Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

There is a lot to love about Donna Tartt’s expansive new novel The Goldfinch. The bildungsroman recounts the curious, troubled, and decadent upbringing of a teenage New Yorker who fumbles along an ever-tightening wire between societal affability and drug-crazed lunacy. It’s the type of plot that smacks you a few times around the face and harasses you endlessly until you get to the bottom of it.

Theodore Decker is a charming, bright, and articulate mummies boy whose life is ripped to shreds following an atrocity that leaves him parentless and homeless in Manhattan. His inability to forget his mother’s memory and his unyielding love for a kindred spirit form the backbone of this 864-page intimate epic.

Tartt’s imaginative rendering of this complex tapestry of contemporary characters is one of the novel’s greatest strengths. While the plot holds the attention, Tartt strokes the heart through her troubled narrator and his faithfully drawn band of reprobates and Manhattanites.

Theodore’s heavy-drinking sidekick Boris is a particularly inspired creation. Within this Russian-born character Tartt has beautifully captured the mongrel beliefs and restless tenacity that defines many twenty-first century adolescents.

The novel is undoubtedly worthy of its extended length. The frequent descriptive pauses entice you as much as the engrossing plot. The novel briskly pushes on but often pauses for intricate reflection and description. The novel is set over a decade-long period but it gives equal weight to each stand of the story and adeptly draws each of the novel’s many characters.

That’s not to say it is a complete success. The plot wraps itself slowly around your waking thoughts but doesn’t necessarily lead you anywhere satisfactory. Tartt has spun a web so intricate and fine that is natural that the unraveling will be at least partly disappointing. 

The book also veers dangerously close to a Dickensian pastiche. While the presence of iPhones, text messages, and transcontinental flights keep us rooted squarely in the twenty-first century, some of the novel’s characters and sub-plots hint rather obviously at Great Expectations. Isn’t Theodore troubled like Pip? Is Mrs Barbour another Miss Haversham in all-but-appearance? And isn’t Pippa as dangerously intoxicating as Dickens’s Estella?

These parallels aren’t necessarily weaknesses but they arguably muddy the novel’s power. It is undoubtedly a visceral and high-octane read. A modern Victorian novel isn’t a bad thing, but didn’t the twentieth century teach us that closure is never easy for a character to achieve? Likewise, characters self-consciously learning grand truths have fallen out of fashion in a post-modernist world. Theodore is hell-bent on learning. His friend Boris is hell-bent on modern life. Would the latter have made a more faithful modern narrator?

The tension between Boris’s pragmatic philosophy and Theodore’s quest for certainty illuminates the later stages of the book. As the novel progresses Theodore becomes a less and less interesting narrator. In particular, his actions towards the end of the novel are irritating and irrational.

This decent into mediocrity could be used to apply to the rest of the novel. The tight plot that grips the reader at the beginning unravels towards the end and the final 50 pages were unsatisfactory. Yes, many stands of the story are neatly tied up. But is that what we want from a modern novel? Isn’t life, as Boris repeatedly reminds us, a little bit more random? A little less certain? A little more fun?

The novel’s length, and its female author, will undoubtedly lead to parallels with Eleanor Catton’s equally heavy-going The Luminaries. Both using an engrossing plot to draw the reader into something more profound and both authors use the space to make an artistic statement. Theo’s final comments in The Goldfinch are stirring and poignant but they risk sliding into a polemical thesis on the nature of art. That’s fine, but whose voice is really talking: Theo’s or Tartt’s?

  

The Goldfinch is a great, great read. It will enhance any holiday, commute, or lazy Sunday. But, it could have been so much better. Within the books there are hints of a trans-generational masterpiece that didn’t quite come together. It does stir the soul and prick the mind, but will it still do so in 50 years?