This is a really interesting essay, and I’m glad I read it. I read both The Secret History, and The Goldfinch really recently and absolutely loved them both. I think I largely failed to catch these moments of racial stereotyping in The Goldfinch, for example; My initial thought when reading the description of the cab was that - being a cab in New York of all places - some less than savoury things had occurred in the back seat, and the driver had tried to cover the smell with artificial sprays etc. But that’s beside the point. Something else I have noticed that has troubled me about Tartt’s writing is her habit of making unlikeable characters ‘paunchy’ or ‘podgy’, and referring to those traits when mulling on the character’s failures or downfalls. In contrast other, more likeable characters are described as being thin, lithe, etc. It’s interesting to compare these two different types of stereotypes and notice where I’ve been ignorant or naive, and what I’m more aware and vigilant of.
I never much cared for The Goldfinch, and Tartt's heavy handed reliance in stereotypes to set the scene is certainly part of it. There's a laziness about that kind of writing - like falling back on literary tropes - that assumes the reader will get it. Even if neither the author nor the readers believe in the stereotypes, they are accustomed enough to them to let them be background and not find them insulting/offensive.
I’ve recently decided after a first attempt at a Tartt novel that I’m not a fan. After witnessing the praise The Secret History gets online, I trembled with excitement to start that book. I’m 70% of the way through and I feel truly let down. I think she nails aesthetics and decorative writing - that is certain. But *careful!! Spoilers ahead!!* this book is literally just about a bunch of rich white kids that got so fucked up one night they accidentally murdered somebody? And then because one of their closest friends finds out, has a loud mouth, and does a million little annoying things they nonchalantly decide to…. Murder him??? And with such little passion. It’s like they had a PTO meeting about it and that was the next thing on the agenda. Also, I’m a lover of languages and all the mentions of Greek and Latin just feel very bravado to me. It’s hardly cryptic or enthralling to follow along with the clandestine studies of this small Greek class because they don’t even make it as cool as it could be. It just feels like a flex of the characters that they’re all fluent in an ancient language and, by extension, a flex of Tartt’s that she writes for ~intellectuals~. I would retitle this book “Smart Snobby rich kids made two murders as boring as you could ever imagine in a dark moody New England town.” Sorry for the rant, but I’ve been brooding over my disappointment in her.
I completely agree with this and thought the same when I read this book last year. It was praised to the heavens and I was horribly disappointed by the end. To me, it was like Donna Tartt literally did what she was trying to criticise on the book, but not purposefully - moreso by mistake. She goes on and on about the ‘horror’ of beautiful things and how they can have an empty, evil tinge to it and that’s exactly what the characters are: empty, monotonous, and ‘evil’ just because, with no substance. Literally just obnoxious rich kids who can go on after MURDERING someone with zero consequences.
I’m glad I wasn’t the only one!!! With that plot? I should have been shivering with goosebumps! Instead I was so bored and confused as to how it got the unparalleled praise that it did.
glad im not the only one- I only ever see people speak highly of TSH and it bothers me how the author tries to make you feel like bunny's murder was justifiable (yes he's annoying and misogynistic and accuses the twins of twincest, rightfully so) but it just felt so ridiculous and anticlimactic. I feel the same way about the dead language mentions too, it felt like tartt was patting herself on the back for them. The audience for TSH seems like a pretentious bunch who like to feel intellectual and want something that validates that desire- the greek and latin mentions are like faux regalia for them.
omg thank you- someone finally said it! I’ve only read the secret history and don’t get me wrong- I loved it and have read it twice- but the bit about the Shah of Isram never sat that well with me and felt extremely unnecessary. I didn’t even realise it was this bad in the Goldfinch! The problem with casual racism like this is that people not from that race internalise it and it ends up subconsciously forming their views. To me I’m so glad you brought up how problematic it is even if DT fans dismiss it as “small” because it really is damaging.
