book review of the goldfinch

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THE GOLDFINCH

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 22, 2013

A standout—and well worth the wait.

A long-awaited, elegant meditation on love, memory and the haunting power of art.

Tartt ( The Little Friend , 2002, etc.) takes a long time, a decade or more, between novels. This one, her third, tells the story of a young man named Theodore Decker who is forced to grapple with the world alone after his mother—brilliant, beautiful and a delight to be around—is felled in what would seem to be an accident, if an explosion inside a museum can be accidental. The terrible wreckage of the building, a talismanic painting half buried in plaster and dust, “the stink of burned clothes, and an occasional soft something pressing in on me that I didn’t want to think about”—young Theo will carry these things forever. Tartt’s narrative is in essence an extended footnote to that horror, with his mother becoming ever more alive in memory even as the time recedes: not sainted, just alive, the kind of person Theo misses because he can’t tell her goofy things (his father taking his mistress to a Bon Jovi concert in Las Vegas, for instance: “It seemed terrible that she would never know this hilarious fact”) as much as for any other reason. The symbolic echoes Tartt employs are occasionally heavy-handed, and it’s a little too neat that Theo discovers the work of the sublime Dutch master Carel Fabritius, killed in a powder blast, just before the fateful event that will carry his mother away. Yet it all works. “All the rest of it is lost—everything he ever did,” his mother quietly laments of the little-known artist, and it is Theo’s mission as he moves through life to see that nothing in his own goes missing. Bookending Jonathan Safran Foer’s  Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close , this is an altogether lovely addition to what might be called the literature of disaster and redemption. The novel is slow to build but eloquent and assured, with memorable characters, not least a Russian cracker-barrel philosopher who delivers a reading of God that Mordecai Richler might applaud.

Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2013

ISBN: 978-0-316-05543-7

Page Count: 784

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: July 28, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013

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PERSPECTIVES

THINGS FALL APART

by Chinua Achebe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 23, 1958

This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.

Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.

Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger .

Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958

ISBN: 0385474547

Page Count: 207

Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky

Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958

More by Chinua Achebe

by Chinua Achebe

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1400031702

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

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Book Reviews

More is more in donna tartt's believable, behemoth 'goldfinch'.

Meg Wolitzer

The Goldfinch

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If you're a novelist who takes a decade or so between books, you can only hope that your readers remember how much they loved you in the past. It's a saturated market out there, and brand loyalty doesn't always extend to novelists.

But ever since the news broke that Donna Tartt's new book The Goldfinch would soon be published, many readers have been waiting in a state of breathless excitement. They've never quite gotten over how much they loved Tartt's 1992 novel, The Secret History , a tale of friendship and murder set at a college, which went on to become not only an international hit but also one of those rare books that are read over and over, in hopes of reliving that initial literary rush.

Would Tartt's latest book inspire the same kind of devotion? After all, she published a second novel, The Little Friend , that was frequently described as a letdown. Is The Goldfinch more like The Little Friend , or — fingers crossed — The Secret History ?

As it turns out, it's not much like either The Secret History or The Little Friend , and if I hadn't known that Donna Tartt had written it, I would never have guessed. This dense, 771-page book tells the story of a boy named Theo Decker, whose mother is killed in a terrorist act early in the novel. In the midst of the trauma and chaos, Theo steals a famous painting, "The Goldfinch," by the Dutch painter Carel Fabritius, setting the sweeping, episodic story in motion.

Several reviewers have compared her book to Oliver Twist , but when I started it I was more reminded of the Harry Potter series (a comparison that is actually made later in the book). The contemporary plot is often nervily improbable and outsized, and Theo, age 13 at the start, is a lot like Harry, in that both boys are gifted, tender-hearted and woefully unsupervised. Theo's scar, while deep and permanent, is of the invisible kind.

Donna Tartt's other works include The Secret History and The Little Friend . Bruno Vincent/Getty Images hide caption

Donna Tartt's other works include The Secret History and The Little Friend .

The day The Goldfinch arrived I promptly cracked it open, remembering how my sons would pounce on the latest Harry Potter on the day it was published. J.K. Rowling transformed a generation of kids into passionate readers. Donna Tartt does something different here — she takes fully grown, already passionate readers and reminds them of the particularly deep pleasures that a long, winding novel can hold. In the short-form era in which we live, the Internet has supposedly whittled our attention-spans down to the size of hotel soap, and it's good to be reminded that sometimes more is definitely more.

