The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

771 pages

Bookclub read

Blurb

It begins with a boy. 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 home on Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who don't know how to talk to him, and tormented above all by his unbearable longing for his mother, he clings to one thing that reminds him of her: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into the underworld of art.

As an adult, Theo moves silkily between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty labyrinth of an antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love-and at the center of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle.

The Goldfinch combines vivid characters, mesmerizing language, and suspense, while plumbing with a philosopher's calm the deepest mysteries of love, identity, and art. It is an old-fashioned story of loss and obsession, survival and self-invention, and the ruthless machinations of fate.

Review

In retrospect I have to wonder why I picked this book for my book club. The fact that a movie based on this book was recently released had something to do with it. And I adored Donna Tartt’s Secret History when I read it something like thirty years ago. But I should probably have done a little research first and have looked at the reviews of this story on Goodreads before making my decision. Because, if I’m totally honest I have to admit that I probably wouldn’t have finished this book if it hadn’t been this month’s book club read.

Not that the story is all bad. The premise of the story is quite interesting actually. It’s very easy to imagine a teenage boy getting obsessed with a picture his mother adored, especially if his mother dies shortly after showing the image to him. What happens to Theo after his mother dies and finds himself without a support network and caring relatives, is heartbreaking and all too realistic. His subsequent friendship with Boris, who is a fascinating but questionable character from the moment he’s first introduced, makes perfect sense under the circumstances, as does his obsession with Pippa and Hobie.

The problem for me was that the story got lost in the wordiness of this tale. I can’t help feeling that this book could have been half the size it is without losing anything, while probably gaining a lot as far as intrigue and tension are concerned. I basically stopped caring when every single act, thought, and surrounding was described in so much detail that I managed to forget what the words were referring to. A good, and very determined editor, might have done wonders for this book, I feel. But, given that the book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, that thought may say more about my lack of literary knowledge than Mrs. Tartt’s writing skills. 😊

The blurb suggests a story filled with ever increasing levels of suspense and one or two scenes in the story certainly took my breath away but, unfortunately, even those moments got dulled through too much description. Sometimes authors need to trust the reader to know and understand what’s happening without them having to spell out every single detail. Tartt apparently doesn’t trust her reader to do that, and as a result, wrote a book that should have been fascinating but ended up boring me.