Donna Tartt sure smells good

My husband Mike was at the Greenbuild convention in Philadelphia last week. Left with so much time on my own, I started reading The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt’s new 771-page novel. I had a hard time putting it down, and I wasn’t the only one. In a New York Times book review, Michiko Kakutani says Donna Tartt’s new book “pulls together all her remarkable storytelling talents into a rapturous, symphonic whole and reminds the reader of the immersive, stay-up-all-night pleasures of reading.”

And that I did. Stay up all night to finish it, I mean.

Nothing holds my attention more than a story about grief and bereavement, and this book is full of that. and more. It starts when 13-year-old Theo Decker and his beloved mother find themselves inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art when a terrorist bomb explodes. Theo’s mother dies, and the story takes off to Las Vegas, Amsterdam and then back to Manhattan from there.

I always wait until I’m done reading a book before reading the reviews (don’t want to spoil the plot) and after staying up late Wednesday night to finish The Goldfinch,, I woke up and read the reviews Thursday morning. Brilliant, they said. Dickensian. With all the gushing, though, none of them remembered to compliment the clever ways Donna Tartt weaves the sense of smell into her writing. I mean, sure, her editor at Little, Brown & Company said that Goldfinch readers “never doubt for a second that you’re experiencing something real,” but he neglected to mention how using the sense of smell is one of the best ways to draw readers in. If The Goldfinch had been published before I gave my Smelling is Believing workshop at Northwestern University’s Summer Writers’ Conference last August, I could have used it as a textbook.

Writers often overuse similes when describing odors, aromas and fragrances, but saying something smells like lemon, like chocolate, like rotten eggs, whatever can sound tedious. In The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt’s main character Theo weaves aromas into his descriptions smoothly. Some examples:

• With his deadbeat Dad in a room in Las Vegas: “The air was overly chilled with a stale, refrigerated smell, sitting motionless for hours. The filament of smoke from his Viceroy floated to the ceiling like a thread of incense.”
• Waking up in a bedroom near the furniture restoration shop: “Lying very still under the eiderdown, I breathed the dark air of dried out potpourri, and burnt fireplace wood, and, very faint, the evergreen tang of turpentine, resin, and varnish.”
• Buying flowers to bring to a dinner party: “In the tiny, overheated shop, their fragrance hit me exactly the wrong way, and only at the cash register did I realize why. Their scent was the same sick wholesome sweetness of my mother’s memorial service,”
• A close-talker startles him with “a gin-crocked blast that almost knocked me over.”
• A young hip New York City restaurant: “The smells were overwhelming. Wine and garlic. Perfume and sweat. Sizzling platters of lemon grass chicken hurried out of the kitchen.”

Funny. Those examples all focus on the sense of smell, but don’t you just picture yourself in those scenes? Forgive me, I just can’t help myself here, I gotta say it: Donna Tartt’s new book? It smells of success.