The Goldfinch in The Bookshelf

May 09, 2021 Owen DeVries rated it it was amazing

A shrewd observer of the movie business recently confided to me that the new formula for the femme fatale in film is, put simply, ladies who kick butt. According to this way of thinking, sexy alone isn't enough anymore; audiences want sexy with abs of steel and martial arts training. If Audrey Hepburn were starting out nowadays, she would need to carry a machete to the screen test.

Well, I must admit I've noticed a similar tendency in literary fiction. Lady authors are increasingly kicking butt t A shrewd observer of the movie business recently confided to me that the new formula for the femme fatale in film is, put simply, ladies who kick butt. According to this way of thinking, sexy alone isn't enough anymore; audiences want sexy with abs of steel and martial arts training. If Audrey Hepburn were starting out nowadays, she would need to carry a machete to the screen test.

Well, I must admit I've noticed a similar tendency in literary fiction. Lady authors are increasingly kicking butt too. In the old days, the body count on the page correlated directly with the testosterone level behind the typewriter. Ah, times have changed, and nowadays the women are sowing their wild (Joyce Carol) Oates, and matching their male counterparts blow for blow, gunshot for gunshot.

The last three novels I've reviewed by current-day female writers - Marisha Pessl's Night Film, Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries, and Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch - have each demonstrated this engagement with violence in different ways. But Tartt is perhaps the most interesting, given the very personal spin she applies to this element in her writing. From the very start of her illustrious career, she has specialized in the juxtaposition of violence and refinement. Let other authors shed their characters' blood on the battlefield or in a dark alley; Tartt, in contrast, kills them off in more rarefied settings, a sleepy liberal arts college or a venerable art museum. No, I wouldn't want to be a Donna Tartt character, and if I was an actuary I would refuse to underwrite a life insurance policy for even her bit players. But when they go, they go out in style. They won't flame out on a motorcycle, but rather behind the wheels of a Lexus or, better yet, while taking the family yacht out for a spin. As F. Scott Fitzgerald might have said: "The rich are different. They get to destroy a lot of expensive accessories when they die."

In other words, Donna Tartt is the literary equivalent of Audrey Hepburn with a machete.

The protagonist of The Goldfinch, a young man named Theo Decker, is visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art when a bomb explodes, killing his mother and leaving the youngster with minor injuries and in a state of shock. In the aftermath, he leaves the museum dazed and confused, but also with a famous painting - The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritus, a Dutch artist of the mid-17th century - in his possession. The heist is an unwitting, rather than premeditated, theft. But in the succeeding days, Decker is so overcome with grief for his dead mother and uncertainty over his own future, that he forgets about the painting. He later realizes that he need to find a way to return it to the museum, but by this time he is uncertain how to do so without getting himself in trouble - especially since government authorities already seem intent on putting him under their 'care' as a ward of the state.

In its opening stages, The Goldfinch seems to follow the formula of those sprawling Dickens novels of a bygone day. As with Dickens - in Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Great Expectations and other works - we begin with the endearing youngster, bereft of a parent, trying to make his way in a crooked, hazardous world. And Tartt rivals Dickens in the unhurried pace with which she proceeds in the first half of The Goldfinch. Interludes that might last 20 or 30 pages in the hands of another author, are here stretched out to five times that length. Characters can disappear for hundreds of pages, and then move back into the center of the plot. While other authors are trying nowadays to write novels in Twitter-sized bites, Tartt bucks this trend, giving each scene and section enough space to resonate, imparting a kind of contradictory realism to characters, always in the process of redefining themselves in this book, than Dickens, whose protagonists tended to be bigger-than-life rather than true-to-life, never cared to achieve.

Like Oliver Twist, Decker falls among bad influence - perhaps the worst is his father, who shows up to claim the youngster and bring him to a new home in Las Vegas. Dad eventually immolates himself in a car crash (yes, this is a Donna Tartt novel, so it's a luxury model), but demonstrates charm and duplicity in equal doses before leaving the scene. Pop's girlfriend Xandra, a casino worker and small-time drug dealer, is hardly a better role model, but like almost every character in this book has a few quasi-angelic qualities mixed in with the more sordid ones. But the strongest influence on Decker during this Las Vegas interlude, comes via his intense friendship with a Russian schoolmate named Boris, also living in a broken household with a dysfunctional dad. Together they try their hand at a range of transgressions, from shoplifting to dropping LSD.

Tartt plays a bold psychological game with her readers over the course of these pages. After eliciting sympathy for her young orphan, she forces us to follow his moral decline and decide for ourselves whether this boy-turned-crook is qualified to serve as hero of his own story. Returning to New York, Decker takes a job with a sympathetic father figure who trains him in the antiques business, but the young man rewards this trust by scamming customers with fake merchandise. He keeps his stolen painting locked away in a storage facility, and it's hard to avoid labelling his continued possession of the work as anything but a blatant crime, even if it started out as the innocent mistake of a distraught adolescent. Meanwhile, much of the cash he makes from antique sales fuels his drug habit. Theo increasingly leads a compartmentalized life, marked by lies to his closest friends, even lies to himself, especially with regard to his muddled love life.

From Dickensian innocence we have shifted to Dostoevskian intrigue, and a miasma of existential guilt and malaise settles over the second half of The Goldfinch. It's no coincidence that Dostoevsky's The Idiot is repeatedly referenced in these pages, nor that our protagonist has the same name (albeit Anglicized) as the author of Crime and Punishment. Adding to the Russian flavor of the shifting plot, Boris reappears, and shows Decker that the infractions and passions he has been experiencing in the New York antiques world are small potatoes compared to what his old friend has been up to in global gangland. The pace of the book, relaxed almost to an extreme up until this point in the narrative, now accelerates manically.

Tartt saves her best for last, and in the final two hundred pages manages a remarkable balancing act. Even as she mimics the trappings of the action-oriented crime novel she infuses the story with complex questions of culpability, redemption and responsibility - responsibility to others as well as to a posterity we will never see. What seemed like a quasi-Victorian sprawling novel becomes as taut and intense as a psychologist's case study.

My biggest gripe with contemporary fiction is how unwittingly cinematic most of it has become. We are so beguiled with visual narratives that we shy away from those dramas within our psyches that the novel, preeminently among all forms of storytelling, is so well suited at conveying. Tartt, however, reminds us in these pages that both facets - of outer action and inner turmoil - can resonate simultaneously, if the author is daring and capable enough to see the levels at which they intertwine. How fitting that the real protagonist in this book, a tiny painting, remains hidden from view throughout most of the tale! Out of sight does not mean out of mind, at least not in the world of Donna Tartt. One could hardly find a better symbol for the kind of drama, in which the secret ingredients and exposed elements are in constant dialogue, that Tartt has made her specialty, and nowhere with more authority than in The Goldfinch. ...more

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Nov 21, 2013 Miriam Murcutt rated it liked it

Tartt’s writing is beautiful but, in the end, there’s too much of it for the story she has to tell. She creates many intriguing characters – real people with flaws and contradictions, strengths and weaknesses – and situates them in the equally intriguing world of art and antiques. The first two-thirds of her book are riveting. The last third drags with endless re-runs of the highs, lows and drunken stupors of Theo and Boris who are Tartt’s male leads. Her plot is a little suspect as it relies on ...more

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Feb 06, 2018 Jess Penhallow rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: usa, the-netherlands, 21st-century, 2018-chunky-books, boxall-s

This book was just wonderful. The writing just pulls you in and makes you want to keep listening and emerging yourself in the twists and turns of Theo's life. Definitely not a light read, many parts were downright depressing but there was still so much beauty in the sadness (like the eponymous painting). This is definitely a book that will stay with me. ...more

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Jan 17, 2020 Cynthia marked it as to-be-read-books-i-own

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Jan 04, 2020 Brooke Bowers rated it it was amazing

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