So we get a whole lot of Theo here, and also his friend Boris, a kid with a Ukrainian passport and a multi-national history who befriends him after he's forced to leave New York City and go live with his deadbeat dad and his dad's new girlfriend Xandra in a horrible development in Las Vegas. Boris is a great character — totally appealing, a victim of appalling parental neglect, and together he and Theo forge a friendship that's believable, destructive, and comical:

"Don't go!" said Boris, one night at his house when I stood up toward the end of The Magnificent Seven " ... "You'll miss the best part." ... "You saw this movie before?" "Dubbed into Russian, if you can believe it. But very weak Russian. Sissy. Is sissy the word I want? More like schoolteachers than gunfighters, is what I'm trying to say."

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The Las Vegas section is long and detailed, just like all the other sections of this novel. Tartt almost seems to be writing in real time, and yet I was never bored. A series of long set pieces moves the story from the suspenseful opening to the rich, dense, leisurely middle and eventually the action-packed end, which is set in Amsterdam. That part, weirdly, feels as if it was grafted on from a different novel. Or no, it almost feels as if it was grafted on from a particularly literate, stylish indie crime film on the Sundance Channel.

But the occasional disjointedness doesn't affect the overall success of the novel, which absorbed me from start to finish. While The Goldfinch delves seriously and studiously into themes of art, beauty, loss and freedom, I mostly loved it because it kept me wishing I could stay in its fully-imagined world a little longer. Donna Tartt was right to take her time with this book. Readers will want to take their time with it, too.

Meg Wolitzer's latest novel is The Interestings.

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Reviews of The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio

The Goldfinch

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• Oct 22, 2013, 608 pages
• Apr 2015, 784 pages

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Book summary.

Composed with the skills of a master, The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present-day America; a story of loss and obsession, survival and self-invention, and the enormous power of art.

Winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction The author of the classic bestsellers The Secret History and The Little Friend returns with a brilliant, highly anticipated new novel. A young boy in New York City, Theo Decker, miraculously survives an accident that takes the life of his mother. Alone and abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by a friend's family and struggles to make sense of his new life. In the years that follow, he becomes entranced by one of the few things that reminds him of his mother: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into the art underworld. Composed with the skills of a master, The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present-day America, and a drama of almost unbearable acuity and power. It is a story of loss and obsession, survival and self-invention, and the enormous power of art.

Chapter 1. Boy with a Skull

WHILE I WAS STILL in Amsterdam, I dreamed about my mother for the first time in years. I'd been shut up in my hotel for more than a week, afraid to telephone anybody or go out; and my heart scrambled and floundered at even the most innocent noises: elevator bell, rattle of the minibar cart, even church clocks tolling the hour, de Westertoren, Krijtberg, a dark edge to the clangor, an inwrought fairy-tale sense of doom. By day I sat on the foot of the bed straining to puzzle out the Dutch-language news on television (which was hopeless, since I knew not a word of Dutch) and when I gave up, I sat by the window staring out at the canal with my camel's-hair coat thrown over my clothes—for I'd left New York in a hurry and the things I'd brought weren't warm enough, even indoors. Outside, all was activity and cheer. It was Christmas, lights twinkling on the canal bridges at night; red-cheeked dames en heren, scarves flying ...

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[The book] could have used some heavy editing. Frankly I am not sure I would have continued on had The Goldfinch not been a Donna Tartt book, knowing she’d spring a sudden surprise on me toward the end. And boy, does she! A dramatic event happens about two-thirds of the way in that upends the very foundations that the story is built on. It upsets, not just Theo, but the reader too, because Tartt has a way of enveloping us completely in her beautifully imagined world. That this plot turn hinges on a slightly far-fetched coincidence, we shall choose to ignore. As I read through, I realized I had impossibly high expectations for the author. The one problem with being Donna Tartt is that you have to measure up to, well, Donna Tartt... continued

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(Reviewed by Poornima Apte ).

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Carel fabritius and the goldfinch.

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Book Review: The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt’s latest novel is a Bildungsroman in all its coming-of-age glory, as Theo Dekker works his way through a world as messy and disorientating as our own. After an explosion in the city-machine of New York kills Theo’s mother, his estranged father comes to reclaim him from the arms of the Big Apple’s elite. He is relocated to the eerie suburbs of Las Vegas with nothing but a stolen painting of a goldfinch to remind him of the life he once led. The recognisable clutter and confusion of everyday life are perfectly captured, intensified through the unease of a young boy in the wake of loss.

The stolen painting, while central to the narrative, often fades into the background of Theo’s life. I found myself forgetting about it altogether—as Theo occasionally does—so absorbing is Tartt’s evocation of the semi-deserted Las Vegas suburbs. When Theo befriends the “Barbarian Prince” Boris—a Russian Artful Dodger to Theo’s displaced Oliver Twist—the painting is disregarded completely as Theo attempts to negotiate the complexities of his new life, egged on by his charismatic new friend.

You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life

Along with The Luminaries , The Goldfinch cemented 2013 as a year for beautifully written but vast novels. The Goldfinch is around eight hundred pages long, and part of the joy of reading a book so expansive is the devotion it demands and it is rewarded. Years pass, characters grow, we are swept away with the bit-part players that come and go in Theo’s life.

Some critics, presumably desperate to analogise, have discussed Theo as a Harry Potter figure; he is the ‘boy who lived’ indeed, but hardly a wizard out to fight evil. He’s far too complex for such a fairytale comparison. Those who have heralded the work as Dickensian are closer. It’s easy to see The Goldfinch as a reimagined Great Expectations , for part of the fascination of this novel is in the sheer detail of every character Tartt creates. Every person in the novel is fully formed, from walk-on eccentrics to major players., The bit-parts delight because, dropping in and out over hundreds of pages, they take on roles rarely captured well in a novel: casual acquaintances, rarely-seen friends. The people who become significant with time, not because of the contrivances of plot. It’s rare to find a writer who spends so much time becoming acquainted with every cast member; rare still for such attention to detail to be so invigorating.

Theo’s impetuous you-only-live-once theft may represent the promise of the present, but The Goldfinch is also concerned with the past, and the manner in which memories shape us, often while we are unaware. In the book’s opening passage Theo dreams of his mother, who represents an alternative world: another life in which he might remain secluded and happy, content in the big city, visiting art galleries, casually devouring culture and appraising antiques. But with his mother only a memory, these things are distorted. The painting of the goldfinch represents impulsive youth but is also a last thread of what-could-have-been. Folded up and secreted in a pillowcase, the painting becomes a guilty secret which taints event positive memories. The tender passages detailing Theo’s final moments with his mother are beautifully sad but what the reader wonders about most is what will become of the stolen painting, the painting that Theo has yet to understand and maybe never will.

Every new event—everything I did for the rest of my life—would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.

This story will change you, mostly because of its honesty. After you’ve read it, you’ll remember sections as though you’re recalling something a friend told you about. How that one time he had to take a coach journey with a dog; how petrified he was that it would annoy someone and he’d be thrown off. Even such apparently mundane moments are suspenseful, and take on a wonderful clarity at Tartt’s touch. There’s an eloquence in the most trivial events. It should come across as self-indulgent, but it ends up being deeply moving. We see the world from Theo’s perspective and Tartt never lets the mask slip for a moment. We are fixed in the world of the protagonist.

To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole…

In this way Theo becomes the Goldfinch of the title. A small lonely bird, tethered by a chain he does not see, attempting to spread his wings in a world he does not understand. It spoils nothing and comes as no surprise that Theo outlives both his parents. His inability to unfetter himself from such experiences shapes the novel. Theo never actually gets to leave the nest at a time of his own choosing; instead, he is thrown from it. He is without shelter and he cannot fly.

At times it seems as though Tartt is in danger of overreaching. The Goldfinch is long, varied, spread across all corners of the Earth, involved with all classes and all manner of social situations. It is a novel about relationships in all their stages, all their forms, making, breaking, reviving, consuming, abusive, obtrusive, elusive. Yet through this confusion there is a thread of clarity. The aspects of the novel that could have been its weak points are actually its strongest: its size, the inwardness of its narrator, its eclectic cultural references. The Goldfinch will leave you exhausted, both from carrying it around and from the mental energy Tartt demands that you invest in her characters. This is a book that calls for complete immersion—but it is well worth the effort.

A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the people we are.

The Goldfinch is available now.  Buy it from Foyles .

About Thea Hawlin

Theodora (Thea) Hawlin is assistant editor and production manager of The London Magazine.

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It’s Tartt—But Is It Art?

“Have you read The Goldfinch yet?” Consider it the cocktail-party conversation starter of 2014, the new “Are you watching Breaking Bad ?” Eleven years in the making, 784 pages long, the book has re-ignited the cult of Donna Tartt, which began in 1992 with her sensational debut novel, The Secret History . When The Goldfinch came out, last fall, recipients of advance copies promptly showed off their galleys on Instagram, as if announcing the birth of a child. Her readings sold out instantly. New York’s Frick Collection, which in October began exhibiting the painting for which the book was named, hadn’t seen so much traffic in years. The novel is already on its way to becoming a movie, or a TV series, made by the producers of The Hunger Games. It’s been on the New York Times best-seller list for seven months, sold a million and a half print and digital copies, and drawn a cornucopia of rave reviews, including one in the daily New York Times and another in the Sunday New York Times Book Review. In April it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the judges of which praised it as “a book that stimulates the mind and touches the heart.”

It’s also gotten some of the severest pans in memory from the country’s most important critics and sparked a full-on debate in which the naysayers believe that nothing less is at stake than the future of reading itself.

Tartt’s novel The Goldfinch. , by John Manno.

For the few uninitiated, The Goldfinch is a sprawling bildungsroman centered on 13-year-old Theo Decker, whose world is violently turned upside down when, on a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a terrorist bomb goes off, killing his mother, among other bystanders. At the behest of a dying old man, he makes off with a painting—the 1654 Carel Fabritius masterpiece, The Goldfinch. For the next 14 years and 700 pages, the painting becomes both his burden and the only connection to his lost mother, while he’s flung from New York to Las Vegas to Amsterdam, encountering an array of eccentric characters, from the hard-living but soulful Russian teenager Boris to the cultured and kindly furniture restorer Hobie, who becomes a stand-in father, to the mysterious, waif-like Pippa, plus assorted lowlifes, con men, Park Avenue recluses, and dissolute preppies.

Michiko Kakutani, the chief New York Times book reviewer for 31 years (and herself a Pulitzer winner, in criticism), called it “a glorious Dickensian novel, a novel that pulls together all [Tartt’s] remarkable storytelling talents into a rapturous, symphonic whole. . . . It’s a work that shows us how many emotional octaves Ms. Tartt can now reach, how seamlessly she can combine the immediate and tactile with more wide-angled concerns.” According to best-selling phenomenon Stephen King, who reviewed it for The New York Times Book Review, “ ‘The Goldfinch’ is a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade, a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind.”

Reading Like a Critic

But, in the literary world, there are those who profess to be higher brows still than The New York Times —the secret rooms behind the first inner sanctum, consisting, in part, of The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The Paris Review, three institutions that are considered, at least among their readers, the last bastions of true discernment in a world where book sales are king and real book reviewing has all but vanished. The Goldfinch a “rapturous” symphony? Not so fast, they say.

“Its tone, language, and story belong in children’s literature,” wrote critic James Wood, in The New Yorker. He found a book stuffed with relentless, far-fetched plotting; cloying stock characters; and an overwrought message tacked on at the end as a plea for seriousness. “Tartt’s consoling message, blared in the book’s final pages, is that what will survive of us is great art, but this seems an anxious compensation, as if Tartt were unconsciously acknowledging that the 2013 ‘Goldfinch’ might not survive the way the 1654 ‘Goldfinch’ has.” Days after she was awarded the Pulitzer, Wood told Vanity Fair, “I think that the rapture with which this novel has been received is further proof of the infantilization of our literary culture: a world in which adults go around reading Harry Potter. ”

In The New York Review of Books, novelist and critic Francine Prose wrote that, for all the frequent descriptions of the book as “Dickensian,” Tartt demonstrates little of Dickens’s remarkable powers of description and graceful language. She culled both what she considered lazy clichés (“Theo’s high school friend Tom’s cigarette is ‘only the tip of the iceberg.’ … The bomb site is a ‘madhouse’ ”) and passages that were “bombastic, overwritten, marred by baffling turns of phrase.” “Reading The Goldfinch, ” Prose concluded, “I found myself wondering, ‘Doesn’t anyone care how something is written anymore?’ ” Across the pond, the highly regarded London Review of Books likened it to a “children’s book” for adults. London’s Sunday Times concluded that “no amount of straining for high-flown uplift can disguise the fact that The Goldfinch is a turkey.”

