By Donna Tartt
Little, Brown 2013
771 pages Fiction
All week I have been compulsively reading The
Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, gazing out at the sea while reading a
torturous and tortured story. The incongruity of the scene has been emotionally
draining for me. I wanted to be on vacation but I couldn’t stop reading. At the
same time, I was extremely grateful that I could devote so much time to the book.
If I had been home, I would have resented the intrusions that would have kept me
from delving in so completely.
The Goldfinch starts out with a bang—literally. Theo Decker and
his mother are at the Metropolitan Museum of Art one weekday morning before
going to Theo’s school, where he is a 13-year-old middle school student, in
trouble with the dean for smoking and/or stealing. Theo is a very bright son of
a very bright mother (dad having left the year before). While Theo is looking
at the Dutch Masters, mom wanders into another room. There is a huge bomb
explosion and when Theo becomes conscious again, an old man he had earlier
noticed, is dying at his feet. He gives Theo a ring and asks him to deliver it
to an address, and he tells Theo to save the small painting of the Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius and then he
dies. Theo grabs the painting, stuffs it in his backpack and makes his way out
of the museum. He can’t find his mother anywhere, so he goes home to wait for
her. She never arrives; she has been killed in the explosion.
At that point, everything goes downhill for the
suddenly orphaned boy. He spends a school term with the Upper East Side family
of a school friend while authorities look for his father. The family gives Theo
some stability and the mother in the family helps Theo deal with his loss. During
this year, another important set-up occurs when Theo returns the dead man’s
ring to the address he has remembered. There he meets the girl, Pippa, who had
been in the museum with the old man, and her guardian, Hobie, an antique dealer
and restorer. Pippa becomes the love of Theo’s life, and Hobie, dear Hobie,
becomes his lifelong friend and mentor.
In the spring, Theo’s ne’er-do-well father and his
girlfriend come to claim Theo, and they take him to live in suburban Las Vegas,
where he spends his high school years. Boris, a Ukrainian student who has also
lost his mother, teams up with Theo to carouse their way through high school. All
these characters appear and reappear throughout the novel over a period of
about 15 years, and Boris continues to influence Theo throughout the rest of
the novel.
After the breathtaking beginning, there is a meandering
middle section in which Theo continues to hide the painting, which causes him
no end of anxiety. When his alcoholic father is killed in an automobile
accident, Theo returns to New York to live with Hobie and he learns all about
the antique business. The middle section of the book is important, however long
it is, because it teaches the reader patience. One reviewer says of Tartt: “. .
.she takes fully grown, already passionate readers and reminds them of the
particularly deep pleasures that a long, winding novel can hold. In the
short-form era in which we live, the Internet has supposedly whittled our
attention-spans down to the size of hotel soap, and it's good to be reminded
that sometimes more is definitely more.”
The writing is so marvelous that you read on for hundreds of
pages; you just can’t get enough of it. Then, just as you think you don’t want
any more glorious writing—you want some action—you lose your breath again as
the plot picks up and moves to Amsterdam, and then goes full speed ahead to a
dramatic climax in which the stolen painting plays a pivotal role.
I am in awe of Donna Tartt. This is the first book of Tartt's that I have read. Actually there have only been two others. The
Goldfinch took ten years to write. All the way through I marveled at
her skill, but the skill doesn’t overwhelm the character development or the
plot. There are elements of Dickens, Catcher
in the Rye and Empire of the Sun.
One reviewer felt that the early sections reminded her of the Harry Potter series. Tartt seems to
really understand teenage boys. Boris is incredibly charismatic and Theo
remains an appealing character throughout the story. My favorite character is
Hobie, the bachelor antique dealer who takes Theo in when he is at his lowest
point and becomes the parental figure and mentor that Theo desperately needs. The
plot is so well developed that there are very few unbelievable moments. If I
have any complaints about plot, is that sometimes the reader wishes that it
would move a little bit faster.
There is so much loss in The Goldfinch that I have
pondered Theo’s fate almost as much as he does. He makes so many bad choices,
but he is so appealing that you keep wanting him to shape up and “get his shit
together.” And when, in the end, he has an epiphany and finds purpose for his
life, you are so proud of the decisions that move his life forward. The end of
the book is quite philosophical. I wanted to copy whole passages; they were so
heartfelt. He says, “A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to
understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want
what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the
people we are.”
When I finished the book this afternoon, I breathed heavily
and began to cry—filled with emotion and exhaustion. I was done; yet, I immediately
longed for more. Theo is a character that will stay with me for a long time.
The Goldfinch will stay with me even longer. The NPR reviewer summed it up thus: “While The Goldfinch delves seriously
and studiously into themes of art, beauty, loss and freedom, I mostly loved it
because it kept me wishing I could stay in its fully-imagined world a little
longer. Donna Tartt was right to take her time with this book. Readers will
want to take their time with it, too.”
I’m going to read an amusing murder mystery next; I don’t
think I can stand to read any more great literature for a while. I need time to
recover.
Tarcher Penguin 2014