Just got to that part of The Secret History and it stuck out so much to me too! Also the part where the mechanic goes on a rant about 'Arabs kidnapping Bunny'??? Don't even know what angle the author was going for and have seen literally no one mention it in any analysis. Glad I stumbled across this article because it does seem like there's stuff in the books that's going unmentioned which is crazy considered the huge fanbase
I’ve never read Tartt so maybe I don’t have a say here but the passages you provided were sickening. Very obviously steeped in harmful stereotypes. I can imagine a south asian reader seeing those and my heart hurts just thinking about it. I mean really, shit smell? That’s just stupid and mean spirited and nothing gained
I never see anyone talking about this in mainstream book spaces either. same with the secret history where many racist and homophobic things were said by one of the main characters, bunny. I haven’t read the goldfinch and I don’t plan to now, but I see these racist stereotypes against indians all the time. the main one being that they “smell like shit” and things like. as half indian myself it really sucks seeing this be normalized. maybe donna tartt isn’t racist but the mentions of these things in her books are really off putting.
To be fair I think the things bunny says serve a point. He’s so awful that you end up rooting for his death. Everything he says serves to make you disgusted and annoyed with him.
right but at what point is saying the n slur really appropriate for that sort of thing other than to create shock value? he can be a lot worse without that addition lol
I have encountered plenty of white people who smelled bad for various reasons. In most of Asia white people are viewed as hairy, greasy, loud and smelly, which we absolutely objectively are by many Asian hygiene standards. You really don’t want to be trying to defend this particular hill. Jesus.
As someone who loves Tartt (and for whom, The Goldfinch is perhaps my favourite book... ever?) I loved this post! Tartt certainly has a thing with race and ethnicity in her books: they are overwhelmingly, aggressively white, and she has a very Euro-centric value set, especially about art and culture, which manifests in weird little swipes at people's who values and traditions are different.
In a werid way, though, I think The Goldfinch is the book that justifies this best. Theo is a very hermetic main character. He's a well of paranoia, afraid of almost everyone, and his fatal flaw is that he doesn't really try to understand other people, so his racism feels like a natural extension of that. It would read clearer, perhaps, if once he'd gone on his character arc, there was a scene towards the end of the book where he got to express some changed values, but that's more of an issue with the way the book wraps up on a whole.
Do I think racism was the *best* way to express Theo's paranoia and unwillingness to understand people, however? No, not really. And do I think she needed to include so much? Again, no. But that's more of an issue with her particular glut of description, and that's another can of worms entirely.
The casualness of the racism matters a lot. She writes it in a way that doesn't show the character to be racist, but in a way where the racism is innate and sort "of course all of my white characters feel this way".
A crucial difference, not really mentioned yet, is between "my white characters feel this way" (and I may be aiming to portray that and/or condemn it) versus "my characters feel this way" (because everybody does and is justified in that).
I wish you hadn't added the disclaimer. The fact is that a lot of popular books have a lot of casual racism built in - it seems to make the reader comfortable, that the world in books like The Goldfinch is centered around whiteness.
Out of context that quote can definitely seem racist by modern standards, but as someone who grew up in New York in the early 2000s, what she described was "a thing". As in if you went to NYC and got a cab there was a chance you'd end up in one that's smelly and driven by an ethnic minority. There were also ones that were driven by ethnic minorities and not smelly, and ones driven by white people that were smelly. Also much of NYC was smelly and dirty and filled with ethnic minorities in general, and still is to some extent tho less so. There's some really smelly parts of Chinatown for example that smell a specific way specifically because they are in Chinatown.
I don't think it's racist to point this out and I have gotten used to it. Sometimes when people visit me from other places they'll be like wow this area is dirty and smells really bad and I'll be like oh yeah that's a thing and I can see how they're shocked by it. I don't think it implicates ethnic minority groups in general but it really is/was like that sometimes.
"Modern"?! Look, a slur is a slur. I've taken plenty of cabs in Manhattan, over several decades, and never once have I encountered the things you mention. Ditto with cabs in DC. And that slur was every bit as offensive when The Goldfinch was published as it is now.
Strange, I can say I've encountered some cabs like that in the last 6 months, tho ride sharing services like Uber are definitely making them rare compared to say pre pandemic. But what slur are you referring to?
I'm talking about Yellow Cabs, owned by the drivers. Over a period of 30 years (the many cabs I've taken). Never called Uber or Lyft.
