The GOLDFINCH

Donna Tartt’s novel certainly merits the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, but does have some discernible flaws (we will discuss later). I saw the CBS interview with Donna Tartt and now understand why her prose is so impeccable. She takes ten years to write a book! She wrote one novel each at the ages of 29, 39 and 49. She is influenced by the writing style of Charles Dickens, which accounts for her incredible, descriptive writing. The aftermath of the museum explosion extends for a suspense filled eighteen pages (pp. 31-48). We see the outcome of the detonation through the eyes of our narrator and protagonist, Theo Decker. This was one of several sections the author wrote that I thought was exceptionally proficient. I also thought introducing Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1868 novel, The Idiot, was a clever writer’s ploy since the Russian novel is a classic study of the conflict between good and evil, which abounds in Tartt’s novel. Lastly, this might seem trite, but I loved the author’s generous use of commas, semicolons and dashes. I know that there are grammatical rules for their usage, but I like ‘a little extra cheese on my pizza’ (is that a idiom?). What is the story about?

Okay, Theo Decker is a thirteen year old student living in N.Y.C. who gets into dubious trouble in school and gets suspended. Now his estranged mom and Theo head for the school for a meeting. They are early, it’s raining, so they duck into an art museum to pass some time and see the Dutch artist exposition, mainly Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson and C. Fabritius’s The Goldfinch. Theo is mesmerized with a red headed girl (Pippa) his age accompanied by a old man presumed to be her grandfather (Welty). As Theo and his mom walk to the gift shop, mom decides to go back to see the painting one more time, leaving Theo in the shop alone when he spots the girl and her companion again. Just as he approaches the girl, a massive explosion occurs in the museum. He is covered in debris and disoriented. He hears the old man groaning and goes to him. The girl is nowhere to be seen. The old man is dying. Where is mom? The old man spots “a dusty rectangle of board” covered in rubbish and wants Theo to get it. My God, it’s The Goldfinch painting. The old man (Welty Blackwell) wants to know where Pippa is. Theo doesn’t see her (why am I using so many short sentences?). He gives Theo his “heavy gold ring with a carved stone” and tells him to take it to Hobart and Blackwell. “Ring the green bell.” Theo finally finds his way out of the museum, dazed and hurt, unable to get anyone to help him. He still has the painting. He walks home in the rain to wait for his mom to return from the museum. Guess what, she’s dead, and suddenly Theo is alone.

Is Theo going to experience the same problems that Pip in the Charles Dickens novel Great Expectations endured? Maybe. Mom doesn’t come home, a social worker from the Department of Child and Family Services calls, and the story is off and running (idiom alert). The reader is going to encounter the peculiar Barbour family, agonize over Theo’s life with his dad in Las Vegas, meet his crazy Russian friend, Boris, and delight in Theo’s relationship with Hobart (Hobie). What happened to Pippa? And what about The Goldfinch? Who has it and what will become of it? It is the focus of the story, yet the author occasionally seems to forget about it for a hundred pages or so. I guess that can happen in a 771 page novel. The cigarette smoking, vodka drinking and drug using Boris is a character that the reader loves and periodically hates. The author has the unique ability to make the reader like the characters she wants you to like (Theo, Hobie, Pippa, Mrs. Barbour, Andy and sometimes Boris) and hate the characters she wants you to hate (Theo’s dad, Boris’s dad, Lucius Reeves, Tom Cable and sometimes Boris). Can this lady write or what?

Alright, now for the flaws. When the reader gets to page 643...suddenly it’s a race to the finish line; the author can’t wait to get to page 771. Why? The novel was plodding along nicely for 642 pages and probably nine years of Donna Tartt’s life. If you are writing a book that long, what difference does it make if the novel is a couple hundred pages longer? The extra pages would have given the author the time needed to develop all the new characters that turned up near the end. Lastly, what was that life and death tirade (in the last five pages) all about? Don’t get me wrong, I loved the book...it’s just that it could have been better.

RATING: 5 out of 5 stars

Comment: As I said before, Donna Tartt has only written two previous novels, The Secret History (1992) and The Little Friend (2002), winner of the WH Smith Literary Award (2003).So lets take a look at these books:

The Secret History: Amazon.com says: “Donna Tartt, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for her most recent novel, The Goldfinch, established herself as a major talent with The Secret History, which has become a contemporary classic.

Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality their lives are changed profoundly and forever, and they discover how hard it can be to truly live and how easy it is to kill.”

Goodreads.com says: “Richard Papen arrived at Hampden College in New England and was quickly seduced by an elite group of five students, all Greek scholars, all worldly, self-assured, and, at first glance, all highly unapproachable. As Richard is drawn into their inner circle, he learns a terrifying secret that binds them to one another...a secret about an incident in the woods in the dead of night where an ancient rite was brought to brutal life...and led to a gruesome death. And that was just the beginning....”

The Little Friend: Amazon.com says: “The setting is Alexandria, Mississippi, where one Mother’s Day a little boy named Robin Cleve Dufresnes was found hanging from a tree in his parents’ yard. Twelve years later Robin’s murder is still unsolved and his family remains devastated. So it is that Robin’s sister Harriet—unnervingly bright, insufferably determined, and unduly influenced by the fiction of Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson--sets out to unmask his killer. Aided only by her worshipful friend Hely, Harriet crosses her town’s rigid lines of race and caste and burrows deep into her family’s history of loss. Filled with hairpin turns of plot and “a bustling, ridiculous humanity worthy of Dickens” (The New York Times Book Review), The Little Friend is a work of myriad enchantments by a writer of prodigious talent.”

Goodreads.com says: “Bestselling author Donna Tartt returns with a grandly ambitious and utterly riveting novel of childhood, innocence and evil.

The setting is Alexandria, Mississippi, where one Mother’s Day a little boy named Robin Cleve Dufresnes was found hanging from a tree in his parents’ yard. Twelve years later Robin’s murder is still unsolved and his family remains devastated. So it is that Robin’s sister Harriet - unnervingly bright, insufferably determined, and unduly influenced by the fiction of Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson--sets out to unmask his killer. Aided only by her worshipful friend Hely, Harriet crosses her town’s rigid lines of race and caste and burrows deep into her family’s history of loss.”

Picture of The Goldfinch by C. Fabritius (1654), the main focus of the novel: