The Goldfinch: A Novel

By Donna Tartt

201

771 pages / 32 hours and 24 minutes

Fiction

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There are some novels about which critics just can’t agree. A couple modern classic cases are Gravity’s Rainbow, considered by many as one of the great novels of the late 20th century and by many others like myself as absolutely unreadable, and Infinite Jest which, by the way, is a truly great book. A primary reason I’ve chosen to review Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch is that it creates those same sorts of extreme reactions. By the way, it did win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2014, though that hardly settles the argument.

Whenever Tartt publishes a novel, it is an event because she has only written three over the last two decades. The Secret History came out in 1992 and made her famous. A decade later came The Little Friend and then more than 10 years after that, the 771-page novel currently under review; readers awaited it with great anticipation because of the long lag between novels.

The Goldfinch of the title is a very small painting and a real one at that. It was painted around 1654 by Carel Fabritius who tragically died at the age 32 when an munitions depot blew up, killing him, destroying his studio and most of his work. The Goldfinch is one of the few that survived.

I recount this back story, because the driving action in the book surrounds a terrorist bombing in a museum in which this work of art is being displayed. The novel’s protagonist is 13-year-old Theo Decker whose mother, having taken him on an outing to the museum, is killed. Theo survives and also inexplicably steals The Goldfinch in the confusing aftermath of the blast. For the rest of his life this painting will be his solace and his curse. I give you this information because it all happens very early in the book. This isn’t the climactic action; it just gets us started.

So the rest of the book chronicles young Theo’s troubled life. This is where the parental warning comes in. Drugs are going to be a big part of the story. Violence is going to ensue. The language is going to be about what you’d expect from such a setting. The ending is actually action-novel-exciting.

The book spent 30 weeks on the bestseller list. It has been very popular, nominated for many literary awards and absolutely excoriated by some excellent critics. It was recently made into a movie which I have not seen (but never judge a book by the movie anyway).

So I grant that everyone is entitled to their opinion and I will offer mine. I think it is an excellent novel though at times it is unbearably sad and occasionally distressing because of some of the seedier characters. But I couldn’t quit turning the pages and Theo captured my heart: essentially orphaned at 13 and holding onto a piece of art – the last connection to his mother –as he tries to find his way into a confusing future. I wish he had made better choices, but then it might not be such an engaging novel.