Cab companies have standards that drivers *must* meet. Honestly, anything I've ever seen left in the back (like mud and snow from peoples' boots) came from passengers. Keep in mind that *many* Yellow Cab drivers have a plexiglas sliding window installed between the front and back seats. It can be opened when needed, but provides more privacy for drivers and passengers alike. Which is a nice thing.
I'm probably describing a bygone world, but the switchover is *very* recent. Applies to DC as well. (I used to live there.)
So the issue with this interpretation is that nothing exists in the book without the author wanting it there. You have to remember that. She is not a documentary filmmaker who happened to end up in a specific sort of cab and is now faithfully describing it to us. She had the full liberty to invent ANY sort of cab with ANY sort of driver at all, and she chose this.
And on its own we could say ‘well ok…. random choice among many viable options?’ But then you notice specific trends in ‘white’ writing that always somehow spontaneously end up landing on this one specific trope - smelly ethnic person.
As someone who has lived in different parts of Asia I can confirm some are smelly. However others are shockingly clean compared to us here. On the whole I have had less encounters with smelly people in Asia than I have had in Europe or North America. Not to mention that for certain parts of Asia, it is us who carry the stereotype of ‘smelly greasy and loud’ because, like, we kind of are. Most of us don’t wash our asses, which the rest of the world finds deeply perplexing. And we sweat, on the whole, WAY more than Asians do.
So if we agree that there are all these different angles in how we think about the links between ethnicity and hygiene, which interplay with social status, mental health, etc etc, but then white writers somehow too often casually reach for ‘heh heh random ethnic person in the background of my story is smelly heh heh’….. you gotta wonder a little.
And I have definitely smelled things here in Montreal that have made my stomach turn, and not an ethnic person was in sight.
The goldfinch is the only book I forced myself to finish and I wish I hadn’t. I’m pretty mad at every person who praised it as a masterpiece. It starts off ok. The premise of the book is fine. And then it goes in so many random directions, the story stops making sense altogether. I must be truthful I don’t remember if I was shocked by her racist descriptions but her long winded descriptions of the most irrelevant crap made it a distasteful read. And also, yes, so many slurs… what for?
No because you shouldn’t even have to preface this with that disclaimer because you’re straight up right. I genuinely love the secret history, despite its glaring issues, but the revelation of just how bad the stereotyping and xenophobia in the goldfinch is was enough to turn me off that book forever. It’s a shame too, because Tartt is a genuinely engaging writer.
it's like . . . what's the point? She's going out of her way to perpetuate the lamest, most boring stereotype at no marginal benefit to the characters or the narrative. It would've been easier to just keep her mouth shut.
I recently reread The Goldfinch and was shocked at how completely drenched in Anti-Slavic stereotypes Boris was. There were several factual errors about Ukraine and Tartt’s attempts to bring Ukranian into the Latin alphabet were beyond painful. For someone who has acquired a reputation as a meticulous master of their craft, it doesn’t seem to extend to basic fact checking.
Hey, I'm really not sure about your disclaimer. That's b/c I can't help seeing the passages you cited as very racist. If the driver had been Black and she had written in the same way, the 1st printing likely would have been pulped (and rightly so).
There's no seeming reason for that whole segment except racism. It's not a description of the man himself - who isn't an automaton, but a person with feelings, like everyone else. She's just throwing common sterotypes together in an extremely biased way.
Today, a sensitivity reader would probably have reviewed several,drafts. Their input is crucial. Not saying all of the folks who do that job are always correct, but over 99% of the time, they are (in my estimation, anyway, per situations I'm aware of).
This is a really interesting essay, and I’m glad I read it. I read both The Secret History, and The Goldfinch really recently and absolutely loved them both. I think I largely failed to catch these moments of racial stereotyping in The Goldfinch, for example; My initial thought when reading the description of the cab was that - being a cab in New York of all places - some less than savoury things had occurred in the back seat, and the driver had tried to cover the smell with artificial sprays etc. But that’s beside the point. Something else I have noticed that has troubled me about Tartt’s writing is her habit of making unlikeable characters ‘paunchy’ or ‘podgy’, and referring to those traits when mulling on the character’s failures or downfalls. In contrast other, more likeable characters are described as being thin, lithe, etc. It’s interesting to compare these two different types of stereotypes and notice where I’ve been ignorant or naive, and what I’m more aware and vigilant of.
