What I Am Reading: "The Goldfinch" by Donna Tartt
One of the earliest books I blogged about was Donna Tartt's The Secret History, which I liked a lot and wrote a very mediocre blog post about. Now I am back, more than a year older and hardly any wiser, to tell you that her latest book, The Goldfinch, is Also Pretty Good.
The book is named after the painting, The Goldfinch, of a goldfinch held in captivity. The painting was made by the Dutch artist, Carel Fabritius. A student of Rembrandt, he painted it in 1654, the same year that he was killed in a massive magazine explosion in Delft that also destroyed most of his works. This explosion is echoed in the one that sets the story in motion: Theo Decker is in a museum in New York when it is bombed by right-wing terrorists, and his mother is lost, eventually found dead. Another casualty is a furniture dealer named Welty, who had, along with his niece Pippa, caught Theo's eye and imagination in the museum shortly before the explosion. Theo sits with Welty as he dies, and Welty, delirious, asks to see the painting, and gives Theo his antique ring. Theo ends up finding his way out through the wreckage with the painting and the ring, and in his panic, keeps both.
The ring leads Theo back to the girl, Pippa, with whom he has become enchanted, and to Welty's partner in furniture restoration, Hobie. The two live in Greenwich Village, in an old building with a workshop in the basement. When combined the presence with Theo's late mother, an impecunious art specialist who lives in an old Art Deco apartment building, a strong sense of Old New York is invoked, of cobblestone streets and genteel cafes, a sort of shabby chic. I don't think that it is a coincidence that the story takes us to (and starts off in, in the prologue) Amsterdam, New York's urban ancestor.
After a stay in this slightly whimsical safe space for the children of the urban gentry (right out of a YA novel about orphans), Theo ends up hustled off to Las Vegas, to live with his alcoholic gambler father. Here he beomces a burnout, and makes friends with Boris, the globetrotting ragamuffin son of a Russian mine foreman. As they smoke, drink, and steal their days through the un-city of Vegas, they form a strong bond (and have a sexual encounter that receives very, very little page-count).
Eventually, however, Vegas proves to be just an interlude, as Theo's father's death sends him back to New York and to live permanently with Hobie. From there, the novel encompasses years of Theo's life, as he learns Hobie's trade, gets enmeshed in furniture forgery, waxes and wanes in his dependence on drugs, pines after Pippa, and gets engaged to the sister of a childhood friend (who turns out to have died tragically during Theo's absence from his life, in a reveal I found to be the most melancholy of all). Throughout the story, he is both haunted and enthralled by the painting, nervously tracking news of art crimes and subject to blackmail for his forgeries. Beyond the art history in the novel, it spends some time on the work of refinishing and dealing antique furniture; another reminder of how history lives through artisans, and not just college professors. Eventually, the painting's location causes a crisis, and Theo must reckon with the choices he has made in the past decade-plus of his life.
I liked this novel, and definitely kept me interested as I read it. It was without many dull moments and plenty of exciting or satisfying ones. That being said, this is a definite English Class Novel. It was written by a professional novelist who went to school (famously) to be a novelist; it has a clear theme, motifs; it had an epic story spanning years and continents, lives ruined, blood shed (as Logan Echolls might say). It ends with a moral about appreciating beauty in the malevolent chaos of modern life, it has characters who start out simple, but end up shown to be more complex, and are even analyzed as such by other characters. Definitely a novel you can write discussion questions for.