A novel way to cope with the new school term

And so, another school year beds down and the calendar is crowded with the grim promise of parent-teacher meetings and craft fares and fundraisers. In the interests of domestic harmony, I’ve abandoned any attempt to write much more than a shopping list and have instead spent the day languishing under the U-bend. Nothing too technical, you understand. It’s just that that was the last place I remember seeing the 12in ruler: under the sink, next to an unused cat flap, pristine still in its cardboard box. (“Cat flap?” I can hear the mog thinking. “Why would I use a cat flap when I can bleat outside your bedroom window at 3am instead?”)

Actually, I’ve been reduced to an arthritic wreck, having spent swathes of the past couple of weeks foraging under beds for calculators without their batteries and mathematical instrument sets minus various essential instruments of mathematicalism. The house is littered with the detritus of last year’s learning: dry pens, inky erasers, lidless lunchboxes, chewed gumshields.

Whatever about imminent sciatica, free education has also left me broke. Why does the third-edition science book – which just set you back about 30 bleedin’ quid – look so awfully like the second-edition science book, the one you’ve hung on to these last few years under the apparently misguided assumption that the periodic table is not subject to random revision?

In truth, though, it hasn't all been doom and broom. Between bouts of label-fixing and melodica-searching, I've been lying on the floor under my desk reading Donna Tartt's splendidly time-consuming, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Goldfinch, which might explain why I forgot to purchase the PE top.

Crumpled faces

“Read it, you’ve got to read it,” various haggard-looking friends urged, although whether their crumpled faces were due to long nights burning up the bedside lamp, as they mowed through the novel’s 864 pages, or whether their book-club hosts were a little too liberal with the chardonnay in celebration of clocking up such notable word mileage, it’s difficult to tell.

Tartt's novel, currently hovering near the top in the Irish paperback fiction charts, is a kind of Gothic farce, a dead-smart hybrid of Harry Potter and The Bonfire of the Vanities, a compelling, intricate, and at times surprisingly moving read.

The action unfolds over two time frames and two locations, a lavish, cultivated, abundant Manhattan and the arid, empty, desert-edge limbo of suburban Los Angeles.

Restorative power of art

It is a gift to be swept up by story, to carry around in your addled brain characters vivid and authentic enough to invade your days, characters who will tap you on the shoulder while you’re lying under the sink with a pocket torch or sit on your tense knees while you’re going into battle with rolls of adhesive book wrap

(a substance that can reduce me to cowering wreckage quicker than the thought of a night under Garth Brooks’s stetson).

Told by a sympathetic, bedraggled narrator, a young man who fortifies himself against misery and misfortune with an awful lot of narcotics and an abiding interest in antique furnishings, The Goldfinch is a long, spiky meditation on awful, gut-wrenching loss: loss of childhood, loss of innocence, loss of trust.

But, ultimately, even when your reading glasses are smudged with your vitamin E-enriched night cream and your rheumatic wrists are aching from holding the damn book aloft (I suppose you’ve probably all got Kindles and lasered corneas, have you?), the novel worms its way out of a catacomb of despair and gives the bleary-eyed reader heart. It offers hope, in the transformative, restorative power of art and in the spirit that beats in the fragile, dignified breast of the Dutch artist Fabritius’s little yellow bird, chained to its perch for centuries.

It’s no surprise that Tartt’s novel is in the bestseller lists. It’s a thriller, a page-turner, a Dickensian tale of an abandoned child thrown to the wolves of avarice; a fairy tale about a lost boy, following a trail of scattered crumbs right to the rickety door of destiny.

The final section of the novel, though, pushes deeper, heralded by a quote from Nietzsche: “We have art in order not to die from the truth.” It seems to ask: what survives, what remains, what watermark do we leave on this world?

Lying on the floor among last year’s crumpled notes and pencil shavings, trying to believe in the promise of a clean sheet, a few weeks into the new term, these felt like questions worth considering.