“A book like The Goldfinch doesn’t undo any clichés—it deals in them,” says Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review, perhaps the most prestigious literary journal in America. “It coats everything in a cozy patina of ‘literary’ gentility.” Who cares that Kakutani or King gave it the stamp of approval: “Nowadays, even The New York Times Book Review is afraid to say when a popular book is crap,” Stein says.

No novel gets uniformly enthusiastic reviews, but the polarized responses to The Goldfinch lead to the long-debated questions: What makes a work literature, and who gets to decide?

The questions are as old as fiction itself. The history of literature is filled with books now considered masterpieces that were thought hackwork in their time. Take Dickens, the greatest novelist of the Victorian period, whose mantle writers from John Irving to Tom Wolfe to Tartt have sought to inherit. Henry James called Dickens the greatest of superficial novelists … “We are aware that this definition confines him to an inferior rank in the department of letters which he adorns; but we accept this consequence of our proposition. It were, in our opinion, an offence against humanity to place Mr. Dickens among the greatest novelists. . . . He has added nothing to our understanding of human character.” Many future offenses against humanity would follow:

“It isn’t worth any adult reader’s attention,” The New York Times pronounced concerning Nabokov’s Lolita.

“Kind of monotonous,” the same paper said about Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. “He should’ve cut out a lot about these jerks and all at that crumby school.”

“An absurd story,” announced The Saturday Review of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, while the New York Herald Tribune declared it “a book of the season only.”

That said, for all the snooty pans of books now considered classics, there have been, conversely, plenty of authors who were once revered as literary miracles and are now relegated to the trash heap. Sir Walter Scott, for example, was considered perhaps the pre-eminent writer of his time. Now his work, reverential as it is to concepts of rank and chivalry, seems fairly ridiculous. Margaret Mitchell’s Civil War blockbuster, Gone with the Wind, won the Pulitzer and inspired comparisons to Tolstoy, Dickens, and Thomas Hardy. Now it’s considered a schmaltzy relic read by teenage girls, if anyone.

For many best-selling authors, it’s not enough to sell millions of books; they want respectability too. Stephen King, despite his wild commercial success, has nursed a lifelong gripe that he’s been overlooked by the literary-critical establishment. In 2003, King was given a medal by the National Book Foundation for his “distinguished contribution to American letters.” In his acceptance speech, he took the opportunity to chide all the fancy pants in the room—“What do you think? You get social academic Brownie points for deliberately staying out of touch with your own culture?”—and to ask why they made it “a point of pride” never to have read anything by such best-selling authors as John Grisham, Tom Clancy, and Mary Higgins Clark. Harold Bloom, the most finicky of finicky literary critics, went into a tizzy, calling the foundation’s decision to give the award to King “another low in the process of dumbing down our cultural life” and the recipient “an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis.”

Bloom’s fussing had little impact. King was already on his way to the modern canon—his essays and short stories had been published in The New Yorker —and thus he was now in the position to announce who he thought was garbage: James Patterson. “I don’t like him,” King said after accepting a lifetime-achievement award from the Canadian Booksellers Association in 2007. “I don’t respect his books, because every one is the same.” To which Patterson later replied, “Doesn’t make too much sense. I’m a good dad, a nice husband. My only crime is I’ve sold millions of books.”

