The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt

This year has been the Year of Reading Really Long Books for me.  I’ve ploughed through Les Misérables and The First Man in Rome so far and this has continued with Donna Tartt’s 784 page work The Goldfinch.

The Goldfinch has received almost universal acclaim and has been long awaited – Donna Tartt can rival George R.R. Martin in the field of procrastination.  It was selected by The New York Times as one of its ‘10 Best Books of 2013’ and has been shortlisted for the ‘National Book Critics Circle Award’, the ‘Bailey Women’s Prize for Fiction’, the ‘Pullitzer Prize’ and the ‘Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction’.  In fact pretty much the only thing that it has not won is the ‘Man Booker Prize’ and even this was met with no little controversy.  So, the critics love it, but that is not always an indication of a book that is good to read and indeed I believe this book, while very impressive, to be rather flawed.

The Goldfinch is a the bildungsroman to end all bildungsromans.  It tells the life of Theo Decker, who starts as a rebellious 13 year-old whose mother dies in a bombing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.  Theo, who was present at the blast too, encountered a dying man there who encouraged him to take a work of art from the wall, Carel Frabritius’s ‘The Goldfinch’.  The book then follows Theo over the next two decades as his structure-less life takes him from house to house without him ever having a connection anywhere or to anything.  The story takes Theo from New York, to Las Vegas, back to New York, and then to Amsterdam, yet he only has a real connection to one thing, ‘The Goldfinch’.

This being a Tartt book, Theo slipps into substance abuse and introverted existential angst as he struggles to gain control of a life that lost all focus in that art gallery.  She peppers the book too with the usual array of preppy, boisterous parvenus and unsavoury, shadowy elements, all of whom, while enjoyable seem particularly clichéd.  The narrative has a distinctive flow and a peculiar sentimentality to it, as Tartt strives to contrast the material world in which we live in, with the more ethereal one of art and culture.  It is a book of vice, where each character struggles and fails to overcome their more base instincts and traits and none more so than Theo.

This book’s main problem though is its length – put shortly, it’s just far too long.  In my review of The Secret History I stated that the book’s only real weakness was how long it took to get going; The Goldfinch has the opposite problem: it cannot sustain its flow.  The story starts at a roaring pace with the bombing and its aftermath and through the first New York City part of the story it is a thoroughly engaging read, and yet, much like Theo’s life, it gets bogged down in Vegas and the story never really picks up.  Even when the book transitions nearer the end to something of a heist novel, all of the drive seems to have left the narrative and I struggled to get re-engaged.

In summary, The Goldfinch is a work of undoubted quality in terms of theme and scope, but in reading I was always conscious of just how long the thing is and, moreover, I am really unconvinced that it needed to be quite so protracted.  A cursory google of critical reviews suggest that I am perhaps in a minority in this view, but I am no less convinced of this point.

7/10

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“Well—I have to say I personally have never drawn such a sharp line between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ as you. For me: that line is often false. The two are never disconnected. One can’t exist without the other"

“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.” 

“But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.” 

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