I never much cared for The Goldfinch, and Tartt's heavy handed reliance in stereotypes to set the scene is certainly part of it. There's a laziness about that kind of writing - like falling back on literary tropes - that assumes the reader will get it. Even if neither the author nor the readers believe in the stereotypes, they are accustomed enough to them to let them be background and not find them insulting/offensive.
I’ve recently decided after a first attempt at a Tartt novel that I’m not a fan. After witnessing the praise The Secret History gets online, I trembled with excitement to start that book. I’m 70% of the way through and I feel truly let down. I think she nails aesthetics and decorative writing - that is certain. But *careful!! Spoilers ahead!!* this book is literally just about a bunch of rich white kids that got so fucked up one night they accidentally murdered somebody? And then because one of their closest friends finds out, has a loud mouth, and does a million little annoying things they nonchalantly decide to…. Murder him??? And with such little passion. It’s like they had a PTO meeting about it and that was the next thing on the agenda. Also, I’m a lover of languages and all the mentions of Greek and Latin just feel very bravado to me. It’s hardly cryptic or enthralling to follow along with the clandestine studies of this small Greek class because they don’t even make it as cool as it could be. It just feels like a flex of the characters that they’re all fluent in an ancient language and, by extension, a flex of Tartt’s that she writes for ~intellectuals~. I would retitle this book “Smart Snobby rich kids made two murders as boring as you could ever imagine in a dark moody New England town.” Sorry for the rant, but I’ve been brooding over my disappointment in her.
I completely agree with this and thought the same when I read this book last year. It was praised to the heavens and I was horribly disappointed by the end. To me, it was like Donna Tartt literally did what she was trying to criticise on the book, but not purposefully - moreso by mistake. She goes on and on about the ‘horror’ of beautiful things and how they can have an empty, evil tinge to it and that’s exactly what the characters are: empty, monotonous, and ‘evil’ just because, with no substance. Literally just obnoxious rich kids who can go on after MURDERING someone with zero consequences.
I’m glad I wasn’t the only one!!! With that plot? I should have been shivering with goosebumps! Instead I was so bored and confused as to how it got the unparalleled praise that it did.
glad im not the only one- I only ever see people speak highly of TSH and it bothers me how the author tries to make you feel like bunny's murder was justifiable (yes he's annoying and misogynistic and accuses the twins of twincest, rightfully so) but it just felt so ridiculous and anticlimactic. I feel the same way about the dead language mentions too, it felt like tartt was patting herself on the back for them. The audience for TSH seems like a pretentious bunch who like to feel intellectual and want something that validates that desire- the greek and latin mentions are like faux regalia for them.
Precisely!!!
omg thank you- someone finally said it! I’ve only read the secret history and don’t get me wrong- I loved it and have read it twice- but the bit about the Shah of Isram never sat that well with me and felt extremely unnecessary. I didn’t even realise it was this bad in the Goldfinch! The problem with casual racism like this is that people not from that race internalise it and it ends up subconsciously forming their views. To me I’m so glad you brought up how problematic it is even if DT fans dismiss it as “small” because it really is damaging.
(sincerely- a POC who grew up in a white area)
Just got to that part of The Secret History and it stuck out so much to me too! Also the part where the mechanic goes on a rant about 'Arabs kidnapping Bunny'??? Don't even know what angle the author was going for and have seen literally no one mention it in any analysis. Glad I stumbled across this article because it does seem like there's stuff in the books that's going unmentioned which is crazy considered the huge fanbase
I’ve never read Tartt so maybe I don’t have a say here but the passages you provided were sickening. Very obviously steeped in harmful stereotypes. I can imagine a south asian reader seeing those and my heart hurts just thinking about it. I mean really, shit smell? That’s just stupid and mean spirited and nothing gained
I never see anyone talking about this in mainstream book spaces either. same with the secret history where many racist and homophobic things were said by one of the main characters, bunny. I haven’t read the goldfinch and I don’t plan to now, but I see these racist stereotypes against indians all the time. the main one being that they “smell like shit” and things like. as half indian myself it really sucks seeing this be normalized. maybe donna tartt isn’t racist but the mentions of these things in her books are really off putting.
