Donna Tartt was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, and is a graduate of Bennington College. She is the author of the novels The Secret History and The Little Friend, which have been translated into thirty languages. You can find more of my reviews of Donna Tartt's works here.
Theo Decker, a thirteen-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new life and tormented by his longing for his mother, he clings to the one thing that reminds him of her: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately propels Theo into the art underworld. As an adult, Theo moves silkily between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty labyrinth of the antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love—and at the center of a narrowing, dangerous circle. The Goldfinch is a beautiful, stay-up-all-night-and-tell-your-friends triumph, an old-fashioned story of loss and obsession, survival and self-invention, and the ruthless machinations of fate.
The Goldfinch, for all its faults, did actually cause me to wonder more deeply about all the people in the world I'll never have a chance to meet—and it only succeeded in doing that by following the story of someone I don't think I'll ever meet. Theodore Decker's mother died young, in a tragedy that also took Theodore's sanity along with it. I enjoyed immensely the first few hundred pages of the novel—Tartt's prose and her skill at writing grief and anxiety and panic made for the kind of "stay up all night" storytelling most critics cite when saying why they loved this novel. Yet, after 300+ pages of Theo's childhood, I started to wonder if the novel would have enough time to build him into an adult, and also build up to the whole "art underworld" it was promising in its synopsis. I would say that the book did not have the time to develop the art underworld as I had hoped—after an abrupt time jump and bringing back characters that don't have enough room to explain themselves or the situation, I would say that the entire back-half of the novel could have used more development. While Tartt's captivating prose stayed consistent, good writing cannot and does not make a good book. What she lost in the second half of the novel was the story she was telling, and even after finishing I would be unable to fully state what exactly Theo's story was meant to do. After watching Theo make bad decision after bad decision, it was also hard to fully care for him, especially as we watched him trick and fool people who seemed genuinely good. The lack of a fully satisfying ending that has the energy of mansplaining also did not help Theo's case, or make me feel like he was a redeemable character, despite his short statement in that he was going back and buying the furniture.
Lots of people seemed to struggle to get through this novel. Its sheer length (my copy is 962 pages long) definitely presented an obstacle, even for me. Yet the thing that seemed to keep most people going was the prose. When I remember this book, I know I will reflect on its details, the way Tartt planted these very specific visions or images that came back to play later—details that may have felt forgettable at first glance, but ones that I remembered instantly once she made a call back to them. The details are sometimes so visceral—such as the moments of clarity where he missed his mom—that I teared up, thinking for a second that it was my own mom I was missing. Tartt uses these details to build a narrative, one where it becomes easier to forget certain parts of his own story. The more Tartt relies on details, the more it seems to signal Theo's loss of understanding in particular moments (this is especially true during the scenes where Theo is drunk or high, and can only remember specific details without a story to attach them to).
When I picked up this book, based on the way the synopsis was written, I assumed there would be a very easy-to-identify trajectory for the novel's plot. Theo's mom died, he lives with rich friends up until he decides to go to college and study art history, then gets involved in some shady business in the art underworld once he decides to do something about the painting he's stolen. I was totally rocked when the novel did not, in fact, follow this train of events. Rather, Theo's mom dies, he lives with rich friends for a while until his drunk father shows up and takes him to Nevada, Theo becomes a druggie and an alcoholic and homeless, and grows into a man who schemes to make money until he is presented with an opportunity he cannot pass up related to the painting he stole. There was more drug and alcohol related content in this novel than I ever thought possible, to the point where it was almost uncomfortable to read (in the sense that I wondered exactly how the author knew so much about all these drugs and these doses).
Tartt also has a skill for writing panic and anxiety. The biggest moment in Theo's life is the disaster that killed his mother, a scene that is so gruesome and horrifying, it felt traumatic to read it. This moment is the foundation for Theo's anxiety, PTSD, and probably a few other mental illnesses that go undiagnosed yet still affect very vividly how he lives his life. Tartt will use long, run-on sentences (even paragraphs) when spiraling into Theo's panic and anxiety, which becomes more apparent the older Theo gets, which reflects accurately on the more anxiety-inducing situations he is in. It is dizzying to read these moments—for one second, we feel like we have a grasp on Theo's reality, and in the next, that understanding is torn away and replaced with a detail so jarring, we as readers forget how we ended up at this point.
The ending is rather philosophical, and doesn't quite match the tone or story we thought we knew when we picked up the book. I didn't agree entirely with everything Tartt was stating at the end. Especially in regards to the "we can't choose who we become" narrative—throughout the book I would wonder how different Theo might have turned out had his mother not died, but more than that, I wondered how different Theo might have turned out had he actually tried at school in Nevada, or had he never become friends with Boris in the first place. Fruitless wonderings, of course, which I think was mostly Tartt's point: we only have one life, and the choices we make amount to it. There's no point wondering how it all might turn out differently, because it will never happen that way. Tartt seemed to take a more pessimistic viewpoint of this philosophy, which I did not agree with. There was also an emphasis on how love plays a big role—in a book where there wasn't a lot of love going around in the first place, I felt a little lost and confused as to how we could have ended up with love as the biggest player of all. Maybe it's because I'm young, but I didn't understand how love played that big of a role, especially since Theo's biggest loves (to his mother and Pippa) went unrequited (his mother died, and Pippa just didn't love him all the way back). I would have loved to see that theme of love more developed, especially if Theo claimed it played a bigger role than we thought. Books that have to explain what you have learned at the end signals to many readers that the book itself didn't do a good enough job diving into the themes and questions it wanted to evaluate and answer.
If you enjoyed The Goldfinch, you'll be sure to enjoy Tartt's other novels, The Secret History and The Little Friend. You can find more of my reviews of Donna Tartt's works here.
*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*
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