finelythreadedsky

seems like the general trend is to conflate the perspective of the main character and tartt's own perspective and pass over any amount of irony that a disconnect between the two would indicate because we don’t /see/ that disconnect. the narration gets treated as if it’s her writing from her own opinions and perspectives.

so richard’s romanticization of whatever the hell is going on in a secret history loses its ironic edge (which is less than sharp) and becomes just the book’s romanticization of all of that. and richard’s one-sided perspective of camilla isn’t really interrogated (he’s the *narrator*, who else is going to interrogate him) so it ends up reading as if it were the book’s one-sided perspective.

partially its that she’s /very/ good at naturalizing the character’s perspectives and biases so the reader sometimes doesn’t realize how skewed or unreliable the account might be (which is risky, because it inevitably results in the kinds of takes you see on this site, both uncritically perpetuating the attitudes she’s satirizing and criticizing of tartt for perpetuating what she’s satirizing).

but then again is it still satire if it’s so easily and often read as uncritical? she does choose, many times, to write from the perspectives of men unable to conceive of women as people. how much should a writer adjust to the public's instinct to take their work at face value and refuse to think critically?

"read a book" takes need to come with a disclaimer that not only does "book" exclude fanfiction but it also excludes donna tartt, you also have to read another book that isn't donna tartt to prove that you can actually read and think critically

anyway that's a lot, but genuinely ""literary""/book culture on this site is so fascinating it might as well have been started as an anthropological experiment

hm. yeah, i mostly agree. to parse this out a bit - 

i definitely take issue with tartt’s portrayal of women (& a lot of other things about her books, which i’ve ranted about repeatedly on here). semi-related, i do strongly disagree with the “donna tartt is a feminist writer” takes i occasionally see on here (less frequent than ‘donna tartt is a misogynist’ but they do come up) - you need to do more than have interesting, complex female characters for your work to count as “feminist”. not being a misogynist does not make your writing “feminist” & vise versa.

but i do think what she did with richard and theo being biased, unreliable narrators in that regard was really quite unsubtle. re: my previous comments about kitsey, I can point to various places in the text where this was said almost point-blank, very little ‘reading between the lines’ required. (same with pippa.) I do think she was subtler about this in TSH, and perhaps attempted to correct that. I guess: “kitsey and pippa are flat one dimensional characters” and “theo decker is heterosexual” are about equivalent in terms of “you really really need to work on your reading comprehension if that was your interpretation.” but does that mean donna tartt is providing great representation of either women or LGBTQ+ relationships? lol no! (quite the opposite, imho.) 

and also: I really and truly don’t think either TSH or the goldfinch are satires. having an unreliable narrator does not make a work a satire. problematizing certain aspects of the narrative does not make the book a satire on said aspect-of-narrative. the reason the irony/satirical nature of richard’s romanticization of wealth/class/academia/etc in TSH is less than sharp is because that’s just not what the book is about imho - the thing is not a satire. (contrary to what is claimed on tumblr dot edu about 500 times a day) (likewise, the fact that richard & theo are unreliable narrators who don’t understand the interiority of women doesn’t make these books a satire on patriarchy.) 

I guess ultimately I think both books are excellent with a lot of interesting complex themes going on in there that elude any kind of simplistic analysis and have to be read with more than three braincells. and I don’t think tartt should be catering to the lowest common demoninator & eliminating subtlety/complexity because many (younger) readers misunderstand it. a lot of great writers get misunderstood. but her works do have problems that need to be addressed.

and, yes, people definitely need to read books that aren’t donna tartt! and if you’re going to read donna tartt, you need to be willing to read it as literature and not, like, YA. (and you need to be willing to acknowledge its flaws.)

obviously reasonable minds can disagree on all of this - that’s just my take.