To be fair I think the things bunny says serve a point. He’s so awful that you end up rooting for his death. Everything he says serves to make you disgusted and annoyed with him.
right but at what point is saying the n slur really appropriate for that sort of thing other than to create shock value? he can be a lot worse without that addition lol
Never in my life have I experienced Indian friends as smelling like anything untoward. This is a foul slander.
You haven't experienced it with your middle-class friends, ergo it doesn't exist.
found the racist, comparing a whole group of people to people living in the slums is crazy
I have encountered plenty of white people who smelled bad for various reasons. In most of Asia white people are viewed as hairy, greasy, loud and smelly, which we absolutely objectively are by many Asian hygiene standards. You really don’t want to be trying to defend this particular hill. Jesus.
As someone who loves Tartt (and for whom, The Goldfinch is perhaps my favourite book... ever?) I loved this post! Tartt certainly has a thing with race and ethnicity in her books: they are overwhelmingly, aggressively white, and she has a very Euro-centric value set, especially about art and culture, which manifests in weird little swipes at people's who values and traditions are different.
In a werid way, though, I think The Goldfinch is the book that justifies this best. Theo is a very hermetic main character. He's a well of paranoia, afraid of almost everyone, and his fatal flaw is that he doesn't really try to understand other people, so his racism feels like a natural extension of that. It would read clearer, perhaps, if once he'd gone on his character arc, there was a scene towards the end of the book where he got to express some changed values, but that's more of an issue with the way the book wraps up on a whole.
Do I think racism was the *best* way to express Theo's paranoia and unwillingness to understand people, however? No, not really. And do I think she needed to include so much? Again, no. But that's more of an issue with her particular glut of description, and that's another can of worms entirely.
The casualness of the racism matters a lot. She writes it in a way that doesn't show the character to be racist, but in a way where the racism is innate and sort "of course all of my white characters feel this way".
A crucial difference, not really mentioned yet, is between "my white characters feel this way" (and I may be aiming to portray that and/or condemn it) versus "my characters feel this way" (because everybody does and is justified in that).
Exactlyyyyy
I wish you hadn't added the disclaimer. The fact is that a lot of popular books have a lot of casual racism built in - it seems to make the reader comfortable, that the world in books like The Goldfinch is centered around whiteness.
I think people are getting really sick of culture being determined by leftists, feminists, and people who unironically use terms like 'whiteness'.
Educated and informed ppl.
Anti-White racists like you.
Poor little victim of reason
This is a wonderful essay, Trina. The only other writer I've heard speak and write about the racism in Tartt's work is Joy Castro--you might appreciate this essay of hers: https://www.salon.com/2014/06/13/donna_tartts_multicultural_fantasy_how_the_goldfinch_got_away_with_its_disgraceful_racial_politics/
Out of context that quote can definitely seem racist by modern standards, but as someone who grew up in New York in the early 2000s, what she described was "a thing". As in if you went to NYC and got a cab there was a chance you'd end up in one that's smelly and driven by an ethnic minority. There were also ones that were driven by ethnic minorities and not smelly, and ones driven by white people that were smelly. Also much of NYC was smelly and dirty and filled with ethnic minorities in general, and still is to some extent tho less so. There's some really smelly parts of Chinatown for example that smell a specific way specifically because they are in Chinatown.
I don't think it's racist to point this out and I have gotten used to it. Sometimes when people visit me from other places they'll be like wow this area is dirty and smells really bad and I'll be like oh yeah that's a thing and I can see how they're shocked by it. I don't think it implicates ethnic minority groups in general but it really is/was like that sometimes.
"Modern"?! Look, a slur is a slur. I've taken plenty of cabs in Manhattan, over several decades, and never once have I encountered the things you mention. Ditto with cabs in DC. And that slur was every bit as offensive when The Goldfinch was published as it is now.
