Kirsty Wark Meets Donna Tartt: A Review Show Special The Review Show

In 1654, the Dutch artist, Carel Fabritius,

painted what would become one of his most important works

The Goldfinch, measuring just 13 inches by 9 inches,

captured the tiny, ordinary bird, tethered by a delicate metal chain.

The same year, the 32-year-old Fabritius was killed

when a gunpowder magazine exploded in the nearby Dutch town of Delft.

It obliterated his studio and all but a handful of a paintings.

This month, the hugely anticipated third novel by Donna Tartt

is published. It is called The Goldfinch.

Donna Tartt's first novel, The Secret History, was a sensation

when it was published in 1992

and has since been translated into 29 languages.

It catapulted her to fame and along with her friend,

Bret Easton Ellis, she led the East Coast literary brat pack.

But her second novel wasn't forthcoming,

and she garnered a reputation as a perfectionist

and a writer who likes to take her time.

It was a decade before The Little Friend,

set in her native South was published,

and that's when we first met.

'I found her engaging, thoughtful and really quite serious.

'Donna Tartt is famously private, and after The Little Friend,

'she disappeared from public view once again,

'so when her publisher asked if I would like to interview her

'about her equally long-awaited third novel,

'there was just one answer.

'More than ten years on, I returned to see her in New York

'and this time I found a woman more at ease with herself,

'and surprisingly good fun!'

A new novel from Donna Tartt.

We met 11 years ago. We did.

And then, you already thought you would start on a novel.

Is it this one? It is this one

Although I had started this novel years ago,

I had started the very beginnings of it, before I even began

The Little Friend, during the last days of work on The Secret History.

I spent a lot of time in Amsterdam

after The Secret History was published

and it was a city that I came to really love and,

to have... it stayed in my imagination,

I would go to sleep and I would find myself in Amsterdam,

once or twice a week. It was a mood before it was anything else

and so, only now, 20 years on,

I've been specifically working on this book for 11 years,

but, actually, it's more like 2 , that the very beginnings

of this book have been around for a long time.

But then what happens is, that, 9/11 happens. Yes.

And the book takes a different focus. It did.

The genesis of it was the destruction of the Buddhas at Bamiyan,

which was just a horrific event before 9/11,

it was a terrible pre-shock, as one will have a pre-shock

before an earthquake, it was the pre-trembling of the terrible..

disaster that was to come and that was what I was writing about.

I was haunted by that.

So much has been lost in human history due to sheer carelessness.

The idea of artwork being destroyed...

on purpose was horrific to me that that was an INTENTIONAL act.

Set in present-day America, The Goldfinch

follows 13-year-old New Yorker Theo Decker,

as he tries to navigate through life

after surviving an explosion at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In the immediate aftermath and surrounded by the debris

of the blast, a dying man thrusts a ring

and the canvas of The Goldfinch into Theo's hand.

Here we are, in this wonderful cathedral, in a way,

where the catastrophic start of the book happens.

Theo Decker is with his mother in the Met

and there's a massive explosion Runs in out of the rain

and only happens to be here. And this of course is the,

the kind of, you know, the kind of massive repository of cultures

of all ages and antiquity. It is.

And so explain what happens in here, on that day.

In a way, it's...

unimportant what happens. I don't want to...

All he knows is, there's an explosion and his mother is killed. The..

But he survives. He survives and wishes he hadn't.

In a way, when I think about this novel in its totality,

I think that Theo has had post-traumatic stress

throughout the whole novel. I think so.

The whole novel, he's haunted,

he's looking for his mother,

he's trying to find his mother in other things.

And he does find her in some very unexpected things

It's a book about displacement and about obsession,

and about trying to recapture what can never be recaptured.

About trying to find what is lost.

But what he has is this wonderful relationship with his mother

which has been forged in a very intense way,

and she has provided him with a moral universe

that serves him well, does it not, throughout the book?

It does, but he's also provided

by a different moral universe by his father.

We don't really get to choose our parents

and we don't really get to choose the parent that we're like

and we're not always like the parent that we love the most.

So, his father enters into his moral universe as well

and his father is a gambler and a drunk.

And has abandoned him, and he comes back into the book

in some fairly unexpected and some expected ways as well

"Things would have turned out better if she had lived.

"As it was, she died when I was a kid, and though everything

"that's happened to me since then is thoroughly my own fault,

"still, when I lost her, I lost sight of any landmark that might have

"led me some place happier to some more populated or congenial life.

" 'Her death', the dividing mark, before and after.

"And though it's a bleak thing to admit all these years later

"still I've never met anyone who made me,

"who made me feel loved the way that she did "

The Goldfinch of the title, where did you first see this painting

I first saw the painting as a copy in Christie's Amsterdam.

And I knew the painting from reproductions but it is

actually possible to love a painting very much through a reproduction.

I grew up in Mississippi, and I was constantly

looking at my grandmother's art books,

my grandmother was an art teacher,

and she actually painted some very good copies of things herself,

she was a good copyist, and I knew paintings through copies

and it was a great experience for me when I was, 18, 19-years-old and, it was like the amazing moment

in the Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy, she's been in Kansas,

all greyness, and she opens the door, and everything's in colour.

The wonderful experience of, you don't realise how much you're losing

by only seeing a reproduction, and you can love

a painting very much and very deeply through a reproduction, and

I had loved, had gone through all my grandmother's art books

all the art books in the library,

and to see a painting myself in person, for the first time,

great paintings like Van Gogh's where you see the texture of the paint,

experience an aesthetic rapture that I think is unequalled.

But in fact that leads me to something you say in the book,

in fact which is that beauty in a sense is better than life

Beauty is something that life necessarily can't give us,

but a wonderful painting can.

That's absolutely true, well, life can give it to us sometimes,

but it doesn't give it to us all the time.

So when you saw The Goldfinch, the real Goldfinch,

for the first time, is that when you knew you wanted to put it in a book?

I actually knew I wanted to put it in the book before I ever even saw

the real painting, I knew that it was the one.

And so, what was it?

Because, in fact, you knew you wanted to put the painting

in the book did you know, that the artist had died in a gunpowder. .?

I didn't - again, this is wonderful.

When all the cards start falling into place like that, you know

that you've got your subject, you know you've got your book.

When I found out the history of the painting, I thought,

"My goodness, this is it, I had no idea.

I thought, "God has just given this to me

"it was just a gift."

And it's a painting that Theo's mother adores.

As a child would adore, it's a painting that a child would love.

But it's also has so many meanings, death and resurrection.

Was that almost serendipity,

did these things come together or was that something that you

were mindful of when you were writing?

It's a very deep little painting, there's a lot there.

Captivity and escape.

The idea of bravery and brightness

in really very terrible circumstances, and the chain is

so delicate it's barely, barely there. At first you see the bird,

you don't at all see that he can't get away.

Is the Goldfinch, then, a kind of talisman for Theo, then?

I think so.

I think that, when he carries it around,

he himself compares it to a holy article of protection.

Even when it's wrapped up, even when he can't see it, he knows it's there, it gives

an invisible sense of rightness and it reminds him of his mother.

And it, in the same way, attaches him to life... It does

..the same way the chain does. It does, it is his attachment to life,

it is his attachment to beautiful things.

He's living in not very beautiful circumstances.

He's living in quite difficult circumstances,

and it is the one, beautiful thing

and the one reminder of beauty in his life for a long time.

But what he does is he, he kind of hangs on, doesn't he

he meets Boris, who's this kind of wild, Ukrainian, Russian,

who's like the Artful Dodger.

He is, and he is a bit like the Dodger yes,

and Boris was great fun to write - charming, bad boy,

um, very dissolute but very noble and grand, too, in his way.

And you give him this extraordinary, roller coaster relationship...

but, in fact, you realise that Boris is very protective towards Theo

He is, Boris has had a much rougher life.

Boris has lived on the street in Ukraine,

his father is a terrible alcoholic

and Boris is a shoplifter, has to shoplift to eat,

he's used to taking care of himself and Theo's not and he helps Theo

get along without parents, they're living in a world without parents.

"Before Boris, I had borne my solitude stoically enough,

"without realising quite how alone I was.

"And I suppose if either of us

"had lived in an even halfway normal household, with curfews

"and chores and adult supervision, we wouldn't have become quite

"so inseparable so fast, but almost from that day we were together

"all the time, scrounging our meals and sharing what money we had.

"In New York, I'd grown up around a lot of worldly kids.

"Kids who'd lived abroad and spoke three or four languages,

"who did summer programmes at Heidelberg

"and spent their holidays in places like Rio or Innsbruck or

"Cap d'Antibes but Boris, like an old sea captain, put them all to shame.

"He had ridden a camel.

"He'd eaten witchetty grubs, played cricket, caught malaria

"lived on the street in Ukraine but for two weeks only.

"Set off a stick of dynamite by himself,

"swum in Australian rivers infested with crocodiles.

"He had read Chekov in Russian

"and authors I'd never heard of in Ukrainian and Polish.

"He'd endured mid-winter darkness in Russia where the temperature

"dropped to 40 below.

"Endless blizzards. Snow and black ice.

"The only cheer the green neon palm tree that burned 24 hours a day

"outside the provincial bar where his father liked to drink."

'While Donna grew up in Mississippi,

'which she drew on for The Little Friend,

'she now divides her time between Virginia and New York,

'where much of The Goldfinch is set.'

Tell me about this room.

I wrote a good bit of the book in here, I stayed here for

two or three months in 2010. They let me bring my dog here

and it's a charming old room with a desk and lots of life on the street

outside and...lay on the couch

and what I was reading here was Proust's

letters to his mother, which I had bought in the flea market

this is a great couch to read Proust's letters to his mother on.

You can write here, where do you like to write? Can you write anywhere?

I can write anywhere. I can write

curled up in a corner in a spare armchair in somebody's house,

I write on the Madison Avenue bus, I write any...all over the place.

Always have been able to. In the bathtub.

I can write anywhere.

In the library? I can write in the library.

I wrote a lot of Goldfinch in the New York Public Library

in the Allen room of the New York Public Library, which was wonderful.

And is that because there's reference books? What makes

the public library so good to work in? I know a lot of writers

would be, I imagine horrified to be in a kind of public space.

It's...if you need a character at all, all you have to do

is look up, people walking back and forth, and it's

like being an artist sketching at a sidewalk cafe.

The people, walk-on characters everybody you need is

right there, and, you know, of course, books

This was a book for which I had to read a lot and some

fairly difficult-to-find books as well so the New York Public Library

was a great resource while I writing this book.

But do you have a routine, if you're at home for example,

if you're in the countryside, do you have a routine, do you write every day?

I do write every day, unless, you know, things do happen,

you know, the well will go out or you'll have a dentist appointment.

Every now and then, life will intervene,

but I write every day and, even if I have guests,

I will slip away to my little room where I work, and always, yes.

You're an inveterate note-taker as well, then?

I do, I carry a notebook with me wherever I go,

because if I don't write it down when I think of it,

I'll never think of it again. And most of my notes are...

Joan Didion uses the phrase, "Bits of the mind's string too short to use."

And so many of my notes are just bits and bobs

and little magpie gleanings and glintings and

they won't really ever turn up in any piece of finished work,

but my notes on Amsterdam, the notes that I took,

21 years ago now, they did finally end up in a novel

because, when I was in Amsterdam, I loved it and sat at the window

of my hotel and took notes and I was writing about it the whole time

even though I had no story to go with it.

And what about at night, I mean, are you a night writer

Oh, yeah, I do, a "night writer", I like that.

Yeah, I do.

Well, it depends. If I've had a hard day, I'll quit,

I'll knock off, I'll go do something else,

but if I'm on a run, if I'm doing well, I'm like a gambler

I don't want to get up from the table. When you're hot,

you're hot, you need to stay there, I will stay until I'm played out.

You have written, then, if you're saying you write every day...

I do. ..then you've more or less written solidly

for the past 21 years.

I have written solidly, yes, but I've written solidly in scraps.

