By Heidi Simmons
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The Goldfinch
By Donna Tartt
Fiction
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On the bestseller list since its debut last October, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, (Little, Brown, 775 pages) continues to be a run-away success. Is everyone reading this book because everyone else is reading this book? At $30, this lengthy tome may be good vacation reading, but is it great literature?
The story is narrated by Theo Decker. He is a 27 year old and begins by remembering his beautiful mother. At 13, he is in trouble at school. He and friend were suspended and the principal has called a meeting with the parents. The friend may have been the instigator, but Theo certainly was a willingly participant.
On their way to the school for the meeting, Theo’s mother wants to stop by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art to see an exhibit. Trying to relax and hoping his mom will forget about the appointment with the principal, he gets lost in the art and follows a pretty girl about his age and her guardian. Suddenly, there is a terrible explosion and when Theo wakes, the building around him is rubble and there is horrible human carnage.
His mother and the girl are nowhere in sight, but the guardian – or what’s left of him – gives Theo a ring, an address and tells him to get the painting. With a terrible concussion Theo is able to remember this information and grab the painting before finding his way out of the museum. Making his way home, he is later told his mother was killed in the terrorist attack.
Theo’s father had abandoned him and his mother, so the authorities find him temporary guardianship with the Barbours, a family of a childhood friend. They are an uber wealthy clan. Although he is an outsider, Theo hopes he can stay with them since no other suitable guardian can be found.
In the mean time, Theo seeks out the address told to him during the crisis to return the ring to the family of the dying guardian. But not the painting. Here he finds the man’s partner, Hobie, an antique furniture repair guy and the girl he saw at the museum, Pippa, who is bed ridden from blast injuries. The three begin a friendly and lasting relationship.
Just as Theo begins to feel a part of the Barbour family, his father and trashy girlfriend surface and take him back to their seedy world in Las Vegas.
Theo only takes his warm weather clothing and the goldfinch painting. Neglected and mostly alone, he eventually makes friends with Boris, a Ukrainian-Polish-Russian boy. The two find they have much in common – dead mothers and cruel fathers. The two bond over drug abuse and shoplifting. When Theo’s father suddenly dies, he leaves Las Vegas and goes back to New York to be with Hobie and Pippa, who become his new family.
With a big jump in time, Theo is now a partner in the furniture business and has made some shady deals pawning off fake furniture as authentic antiques. His impropriety discovered, Theo wants to make it right by returning the painting, hoping it will amend all his transgressions, only to discover Boris stole it years ago. What?
With an impending nuptial to the Barbour daughter and pressure building about his illegal furniture transactions, Boris tries to help him retrieve the painting he long ago pawned in a drug deal. During his engagement party, Theo and Boris leave for Amsterdam to get the painting back.
Unfortunately, the deal goes bad and Theo kills two men. Poor Theo! Still the painting gets away. But, just as Theo considers taking his life, Boris comes through with a cash reward for turning in the painting to European authorities. They’re awarded stacks of American money — not Euros.
Will Theo call off his engagement with the superficial Barbour girl who was once his mean pseudo sister? Or will he marry his true love, the deeply injured Pippa? Will bad boy Boris live to see another day? Will Hobie forgive poor Theo? I’ll let you decide if it’s worth finding out – assuming you care at all about these characters.
The first two thirds of The Goldfinch is definitely a YA (young adult) novel – or, as the highbrow literary community (and Germans) say, Bildungsroman. No matter what you call it, The Goldfinch is a coming of age story about a boy who is a victim of terrorism and realizes life is worth living no matter how bad you are as a person.
Theo is not a likeable character. He is in trouble when we meet him and he is still in trouble when it’s over. Hobie is the only character with redeeming qualities, yet he is very much a cliché.
Even at the ripe old age of 27, Theo remains an unreliable narrator. The reader knows his memory is faulty and lacks credibility. He is a drug addict, a thief and a murderer. However, Theo is a bit sympathetic. Sure we feel bad for the young lad after losing his mum and da. But the little street urchin rescues a dog and smuggles him across the country and he loved his mother. So, how bad can he really be?
The Goldfinch is set in today’s world, but in some alternative universe. If you figure out the math there are contradictions. Like when Theo is 13, there were no cell phones, texting or IPods and terrorism in the US was homegrown.
So what, if anything, makes this book compelling? It is the art itself: the 1654 painting of “The Goldfinch” by Carel Fabritius. When Tartt actually writes about the painting, the story becomes real, interesting and meaningful. In beautiful ways, the painting is used to describe Theo’s mother and the ever-changing continuity of life. However, it is often completely forgotten for hundreds of pages and fails to work as an underlying thematic device or conceit.
Tartt’s Goldfinch has been compared to Charles Dickens’ novels and it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. But, does that make it great literature? No.
