The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt

Now THIS is the book I’ve been waiting for from Tartt after the frustrating disappointment of The Little Friend. This is an old-school sprawling epic about trauma, grief, art, love, denial, and much, much more. After a slow start, I ended up extremely emotionally engaged and look forward to requesting it for Yuletide.

If you liked The Secret History, you will probably like this; if you didn’t, you probably won’t. Though the plots and most of the characters are completely different, the narrative voice is similar and there’s a hard-to-pin-down feel that’s also similar. If Richard Papen drove you up the wall, Theo Decker probably will too.

When the book begins, Theo is a Manhattan teenager living with his beloved mother after his abusive father skipped town, to their relief. His life is shattered when his mother dies under extremely traumatizing circumstances, propelling Theo into a series of different milieus to which he takes his troubles with him.

I read this mostly unspoiled, which was a very rewarding experience, so I’m putting the rest of the plot below a cut. Above the cut, I will just note a few things which readers might want to know about in advance.

Content notes: The dog lives. There is significant gay/bisexual content though a lot of the usual questions that brings up (“Canon or subtext?” “Do they survive?” “Is it a happily ever after?”) are hard to answer due to spoilery/complicated in-book circumstances. There is a lot of addiction, suicidality, and non-sexual child abuse/neglect.

Also, there are Russian characters who I am going to guess are probably not very accurate as I cannot recall a single instance of Russians I know thinking a book by a non-Russian author was accurate.

osprey_archer just reviewed this; if you’ve read it, feel free to jump into the discussion in her comments.

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The Goldfinch: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)[image error]

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