely rejected, his mother’s care for him that early in his life protected him in this unimaginable new life he has entirely embraced. I still don’t understand why Eli’s mother opened the door to the Comanches, as she must have known what would happen, but that scene made me feel that she was still looking out for her son, that despite her own life, and that of her daughter’s, and that of her more sensitive son, the entire McCullough trajectory had as its purpose, its fate, bringing Eli McCullough into the world and helping him tear his way through it. And the glory of this novel is that it made me believe he was worth it.

My winner: THE SON

ToB’s winner: THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES

Read the official Tournament judgment here.

Tournament of Books Round Thirteen: A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING by Ruth Ozeki vs. THE GOOD LORD BIRD by James McBride

In today’s matchup we have the cross-dressing ex-slave, Onion/Henry, who is taken along on John Brown’s road to occupying Harper’s Ferry and taking a stand against slavery, versus the bullied Japanese high-school girl, Naoko, who goes to live at her great-grandmother’s Zen Buddhist temple after her father attempts suicide. There are a number of sections of each that require the reader to suspend disbelief, and the commentary of this round touches on one of them: how does Onion maintain the illusion that he is a woman for so long, in front of so many people, in a brothel, and as the second woman in a household full of men? I also want to know how Naoko’s mother fails to realize that her only daughter has dropped out of school and become a prostitute at a maid-themed café. And why Nao’s own tsunami-inflicted death ends up being less affecting than the death of one of John Brown’s mentally disadvantaged sons. But let’s start with what we do know.

John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry was well-intentioned but poorly planned, motivated more by theological righteousness than expedience, political concern, or well-connected scheming. John Brown sabotages his own plan by moving the date of his attack around without communicating with his reinforcements, choosing a location that is very well-protected and in the midst of unfriendly territory, and believing that no matter what he does, he can’t fail, because the Lord is on his side. He doesn’t make a plan B. He barely has a plan for retreat, and comes to realize at the end that his beliefs will even carry him through imprisonment and death, because he sees himself as something of a Messiah figure. I read a New Yorker article recently about the Branch Davidians, which reminded me quite a bit of John Brown. David Koresh wasn’t fighting for human rights, but he also believed that as long as he could communicate his religious message, his subsequent capture and imprisonment would be tolerable. Does John Brown’s motivation for his failed takeover of Harper’s Ferry justify his actions? Certainly if someone tried something similar now, they would be considered a terrorist—was John Brown a terrorist? Does knowing that his heart was in the right place and that history bore out his wishes change how his siege of the armory must have felt to the people who lived and worked there? Or to the slaves who saw what he was doing and knew it would fail? To the free blacks who had to consider whether to help him in principle and potentially die or lose their freedom, or leave him to his own devices and feel complicit with the forces that moved against him? I think this is both one of the simplest questions THE GOOD LORD BIRD raises, and also one of the most interesting. Onion doesn’t join Brown’s stand out of principle, but because he realizes he has failed to uphold a promise to Brown, and doesn’t want to betray his friend. Although Onion is basically opposed to slavery, he never believes that Brown’s plan will work. He comes to Brown’s aid because Brown was a second father figure to him, and because he feels he owes Brown his loyalty, which ends up being a stronger conviction than the inherent wrongness of slavery.

In Naoko’s story, the doomed fighter is her great-uncle, a conscripted kamikaze pilot in World War Two. Although the pilot generally appreciates the life he has had in Japan, and has affection for his countrymen, he understands that the war is wrong, that the methods by which it is fought are unjust, and that the enemy is also a scared young man like him, who shouldn’t be killed for wanting to protect his country. His experiences provoke Nao first to pride, when she thinks he carried out his military mission and died a martyr, then to regret for her former feelings when she learns that he crashed his plane into the ocean, leaving his mission unfulfilled but his morality uncompromised. Her duality of feeling brings up an interesting tension that we see today, as our country embroils itself in conflict after conflict that have little bearing on the United States’ direct survival, but a large bearing on the survival of individual Americans who enlist. We want very much to be proud of servicemen and –women, while at the same time want to condemn these wars, and their collateral damage and torture and disruption of provincial Middle Eastern lives. Yet in the specifics, this brings the average person into a direct contradiction; success may involve ordering a strike against a group of militants, and that same strike may kill the militants as well as some innocent goat-tending bystanders. Were the pilot who was ordered to perform that strike instead to crash his plane into the Hindu Kush, rather than kill a fellow man who may not directly wish him ill, I doubt we would feel the way that Naoko does. But Naoko is more certain of herself and of her feelings than Onion, and does less to brook discussion; though both are reporting on events for posterity in the form of a journal or private papers, Onion has a deeper conversation with himself than Naoko does, and pushes himself farther to find the truth.