I mean, not every day do I sit down and write a tremendous

block of finished prose, but I'm always fiddling around

and writing little bits and bobs of things, and some days when I'm out

and about and with my notebook in a pocket, it is only bits and bobs.

When I say that I can write on the Madison Avenue bus,

I don't mean I'm writing pages of finished prose on the

Madison Avenue bus, but things will occur to me and I'll jot them down.

And very often they're the germs of things that will become pages of prose. That's writing, too.

Do you ever think you've made too many sacrifices

for all these books? It's not a sacrifice.

It would be more a sacrifice

if I felt I had to be, I don't know, I mean, going to an office instead

of doing this, or doing something else, that would be the sacrifice.

I mean, I feel very lucky that I m able to devote this amount of time

to doing what I do, because it's what I think about all the time I'm obsessed.

Are you really, though? You seem quite balanced to me.

Well, I mean, you're encountering me when I've

just finished a book, not when I m the middle of one. Maybe I wouldn't

seem quite so balanced if you'd seen me while I was working.

In the same way that you actually hit great streaks,

have you hit bad streaks of thinking,

"The last 50 pages, I have to strike"?

Absolutely, absolutely.

There was a point in this book where I realised I'd taken

a bad turn and it was just about eight months of work

And I realised, you know, but it's OK because sometimes

you have to go through that, before you can get to...you're

throwing off impurities in a way, you are, you have to run, you have

to play out the hand of cards, you have to really get to

where you need to go. Sometimes you must run through the other options.

There was no way that I could have

gotten to that point had I not spent those eight months

They're invisible, they're not in the book, but I needed to

spend them in order to get to where I was, yeah.

And does that mean that that way you keep your sense of equilibrium

because you now that it's not in vain?

It's not in vain, because it's. . the work is there, it shows,

even if it's not... it's part of an invisible

underpinning of the work. I mean, Hemmingway

used the metaphor, and it's very correct, of an iceberg.

With writing, sometimes you'll only see the tip.

Everything else will be cut,

but there's a sense of weight underneath the water.

The real world is there, even though it's not

going to be in there verbatim, what you've done - no, it's not in vain.

Funnily enough, you were talking about Hemmingway, but there's

a lot of literary illusion and there was in The Little Friend as well.

Here you've got Saint-Exupery and it's wonderful, can I just. .

Wind, Sand And Stars, which is the title of one section...

"You cannot buy the friendship of a companion bound to you

"for ever by ordeals endured together."

That is Boris, and Theo, isn't it?

You couldn't buy that kind of friendship.

No, you can't, it's a gift when it comes.

"But still I was lonely. It was Boris I missed.

"The whole impulsive mess of him.

"Gloomy, reckless, hot-tempered appallingly thoughtless.

"Boris, pale and pasty, with his shoplifted apples

"and his Russian-language novels, gnawed-down fingernails

"and shoelaces dragging in the dust.

"Boris, budding alcoholic.

"Fluent curser in four languages, who snatched food from my plate

"when he felt like it, and nodded off drunk on the floor,

"face red like he'd been slapped "

The person that we haven't talked about who I think is one

of the most vivid characters in the book is Hobie. Who is this figure

that when Theo gets the ring from the elderly man in the Met

after the explosion and takes it, this is this, like a secret,

a spell that he's going to be able to cast over the rest of his life.

Because of this ring, he meets Hobie.

Now, tell me about the character of Hobie.

Hobie was actually one of the harder characters in the book to write

because he...

he's quiet.

He's sort of absent-minded, a little bit muddle-headed,

but he's a good character, but he's a tiny bit...

He's good, he's neglectful.

He's good, but flawed in some ways. He's always sort of quietly

working away in his workshop, but he is sort of a quiet anchor

which is actually an interesting dilemma for a writer.

You can't have a novel populated with all brilliant talkers,

some people are quiet and strong and he is that,

he is quiet and strong and he's a workman,

he's broken through a brick allure - that's how he describes himself

He's downstairs, he's not the businessman of the operation,

he's downstairs restoring and preparing

and polishing, but he is sort of Theo's anchor in a way and Theo

ends up being partner in the shop, he ends up being Hobie's partner.

