Book Review: The Goldfinch
29.05.2020
Book Review | The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
I put off reading any Donna Tartt books for years. Not in a boycotting kind of way but they were extremely hyped among friends, hefty and I wasn’t even sure if they were going to be my kind of thing. I mean, there’s so many books in the world! Committing to an 800-pager is a big deal. Anyway, suffice to say I took the leap and I’ve got to tell you it is 100% my kind of thing.
Even though I say Tartt’s books are hyped I actually knew very little about The Goldfinch save that it was about a young boy going AWOL with an important piece of art. And it is. It is about that. In fact that very much underpins the whole novel but it’s also about so very much more than that. I’m not going to pop any spoilers in this review because the reading is such a treat.
I also think it’s possibly quite a divisive book. It’s not that the content is particularly contentious but I did see on Goodreads that it got both one and five star reviews in quite large amounts. My friend, the ever-thoughtful Laura Lexx, said that at times she wondered why she was still reading as next to nothing had even happened but that she felt compelled to continue. I felt much the same. Every now and again I’d marvel at the sometimes glacial pace of the book but still realise I was absolutely gripped. The writing is beautiful without being pretentious or inaccessible, the characters are diverse and interesting and there’s a pulsing undercurrent that pushes you to follow the story of both Theo and his piece of art.
The novel opens with its protagonist Theo Decker, now a young man, alone in a hotel room in Amsterdam, unwell and clearly hiding from something major. Something that’s going to hit the newspapers. We leave him there and head back in time to the day of his mother’s death when she and Theo, now a schoolboy, are en route to a school meeting about his suspension via the art museum. This is where the theft of the painting occurs and where he meets a dying man who sets him on his future path. What follows is a story of epic proportions, following Theo and the painting from New York to Vegas and then finally to Amsterdam.
I loved the book so much. I think following a character over the course of a lifetime, or a huge chunk of that lifetime, is so satisfying. The book is narrated by Theo and so I felt very much by his side throughout his experiences. Sometimes I saw things from his point of view, other times I felt like screaming at him for his poor decisions. Regardless I loved how Tartt melded his everyday experiences with the ongoing grief over his mother’s death. Every location was fully fleshed out, every character three-dimensional and human. I found myself reading through long passages about art and antiques, not passions of mine, but kept fully invested and intrigued throughout. I cared about the backstories and futures of almost every single character: Pippa, Hobie, the Barbours, Boris and I was rooting for Theo even when I could see the impossibility of the hole he was digging himself into and hated him for it.
There’s so much more I can say about this novel but I was grateful I had so little information when diving into it. One thing though. I think that you have to care somewhat about Theo in order to invest in and enjoy the reading experience. It’ll probably be a long 800 pages or so if not! I had only one complaint about the novel and that came right at the end. After a novel that was so beautifully and written, the last chapter is a disappointment. Tartt tries to tie up every loose end and set the course of Theo’s future. We’ve already patiently followed the minutiae of Theo’s life at the pace Tartt set for us but for some reason, right at the end, she shoves almost a year’s worth of information into the final chapter and attempts to let Theo tell us his learned beliefs about life. This felt completely at odds with the rest of the novel and it really jarred for me. That said, it’s a minor complaint about an excellent novel.