My round winner and ToB’s: THE GOOD LORD BIRD

Read the official Tournament review here. 

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.

Tournament of Books Round Eleven: THE SON by Philipp Meyer vs. ELEANOR & PARK by Rainbow Rowell

Once again I scrolled right to the bottom of today's review, and was relieved to find that the righteous winner of all tournament rounds has triumphed! I really, really liked this book, you guys.

It's difficult to even compare these two novels because of the disparities in genre; even though both focus on teenagers, and to a certain extent on interracial teenage love (at least in the case of Eli and Hates Work, the Comanche girl he kind of has a relationship with) but while ELEANOR & PARK is basically a romantic comedy, THE SON is pure epic. There are parts of THE SON that are funny, as I discussed in the last review, and parts of ELEANOR & PARK that are dark and tragic, but it's hard to even imagine J.A. McCullough reading E&P or Eleanor reading THE SON.

I want to talk briefly about the dark parts of ELEANOR & PARK, and whether the choice to make the stepfather's ultimate transgression writing dirty comments on Eleanor's textbooks was the right choice. Kicking Eleanor out of the house would have been unforgivable to a reasonable parent; destroying her things and the threat of physical violence against her mother certainly should have been enough to spur Eleanor to leave. I guess I just didn't find it realistic that her stepfather would have been the one writing insults on her textbooks. He barely seems to pay attention to her, much less to her textbooks, and it does seem like he was comfortable being confrontational and directly antagonistic toward Eleanor; why would he have to result to writing on her textbooks, and in such a way that it seemed like he was trying to hide it? He didn't try to hide anything else he did to her. I feel like Rowell wanted to go someplace darker, but felt that for the sake of genre or the likability of her story, she had to stick with the crime of being threatening rather than violent.

That shying away from reality for the sake of sparing the reader is something the ToB judge identifies in a different context: the fact that E&P's relationship is chaste until the very end of their time together seems unrealistic to him, having been a teenage boy, and pretty unrealistic to me as well. I certainly knew other teenagers, when I was a teenager, who had relationships every bit as G-rated as Eleanor and Park's...but they were also religious, which E&P are not, and in the absence of an explanatory force like overwhelming moral obligations, I also find it unrealistic that they wouldn't have at least discussed their abstinence.

You know who doesn't flinch from sharing any detail or scene to spare the reader? Philipp Meyer, that's who. And it's partially because these books are pitched at different readers; there are some teenagers to whom I wouldn't recommend THE SON, and some of my relatives who might not enjoy it, and some serious types who I don't think would find E&P captivating. On the whole, though, I think there are more readers who would appreciate THE SON than E&P; THE SON has so many different types of characters, and different story lines, and a broader historical reach. E&P is a vignette. THE SON is an entire collected works.

My winner, and ToB's: THE SON

Read the official Tournament judgment here.

Tournament of Books Round Ten: THE GOOD LORD BIRD by James McBride vs. THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS by Elizabeth Gilbert

It’s interesting that these two books about abolitionists—white abolitionists driven by religious motives, denying themselves earthly luxuries for the sake of their convictions—are narrated by characters who support the abolitionists, more or less, but are leagues more self-centered and more interested in self-preservation (and self-love in one case) than in political and social causes. In THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS, Alma respects her sister’s belief, the way her sister denies herself things like lace, a large house, good food, that Alma herself would never think to give up for the sake of others. And yet Alma doesn’t seem to give slavery more than ten minutes of thought in the entire novel. Her concern with her sister’s cause is whether it will put her in danger from people who don’t agree with her practices of educating and raising black and white children together. She doesn’t really think about whether, morally or philosophically or rationally, what her sister is doing is right. She just wants to know that she won’t be in danger.

