Review: Tartt Hits Sour Note with The Goldfinch

Editorial tough love could have made this good book great

Readers have been waiting for Mississippi native Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch for a decade, since the 2002 release of her previous novel The Little Friend. Teased in 2008, The Goldfinch was finally released late in 2013—unusually, the Dutch translation (Het Puttertje) emerged before the original English text and received good press in the Netherlands. Sadly, I have to break with the Dutch on this one: while Tartt retains the incredible prose that made her previous novels, mega-bestseller-slash-academic-thriller The Secret History and perceptive Southern gothic The Little Friend, the deserved successes they were, the plot of The Goldfinch is a clotted mess. The book is still a good read—Tartt has so much raw talent that even her shopping lists are probably full of haunting images and clever similes—but falls short of being a good novel.

Though it weighs in at an editor-punishing 784 pages in hardcover, The Goldfinch moves quickly because it needs to. An awful lot happens in the novel —enough that it’s next to impossible to coherently summarize. As a teenager, narrator Theo Decker survives an art museum bombing that kills his mother and, in his daze, steals a small Dutch master painting of a goldfinch, following the instructions of a dying man, who gives Decker a signet ring and whose red-haired niece’s image haunts Theo, who… see what I mean?

Plots and themes crowd the book. It’s about how tragedy marks a young person, and about young love, and about the power of art, and about the obsessive nature of friendship, and about how love means different things to different people. In short, Tartt was writing somewhere from two to five novels at the same time and never got them unraveled. All of them would have been good, and at least one great; but like shoots in a crowded garden, none of them are allowed enough room to develop fully.

Consequently, the plot largely reels from event to event in the style of a drunk going down a hallway, and several characters aren’t developed as much as they just hang out and advance the plot for a while. Theo’s parents are the most obvious examples, paper dolls labeled Perfect-Mother and Daddy-Drinks, who die just when they need to so that Theo can Experience Trauma. For some reason, the red-haired girl who survives the blast with him becomes an obsession —there’s nothing wrong with being attracted to wealthy, redheaded flautists, but Pippa is more symbol than woman. Some of this has to do with the narrator’s youth and lack of adult perception, but some of it also has to do with Tartt trying to chew the massive conceptual bite she took.

I’ve been hard on Tartt here, but I don’t want to give the impression that the book isn’t worth reading. She refers to a society matron as looking “like an elegant weasel,” which is just perfect. The middle of the book deals with Theo’s obsessive teenage friendship with another boy—hard-drinking, foulmouthed Ukrainian émigré Boris—and here Tartt outdoes herself. Teenagers do sometimes form hyper-intense bonds; and she shows us this relationship in all its dizzy, unclassifiable glory. It helps that, in a book featuring several imperfectly sketched characters, Boris is so real he practically leaps off the page and swears at you. And Theo becomes much more vivid through the lens of his relationship to the incandescent Boris. Tartt manages to make two hundred-plus pages of teenagers drinking stolen vodka, eating candy, and talking about girls absolutely fascinating (much more interesting than actually being a bad teenager was, at least in my limited experience), which is no small feat. This is probably the book she should have written—about a person’s first real friendship and how close it can be to a first love—and these are among the scenes and images that readers will most repeatedly turn over in their minds after returning The Goldfinch to the shelf. Every page is good, and only at the very end did I think the book dragged (we writers hate to shut up); but some editorial tough love could have made this good book great.

As a final note, I was surprised to learn that the painting described in the novel really exists and is as captivating as described; for some reason I had assumed that Tartt invented it for the novel. Take a moment to look up an image of this painting by Carel Fabritius while you read The Goldfinch. I’m not surprised it inspired a work of fiction; it’s a haunting little painting that really reminds the viewer why they’re called the Dutch Masters. Most of the artist’s works were destroyed when an armory exploded, killing him and devastating the city of Delft; but this lucky, immortal little bird survived to inspire another type of artist—centuries, oceans, and cultures away. Art holds truly awesome power; and Tartt’s Dutch inspiration, as well as her imperfect-but-engaging novel, clearly underscores that truism.