The Goldfinch

by Donna Tartt

she was as glossy and nervy and stylish as a racehorse.

i like this

We looked at each other, for a long strange moment that I’ve never forgotten, actually, like two animals meeting at twilight, during which some clear, personable spark seemed to fly up through his eyes and I saw the creature he really was—and he, I believe, saw me. For an instant we were wired together and humming, like two engines on the same circuit.

animals or electricity? very nearly a mixed metaphor. seriously? Also would like to point out that engines aren't ON a circuit, but are comprised of them, so really should be "two circuits in the same engine."

a dreamlike sense of having failed him, as if I’d botched some vital fairy-tale task through clumsiness and ignorance.

so many flowery sentences that don't really say anything but it doesn't seem to matter as the floweriness and exposition (getting on with the story) is all that really seems to matter... "a dreamlike sense of having failed him..." what the hell does that mean? Not believing you failed, but then perceiving some disappointment regardless? Why is that dreamlike? What does dreamlike mean in this context? "...some vital fairy-tale task..." so is it vital or a fairy-tale, which either denotes unrealistic expectation or or an unreal task. If you actually look at these sentences and pick them apart, they are incredibly... clumsy and ignorant.

ears ringing, inane buzz and a metallic taste in my mouth like at the dentist’s—and

he had the wherewithal to hide the painting now there's buzzing in his ears. incongruous illogical flow of thought to events. metaphors are often stacked and conflicting (or seem that way) and incomplete.

uncertainly.

uncertain.

a fish out of water—I

are you serious?!?! a cliche? a misused (it's used in the literal sense) cliche? WTF!?!

beggar on the street thrusts out to me such a hand, bloated and grimed with black around the nails.

nice... beggars are gross :/

in fact not a single living soul.

but you said not all were dead. did i miss something? do i have to go back and check? no because I'm certain this writing is so roughshod that I'm right. contradiction!

sense

this kid senses a lot... cheap cheat when you can't be bothered to explain thing realistically...

as if it weren’t even there.

they wouldn't be ducking if it wasn't there. stupid

four or five,

This narrator is never sure of much. He "senses" and he seems to guess a lot re his own memory etc., yet at time he has certain clear recollections.

Frankenstein steps, as I thought of them, deliberate and clumping, with absurdly long pauses between each footfall—and

an actual good sentence and description but the "as I thought of them" is truly unnecessary

high-strung scrawl

what?

I was struck by its extreme brevity

you weren't struck by the "high-strung-ness?" LOL

a perfect stranger—had

these "dash-arenticals" litter this damn story and often are worthless or the sentence could easily be reworded and thus be better. This reads like a first draft. no editor refined this?

the firemen and rescue people had rushed the building only minutes after I got out, and I still had hopes that someone had made it back in to rescue him—the

a detail not mentioned previously. the boy had been rushed off before this occurred. in reality people may recall certain details separately but in a story such should be recognized or the recollection revised and made complete so it doesn't sound as if the author/narrator is making it up as he goes. Plus, how come he didn't hope his mother could be saved? Who cares about this guy? He's no one!

memory of that heaped plate with the steam coming off it still ties my stomach in knots.

passages like this don't ring true. of course it may be a fact but he could claim the look of a sidewalk or an actual knot tied him in knots. it comes across as wordiness, unnecessary detail to lend emotional relevance where one is not required as if the author added these extra bits to make sentence or paragraph or current passage "thicker" though it would probably be fine without them.

beauty—a stillness so powerful that the molecules realigned themselves around her when she came into a room.

good sentence.

slinky ermine

rodents have grace?

it.)

this entire paragraph in parenthesis? why?

(An aside:

as if this is the first aside

stars both silvery and golden

hard-to-follow

its like she has a poor vocabulary so she tends to strings simple words together instead. how about "confusing" or "haphazard." Use a damn thesaurus.

Andy sneezed, and blew his nose;

as much as the author includes painfully boring details she manages to miss others like whether or not Andy used a tissue or handkerchief. I guess he blew his nose into the air.

class outings were as much as he had of a social life.

and plenty if awkward sentences. is there an editor?

dreamy underwater mood of the room,

i like this but it could be better written…

iv.

That's it? That's the whole part iv? for why?

I just didn’t believe you.”

so he lied before when he said that she said he'd be back and presto. ..

my head in the rainclouds, my heart in the sky.

seriously? is this Nicholas sparks?

What the hell did she know about it, the old bat?

this wreaks of young adult writing not Pulitzer worthy. this, as it turns out (we are later informed) is written by an adult using journals he never previously mentioned, so this kind of childish writing doesn't quite work, but i guess...

you slipped away sometimes into 1850, a world of ticking clocks and creaking floorboards, copper pots and baskets of turnips and onions in the kitchen, candle flames leaning all to the left in the draft of an opened door and tall parlor windows billowing and swagged like ball gowns, cool quiet rooms where old things slept.

nice.

handful of pocket change.

Cliché.

bone-jar

pfft. might be somewhat forgivable if not the repeated offenses and lack of poetry. just sound sophomoric in this authors unskilled hands.

When I’d first come to Vegas,

Flashback! another Oops-I-forgot-to-mention moment. is there really any moment where this could have happened? I feel like we've had a day to day account of everything. And suddenly, there's this one moment he forgot to mention before cuz his story doesn't make sense without it so "I'll just plop this sucker in right here..." I hate when authors do this. Too lazy to add it in when it should have been. its cheating. Tartt is too lazy to do a proper re-write.

“Uniform Transfer to Minors.

possible

you mean impossible?

I’d scattered my mother’s ashes in Central Park,

seems like an important detail. a pivotal moment. again another afterthought

taken me to be photographed for it shortly after my mother died;

wtf? lazy writing

Xandra’s friend Lisa (solicitous, following me around, voicing gentle but increasingly urgent concerns that “the family” be notified) had retreated to a corner at some point to dial the number I gave her—and got off the phone with such a look that it had elicited, from Xandra, the only laugh of the evening.

again lazy writing. I swear there's no room for this event to have occurred. narrator was pretty thorough when initially telling the account, hence the "at some point."

Welty’s,

like the one and only time you've ever spoken to him and he's dying and bleeding to death. THAT soothing voice you stupid sh*t?

iv.

the way she ends subsections is like she got bored with it. doesn't seem to be any need for either the subchapter or the sudden graceless ending.

James Bond

what James bond movie has a storage locker?

the awkward silence.

life is full of awkward silences isn't it...

when Platt didn’t respond.

and non responses

flop around

like a fish out of water?

miraculous lofts I hadn’t even known were there,

What? this is abstract so they AREN'T there.

the past and make it different, had somehow attached itself, ravenously, to her.

so its not a coincidence that Tartt tends to say "this symbol is a symbol." This is probably the third time she's done that

migrainous headache

fucking stupid. At least it wasn't a "headachy migraine." Those are the worst.