War of Words

In the long war over membership in the pantheon of literary greatness, no battle had quite the comical swagger of the ambush of Tom Wolfe after the publication of his 1998 novel, A Man in Full, which became a call to arms for three literary lions: Norman Mailer, John Updike, and John Irving. As the English newspaper The Guardian gleefully reported, they were adamant that Wolfe belonged not in the canon but on airport-bookstore shelves (between Danielle Steel and Susan Powter’s Stop the Insanity ). Updike, in his New Yorker review, concluded that A Man in Full “still amounts to entertainment, not literature, even literature in a modest aspirant form.” Mailer, writing in The New York Review of Books, compared reading the novel to having sex with a 300-pound woman: “Once she gets on top it’s all over. Fall in love or be asphyxiated.” (Mailer and Wolfe had a history: Mailer had once remarked, “There is something silly about a man who wears a white suit all the time, especially in New York,” to which Wolfe replied, “The lead dog is the one they always try to bite in the ass.”) Irving said that reading A Man in Full “is like reading a bad newspaper or a bad piece in a magazine. It makes you wince.” He added that on any given page out of Wolfe he could “read a sentence that would make me gag.” Wolfe later struck back. “It’s a wonderful tantrum,” he said. “ A Man in Full panicked [Irving] the same way it frightened John Updike and Norman. Frightened them. Panicked them.” Updike and Mailer were “two old piles of bones.” As for Irving, “Irving is a great admirer of Dickens. But what writer does he see now constantly compared to Dickens? Not John Irving, but Tom Wolfe . . . It must gnaw at him terribly.”

The book of my enemy has been remaindered And I am pleased. In vast quantities it has been remaindered Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized

So begins the Australian critic and essayist Clive James’s poem about the writer’s best friends, Schadenfreude and his twin brother, Envy. Leon Wieseltier, the longtime literary editor of The New Republic (where James Wood was a senior editor before moving to The New Yorker ), suggests there might just be a smidge of this at work in the criticism leveled against Tartt. “Tartt has managed to do something that almost never happens: she has created a serious novel—whether you like the book or not, it is not frivolous, or tacky or cynical—and made it into a cultural phenomenon. When a serious novel breaks out, some authors of other serious novels have, shall we say, emotional difficulties.” Curtis Sittenfeld, the best-selling and acclaimed author of Prep and American Wife, similarly observes that critics derive “a satisfaction in knocking a book off its pedestal.”

It’s a theory that holds appeal for authors who feel they’ve been unfairly ignored by critics, and it can lead to surprising, some might even say contorted, rationales. Jennifer Weiner, the outspoken mega-selling author of such “women’s books” as In Her Shoes, Good in Bed, and Best Friends Forever, theorizes that Wood’s review may have been a response to the public’s tepid reception of The Woman Upstairs, by his wife, Claire Messud. “[Messud’s] writing was gorgeous. It was like beautiful carpentry. Everything fit. Everything worked. There wasn’t a single metaphor or simile or comparison you could pull out and say, ‘This doesn’t work,’ the way you can with The Goldfinch. But not many people read that book . . . . The world doesn’t think what she’s doing is as worthy as what Tartt is doing.”

From the beginning, Tartt’s work confused critics. When The Secret History, about an erudite group of classics majors who turn to murder at a small New England college, was published, in 1992, it was greeted with a kind of wonder by writers, critics, and readers—not just because its author was a mysterious, tiny package from Greenwood, Mississippi, who dressed in crisp tailored suits and revealed little about herself, but because few could place it on the commercial-literary continuum. Lev Grossman, the book reviewer for Time and author of the best-selling fantasy series The Magicians, recalls, “You couldn’t classify it easily into high literature or genre fiction. It seemed to come from some other literary universe, where those categories didn’t exist. And it made me want to go to that universe because it was so compelling.” Jay McInerney, who’d had a splashy debut similar to Tartt’s a few years earlier with Bright Lights, Big City, and became friends with her early on, recalls, “I loved it on many levels, not least because it’s a literary murder mystery, but also because it initiates the reader from the outset into a secret club, which is probably what every good novel should do.” In recent years it has been discovered by new readers such as Lena Dunham (creator of HBO’s Girls ), who found in Tartt not only this cool persona—“She reminded me, style-wise, of my mother’s radical-feminist photographer friends in the 80s”—but a master of the tight-group-of-friends tradition.

It took 10 years for Tartt to come out with her next book, The Little Friend, but it was a disappointment to both critics and readers. Was she a one-hit wonder? To prove otherwise she spent the next 11 years, head down, spinning the adventures of Theo Decker, going down byways for as long as eight months that she would ultimately abandon. After the disappointment of her last book, everything was on the line.

