Reviewed by Dennis Bianchi
Donna Tartt was awarded the Pulitzer Prize this April for The Goldfinch, an anomaly as a book seldom has been a best-selling novel before the prize is awarded. The Goldfinch has been listed in the top ten selling books for approximately seven months. The prize will, no doubt, add to its popularity. It was Ms. Tartt’s third novel, and all have been well received and quite long. This newest novel is the longest yet, at 755 pages. When asked why it took her eleven years to finish the book, she replied, “It’s a long book.” No argument from this reviewer. But was it worth the time it took to finish reading it? Yes, but only because I took breaks at certain intervals. And the breaks seemed like natural places to stop and review what had transpired up to those points. I found the book to be something akin to three or possibly four novellas tied together by a couple of recurring thoughts: what constitutes family, what can be said about evil means creating good ends, or vice versa and perhaps, just how many people are walking around who seem somewhat normal but are drug addicts?
A quick thumbnail sketch of the plot is: 13-year old Theo Decker and his mother are viewing art in a museum in New York City when a bomb explosion seriously damages the building and kills Theo’s mother. Present and nearby is an older man and a girl approximately Theo’s age. The man passes along a ring to Theo. The girl is severely injured. A valuable painting, The Goldfinch, ends up in Theo’s possession and he secretes it in his clothing and leaves the museum, undetected in the theft. One would expect that the painting, which supplied the title of the book, would be of constant focus but that is not what happens. Theo manages to seemingly keep the painting in his possession over the next approximately thirteen or fourteen years. At the end of the book Theo states, “Things would have turned out better if she had lived,” referring to his mother. There is no doubt about that but without her death there would have been no book, or certainly a much different book. The opening scene of the explosion in the museum is extremely well-written and grabs the reader’s attention and provides an incentive to plow forward into the tome. It was only later that I found myself having to stop and consider where the story was taking me and deciding if I wanted to start skimming over the rest.
Why would I want to start skimming the bulk of the book? The majority of the people in the book are difficult to like. I asked myself if I really wanted to invest a great deal of time to learn more about them. For example, the protagonist’s father had abandoned him and his mother many years before so Theo finds himself in the care of a well-off family, the Barbours, whose son Andy is a his schoolmate. The family is a collection of somewhat spoiled and narcissistic characters. Theo’s father and a new girlfriend show up. The reader again meets two self-serving people but these two are schemers, much more sinister than the schoolmates family. Theo is whisked off to Las Vegas to live, where he meets one of the most interesting characters of the novel, Boris, a young Russian attending the same school as Theo. Even Boris, as interesting and comical as he can be at times, is not a wholly likeable fellow. Drugs and alcohol seem to be his favorite source of sustenance. And Theo tries to keep up with Boris, as they become close friends.
Upon the death of Theo’s father, Theo returns to New York where he learns the trade of identifying truly classical and valuable furniture and restoring older or damaged pieces. His teacher, Hobie, seems to be the only person in the book who has altruistic feelings in a world of liars, cheats, drug addicts and a few violent criminals.
The moral of the story comes late in a string of statements, mostly by Boris and Theo. Boris chimes in with, “ the world is much stranger than we know or can say… maybe this is one instance where you can’t boil down to pure ‘good’ or pure ‘bad’ like you always want to do -?... Maybe not quite so simple.” Theo doesn’t tiptoe around his conclusions. “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.” That philosophy may or may not be argued, but what came later is much more difficult to refute: “And I feel I have something very serious and urgent to say to you, … That life – whatever else it is – is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, …it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.”
Although I struggled to finish reading the book, the last 100 pages made it seem worth my while. And Ms. Tartt’s outstanding prose made the parts of the plot I found dragging or over-done nonetheless bearable.