And really, Onion feels much the same. He doesn’t want to be put in danger, and stays with John Brown mostly for expediency and for lack of better options; away from John Brown he could easily be thrown back into slavery, and at least with him he has the promise of excitement. He feels deep down that slavery is wrong, but he also mentions twice that he never went hungry as a slave, and didn’t give much thought to his own bondage before John Brown violently removed him from it. He gives a lot of thought to the social structure of black people in his society—the mulatto prostitute, the muscle-bound yard enforcer, the free black people in the North who support them or forget their cause, the noble rebellion-leaders who die for the freedom they can never have—and this makes him more worthy a protagonist than Alma, who gives a lot of thought to moss societies but doesn’t seem too concerned with the society of Tahitians she encounters. How have the Tahitians accepted Christianity and the presence of missionaries within their society full-time? What does it mean that the Tahitians don’t have a strong concept of personal property? How do they treat animals? What is the role of children in this society, who never work but also seem to be some of the most resourceful? All of these issues are touched upon by description of events but never explored intellectually by Alma. Alma observes, and records, and learns to operate within this society with some effort, but doesn’t consider what it means that this society exists in the same world as her own, with its very different strictures and mores. And right when the Tahitians seem about to accept her, drawing her into their rugby game and roughhousing with her as they would one of their own, she has a personal epiphany and leaves, without giving another thought to the people she leaves behind. I touched on this in my last review, but I really don’t think that Elizabeth Gilbert thought about the inner lives and motivations and desires of the Tahitians she describes. I’m sure she did a lot of research, but the only Tahitian who comes alive off the page is Tomorrow Morning. And I think that’s a flaw in an author, using this island interlude to advance the development of only one character. Compare it to the deeply enlivened Ivu’ivu in THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES. Good lord.

I agree with the judge, here. My winner: THE GOOD LORD BIRD.

Read the official Tournament judgment here. 

Tournament of Books Round Nine: HILL WILLIAM by Scott McClanahan vs. A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING by Ruth Ozeki

I had almost forgotten about HILL WILLIAM. Animal cruelty, child abuse, homophobic attacks, and environmental destruction. Didn’t deserve to make it this far, luckily got knocked out in this round, good riddance.

What’s interesting to me about A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING this week is narrator-Ruth’s relationship with her husband, Oliver. Oliver is a little-known artist who works in the medium of plants—he is building an Eocene-era botanical garden on their island home, and believes his work will not be fully appreciated until he has been long dead and the plants have come to be a natural part of the landscape. It’s a nice idea. Ruth also describes Oliver as being a little bit obtuse, and probably having something like Aspberger’s. He can be very sensitive, and sometimes annoys Ruth, but of course she also depends on him and loves him. And the parallel I want to draw here is between Ruth and Hannah Horvath, on GIRLS.

Before you click close tab, if you haven’t seen the most recent episodes of GIRLS, Hannah and her boyfriend Adam are at the hospital visiting Hannah’s dying grandmother. At Hannah’s mother’s suggestion, Adam tells Hannah’s grandmother that he and Hannah are getting married—although they aren’t—because Hannah’s mother believes the grandmother can die happy knowing that her granddaughter is in a stable relationship. When the grandmother’s prognosis improves later, Hannah jokes to her mother about whether she and Adam will have to get married if her grandmother survives. Hannah’s mother tells her to “keep the job, not the guy” and explains that Adam is socially awkward and maybe not a good fit for Hannah; she doesn’t want Hannah to have to “socialize” Adam if they stay together. Of course, Hannah herself can be very socially awkward, and she rightly tells her mother that she doesn’t know enough about Adam to make these statements. We can tell that the judgment hurts, though. Although it’s not sensitively delivered, there’s some truth to it—saddling herself with a man who will sometimes embarrass her is a weighty choice. Their different personalities are charming now, but the charm may not last. And I wonder too whether for Ruth the charm is wearing off; she daily regrets living on their small Canadian island, and intimates that she left New York partly because Oliver loved living on the island. It makes sense that Oliver would; on the island they are part of a small community, while New York could be daunting even for a socially adjusted man. In Ruth’s case, removing Oliver from the unwanted stimuli of New York meant exiling herself; in Hannah’s case, she herself is the unwanted stimulus, and when Adam finds her dramatic personality distracting to his nascent acting career, he moves out of their shared apartment while rehearsing for his play, which is obviously traumatic for Hannah.

The simple question is, is the man worth the trouble, but of course the answer isn’t so easy for Ruth and Hannah—both desperately want to care for their partners while also resenting them for the constraints they impose on their joint lives. Naoko’s story takes this dynamic to the extreme, with a father who retreats from society and from life so completely that she and her mother are forced to change their family structure and protect Naoko’s father from himself. Naoko allows herself to resent her father for losing his job, for taking them from Sunnyvale, for becoming a shut-in and not caring enough about her and her mother to sacrifice his comfort and philosophical ideals to provide for them. But how does Naoko's mother feel, having chosen to marry a sensitive man—a man who might have needed some socializing, as evidenced by his naivete about human consciences and motivations, as well as his habit of interrupting professors unannounced to explore theories of mind—who, it turns out, did not rise to the challenge of being her partner? Will Hannah make the same realization, if Adam's Broadway career falters? 

This round's tangential Winner: A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING

Read the official tournament review here.