This book has been on my must-read list for a while. It is a highly recommended novel and people comment, “I envy you reading this for the first time”. The heavyweight press seem to give it universal praise. Here’s one quote from the Financial Times review,
“Like a Dutch painting, every scene is described in glittering detail and framed with retrospective melancholy. A modern-day David Copperfield… The Goldfinch is impressive – lavish, gripping, exciting” (Emily Stokes).
The book is a door-stopper in length and spans a period of about 20 years in the life of the narrator, Theo Decker. As a 13-year-old boy he is taken to an art gallery by his mother. A bomb explodes, his mother dies, and Theo finds himself next to a dying man, Welty, who gives him a ring and an address. Nearby is a small painting which Theo takes with him as finds his way through the dust and rubble into the open air. The address turns out to be a shop selling antiques and the home of Hobie, an expert antique restorer and Welty’s partner. The painting is The Goldfinch by a Dutch artist, Fabritus and Theo’s unlawful possession of The Goldfinch is the main thread running through the story.
Theo is first fostered by a rich family, the Barbour’s, but his father, long estranged from his mother, comes to claim him and takes him to live in Las Vegas. Here he meets Boris, originally from the Ukraine, who introduces him to a decedent life of drugs, drink and stealing. After the death of his father, Theo moves back to New York where he lives with Hobie and becomes an expert in selling fake antiques. He hides The Goldfinch away in a storage facility but then is told that it’s been stolen. In the last section of the book Theo goes with Boris to Holland in pursuit of the painting.
Another thread in the story is Theo’s unrequited love for Pippa, a girl of his age who had also been in the explosion with Welty and who recuperated at Hobie’s. To rid himself of his feelings for Pippa Theo tries to concentrate on her flaws:
”yet all these aspects were – to me - so tender and particular they moved me to despair. With a beautiful girl I could have consoled myself that she was out of my league; that I was haunted and stirred even by her plainness suggested – ominously – a love more binding than physical affection, some tar pit of the soul where I might flop around and malinger for years. …..She was the missing kingdom, the unbruised part of myself I had lost with my mother.”
The wonderful, descriptive writing makes this a fine book. Donna Tartt is an expert in conveying images of people, places and the atmosphere in which they live and breathe. So, the quality of the writing is superb, but there are things I didn’t like. I found the whole scenario by which Theo comes to possess The Goldfinch and then to hang on to it, to be very implausible, which is a problem when the whole story hangs on this. Then, you have to buy into Theo himself, as he is the narrator, but once his life is invaded by his father and Boris, he loses the sensitivity of the relationship he had with his mother and I rapidly lost sympathy for him. We are all victims of circumstance but also victims of our own choices, and to me Theo’s life was a catalogue of bizarrely wrong choices.
Another issue is the peripheral nature of some of the “main” characters. Although Theo obsesses about Pippa throughout the 800-odd pages, she just flits in and out of the story and ultimately does not seem that important. Theo’s relationship with Boris is the strongest in the book and it is Boris who is instrumental in tracking down the painting after it has been stolen, but he drops out of the story for 200 pages, before coming back for the crucial denouement. Hobie too, the innocent, good guy and a true father-figure who provides Theo with a home and teaches him the mysteries of antique furniture, in the end is only a bit-part player.
Another problem with the novel is its length. Right at the beginning, after the explosion, it takes 20 pages for Theo to have contact with a dying man and get out into the open air. Pages are devoted to Theo's drug and drink habits which leave him miserable and suicidal. I found myself skimming pages at the end when Theo is in an Amsterdam hotel room being taken through yet another bout of depression by the author.
There is no doubting Donna Tartt's wonderful writing ability, and The Goldfinich shows this in spades, so great prose, with some memorable characters, but to my mind not a great story.