So you have furniture restoration, you have prodigious drug use,

you have the criminal underworld,

you have detailed journeys from Las Vegas to New York.

Is this the meticulous research of the finger on the button

of the computer, or are you out there?

Um... A bit both.

I went to auctions at Christie's, but...

Most of what I do is...

The research is the fun part, that I don't consider work at all.

I mean, the work doesn't really start until I have notebook out

and, you know, getting it down on paper.

I think it happens with all my books that I write about things

that I'm interested in, I actually am interested

in American furniture, I'm interested in Dutch painting

and so, it didn't really seem like research...

So, The Secret History, which is very much part of the whole

kind of idea of Bennington where you went, and then, The Little Friend,

which was set more in the South and where you were raised.

And then, this book is very New York.

Yes, I've lived in New York though on and off, I came to New York

I think, when I was 24 years old, for the first time to live,

it was after college,

and I've been in and out of the city ever since then.

It's sort of strange for me to think,

but I've lived in New York longer than almost anywhere else

I've ever lived in my life. I have real ties to New York and I

feel at home here, now, this is my... Your real home. It really is, yes.

Did you feel, in a sense, because there is this

gap between the books, did you feel a huge weight coming on you?

I've never known it to be any other way, though.

My books have all taken a decade to write, and, in a way, it was. .

I mean, I had a safety net. I didn't with Secret History.

And I felt free to write what I wanted to write with Little Friend.

Sometimes, you're not trying to reach the broadest possible audience

Your job is really only to do the work and then

leave it to do its thing and then start something else.

So what do you think the role of a good literary novel is,

what do you think the role of a book is?

Or the reader free to interpret anything they want,

but what do you think? When you want people

to read your books, what do you want them to read them for?

Well, first I want them to...have fun.

Reading's no good unless it's fun, but what I always want is

the one quality I look for in books and it's very hard to find,

but I love that childhood quality of just that gleeful, greedy reading,

can't get enough of it, what's happening to these people,

the breathless kind of turning of the pages, that's what I want in a book.

But I also want something that's well constructed, too.

I like to be able to drop down and... Dickens goes so fast,

he goes like lightning but, at the same time, any sentence,

you can lift up and it's a marvel and it's a miracle,

so to me I want those two qualities, the two qualities of any great art,

density and speed, density and speed.

But you also bring secrets. You bring secrets.

Your books are about secrets.

I guess they are, I never thought about that, but I guess

all books are about secrets. Yes. All books have mysteries

at their heart, every book has some secret, there's always a secret

In this one, what you say, though, is that life is catastrophe.

Well, um, it is, sorry to say!

Sometimes it is catastrophe.

Well, it doesn't end well for any of us, you know, the last act is ..

Has to be. Yeah.

"Only here's what I really, really want someone to explain to me.

"What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can't be trusted?

"What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons,

"leads one wilfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance

"away from health, domesticity civic responsibility

"and strong social connections

"and all the blandly held common virtues, and instead,

"straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-emulation, disaster?

"Is Kitsey right?

"If your deepest self is singing and coaxing you straight toward

"the bonfire, is it better to turn away, stop your ears with wax,

"ignore all the perverse glory your heart is screaming at you

"set yourself on the course that will lead you dutifully to the norm,

"reasonable hours and regular medical checkups.

"stable relationships and steady career advancement,

"the New York Times and brunch on Sunday,

"all with the promise of being somehow a better person?

"Or, like Boris, is it better to throw yourself head-first

"and laughing into the holy rage calling your name?"

So this one is just about out, so are you into the next groove

Are you into the next book?

I have an idea and I'm constantly grappling round in my pockets

for my notebook, I'm thinking of things that I need to write down,

so I won't forget them, it's very evanescent when it's at this stage.

But is it exciting at this stage?

Yes, it is exciting at this stage.

And then you hit the long stage in the middle

where it's all very difficult. It's what Eliot says, you know

"Between the dream and the reality lie the shadow."

I mean, you have the difficult stage after the...

But you like the shadow. Oh, I do.

Donna Tartt, thank you very much. Thank you.

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