Strange, I can say I've encountered some cabs like that in the last 6 months, tho ride sharing services like Uber are definitely making them rare compared to say pre pandemic. But what slur are you referring to?
I think you're well aware of the passage quoted in the OP, about the Sikh cab driver. I'll leave it at that.
I'm talking about Yellow Cabs, owned by the drivers. Over a period of 30 years (the many cabs I've taken). Never called Uber or Lyft.
Cab companies have standards that drivers *must* meet. Honestly, anything I've ever seen left in the back (like mud and snow from peoples' boots) came from passengers. Keep in mind that *many* Yellow Cab drivers have a plexiglas sliding window installed between the front and back seats. It can be opened when needed, but provides more privacy for drivers and passengers alike. Which is a nice thing.
I'm probably describing a bygone world, but the switchover is *very* recent. Applies to DC as well. (I used to live there.)
So the issue with this interpretation is that nothing exists in the book without the author wanting it there. You have to remember that. She is not a documentary filmmaker who happened to end up in a specific sort of cab and is now faithfully describing it to us. She had the full liberty to invent ANY sort of cab with ANY sort of driver at all, and she chose this.
And on its own we could say ‘well ok…. random choice among many viable options?’ But then you notice specific trends in ‘white’ writing that always somehow spontaneously end up landing on this one specific trope - smelly ethnic person.
As someone who has lived in different parts of Asia I can confirm some are smelly. However others are shockingly clean compared to us here. On the whole I have had less encounters with smelly people in Asia than I have had in Europe or North America. Not to mention that for certain parts of Asia, it is us who carry the stereotype of ‘smelly greasy and loud’ because, like, we kind of are. Most of us don’t wash our asses, which the rest of the world finds deeply perplexing. And we sweat, on the whole, WAY more than Asians do.
So if we agree that there are all these different angles in how we think about the links between ethnicity and hygiene, which interplay with social status, mental health, etc etc, but then white writers somehow too often casually reach for ‘heh heh random ethnic person in the background of my story is smelly heh heh’….. you gotta wonder a little.
And I have definitely smelled things here in Montreal that have made my stomach turn, and not an ethnic person was in sight.
Do you show up in mirrors?
The goldfinch is the only book I forced myself to finish and I wish I hadn’t. I’m pretty mad at every person who praised it as a masterpiece. It starts off ok. The premise of the book is fine. And then it goes in so many random directions, the story stops making sense altogether. I must be truthful I don’t remember if I was shocked by her racist descriptions but her long winded descriptions of the most irrelevant crap made it a distasteful read. And also, yes, so many slurs… what for?
No because you shouldn’t even have to preface this with that disclaimer because you’re straight up right. I genuinely love the secret history, despite its glaring issues, but the revelation of just how bad the stereotyping and xenophobia in the goldfinch is was enough to turn me off that book forever. It’s a shame too, because Tartt is a genuinely engaging writer.
I noticed this with misogyny in The Secret History -- it was just there, seemingly for no reason. I think your criticism is spot on
it's like . . . what's the point? She's going out of her way to perpetuate the lamest, most boring stereotype at no marginal benefit to the characters or the narrative. It would've been easier to just keep her mouth shut.
I recently reread The Goldfinch and was shocked at how completely drenched in Anti-Slavic stereotypes Boris was. There were several factual errors about Ukraine and Tartt’s attempts to bring Ukranian into the Latin alphabet were beyond painful. For someone who has acquired a reputation as a meticulous master of their craft, it doesn’t seem to extend to basic fact checking.
Hey, I'm really not sure about your disclaimer. That's b/c I can't help seeing the passages you cited as very racist. If the driver had been Black and she had written in the same way, the 1st printing likely would have been pulped (and rightly so).
There's no seeming reason for that whole segment except racism. It's not a description of the man himself - who isn't an automaton, but a person with feelings, like everyone else. She's just throwing common sterotypes together in an extremely biased way.
Today, a sensitivity reader would probably have reviewed several,drafts. Their input is crucial. Not saying all of the folks who do that job are always correct, but over 99% of the time, they are (in my estimation, anyway, per situations I'm aware of).