As regular readers know, I have what I call The 40-Page Dropkick Rule. When I begin reading a book, it has forty pages to grab me, draw me in, and make me want to keep reading. For exceptionally long books, the forty page limit can be extended to fifty, sometimes eighty. Regardless the limit, if I’m not hooked by that time, the book gets tossed aside.
I created this rule because, growing up, I had a hard time putting down a book, even if I wasn’t enjoying it. It took me six months to finally finish The Agony and the Ecstasy, a book I might very well enjoy now but, when I was sixteen, it really was a slog.
Six months! One book! That’s a long time, time during which I might easily have read several other books if I’d just allowed myself to put Mr. Stone’s opus to the side. But I couldn’t. With my completionist nature, my overriding urge to “see the job through,” I couldn’t not finish the book. As years passed, my self-confidence helped me override these urges, and thus was born my 40-Page Dropkick Rule.
Once in a while, though, a book passes the Dropkick limit, only to falter farther along. Such was my experience of The Goldfinch, the Pulitzer Prize winner by Donna Tartt.
The book begins with a “frame,” a technique—or dare I say “gimmick”— which I do not like. It’s a cheap trick to draw readers in by giving us a peek of what’s to come. You’ve seen this very often in television shows: the opening shot is of our hero(ine) in dire straits, followed by a cut-to-black screen with the title card “Three Days Earlier”, at which point the story really starts. It’s used when the real start-point isn’t exciting—no explosions, no guns—and the screenwriter is afraid we’ll change the channel if we don’t see something bright, shiny, and loud.
Infrequently, it can be done well, especially in stories with lots of movement back and forth in a timeline, but usually it’s just a device, an author’s Jedi mind trick (except that it’s totally obvious).
The Goldfinch begins with such a frame-out, but as I was still within the first forty pages, it got a pass. When the real story began, it was compelling enough to keep me going. More than the writing, though, it resonated strongly with me on a personal level—the protagonist as a young boy, unpopular and geeky at school, who loses a parent at an early age—so much so that I got a feeling of shared experience and I sailed past the forty-page barrier.
When I got about a third of the way into the book, though, time had passed for our protagonist. The tragedy of his early years became distanced from the narrative, and the writing style which before had been compelling now felt ponderous and overblown. Self-awareness is never good in an authorial style, not even in first-person.
It was also at this point that I hit the whole cramp vs. clamp dilemma, which irked me enough to engender a blog post on the topic. Shortly thereafter, I came across the word “fubsiness,” and began to become annoyed. I was well past the 40th page, though, trapped by my own rules, and thus I dutifully plowed onward. After all, this book won a Pulitzer Prize! If I didn’t like it, what did that say about me?
I got up to page 600 out of 770 before I’d had enough. We’d spent the length of a Bible with this protagonist, living (in real-time, it often seemed) through his years of self-tortured angst over a dilemma that I won’t describe other than to say, while he couldn’t see any way out of it, I’d come up with a dozen different ways to solve.
Pulitzer? Schmulitzer.
Yes, with the end of the book in sight, having pushed myself through 80% of the novel, I put it down, removed my bookmark, and walked away.
If you’re a fast reader with a love of first-person scream-of-consciousness narratives, go for it. I’ll be here, starting the next title from my TBR stack.
k
[…] of titles about adolescent angst…what’s up with that?) or I found them annoying (like this one). After so many failed attempts among the offerings of current fiction, I decided to try something […]
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Kurt, you got farther than I did 🙂 . I didn’t finish this one either. It’s just sitting somewhere on my Kindle.
I also didn’t finish The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. Life is too short.
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When I started this post, I was pretty sure I hadn’t liked most Pulitzer Prize winning novels, but that turned out to be incorrect. I have actually liked most of the PPWinners I’ve read; not all, for sure, but many more than I realized. This one, though…not so much.
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I decided long ago that *I* am the ultimate arbiter of good taste. If I’m of the opinion something lacks quality then history will ultimately show that I’m correct.
Does it always work out that way? Probably not. 🙂
But I’m not going to let the Pulitzer tell me it should be good.
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