The verdict among her fans? Perhaps too long in parts, but the story was as gripping as ever. She is “the consummate storyteller,” says Grossman, who is a new voice leading the charge that certain works of genre fiction should be considered literature. “The narrative thread is one you just can’t gather up fast enough,” he explains.

How Fiction Works

‘There seems to be universal agreement that the book is a ‘good read,’ ” says Wood. “But you can be a good storyteller, which in some ways Tartt clearly is, and still not be a serious storyteller—where, of course, ‘serious’ does not mean the exclusion of the comic, or the joyful, or the exciting. Tartt’s novel is not a serious one—it tells a fantastical, even ridiculous tale, based on absurd and improbable premises.”

For Wood’s crowd the measuring stick in determining what’s serious literature is a sense of reality, of authenticity—and it’s possible even in books that are experimental. In Lorin Stein’s view, best-sellers such as Mary Gaitskill’s Two Girls, Fat and Thin and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall may stand the test of time “not because a critic says they’re good, but because . . . they’re about real life. . . . I don’t want stage-managing from a novel. I want fiction to deal in the truth.”

It’s a view he may have inherited from his former boss Jonathan Galassi, the president of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, which, along with Alfred A. Knopf, is arguably the most prestigious of publishing houses. (Galassi edits, among others, Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides, Marilynne Robinson, Michael Cunningham, and Lydia Davis.) Determining what’s serious literature isn’t a science, says Galassi, who hasn’t yet read The Goldfinch. The response isn’t fully rationalized, but ultimately a book must be “convincing in some way. It can be emotionally convincing, it can be intellectually convincing, it can be politically convincing. Hopefully it’s all those things. But with someone like Donna Tartt, not everyone is convinced on all levels.”

To Grossman, this slavish devotion to reality is retrograde, and perhaps reviewers like Wood should not be reviewing people like Tartt in the first place. “A critic like Wood—whom I admire probably as much or more than any other book reviewer working—doesn’t have the critical language you need to praise a book like The Goldfinch. The kinds of things that the book does particularly well don’t lend themselves to literary analysis.… Her language is careless in places, and there’s a fairy-tale quality to the book. There’s very little context in the book—it’s happening in some slightly simplified world. Which to me is fine. I find that intensely compelling in a novel. Every novel dispenses with something, and Tartt dispenses with that.” As for Francine Prose’s query “Doesn’t anyone care how a book is written anymore?”: Grossman admits that, with story now king for readers, the answer is no. Wood agrees that that’s the state of things, but finds it sad and preposterous. “This is something peculiar to fiction: imagine a literary world in which most people didn’t care how a poem was written!” (Tartt was not available to comment, but Jay McInerney says she doesn’t read reviews, and isn’t “losing any sleep” over the negative ones.)

Wieseltier has come to a rather more expansive definition of serious literature. “Tartt’s novel, like all novels that purport to be serious, should of course pass before the bar of all the serious critics, and receive all the judgments that they bring forth,” says Wieseltier, who has dipped into the book enough to put it in the serious category. “But if a serious book really catches on, it may be less important that its strictly literary quality is not as great as one might have hoped and more important that it’s touched a nerve, that it is driven by some deep human subject and some true human need.” Ultimately, he thinks, the success of The Goldfinch is a step in the right direction. “When I look at the fiction best-seller list, which is mainly an inventory of junk, and I see a book like this riding high, I think it’s good news, even if it is not The Ambassadors. ”

Indeed, we might ask the snobs, What’s the big deal? Can’t we all just agree that it’s great she spent all this time writing a big enjoyable book and move on? No, we cannot, say the stalwarts. Francine Prose, who took on the high-school canon—Maya Angelou, Harper Lee, Ray Bradbury—in a controversial *Harper’*s essay, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read,” argued that holding up weak books as examples of excellence promotes mediocrity and turns young readers off forever. With The Goldfinch she felt duty-bound in the same way. “Everyone was saying this is such a great book and the language was so amazing. I felt I had to make quite a case against it,” she says. It gave her some satisfaction, she reports, that after her Goldfinch review came out she received one e-mail telling her that the book was a masterpiece and she had missed the point, and about 200 from readers thanking her for telling them that they were not alone. Similarly, Stein, who struggles to keep strong literary voices alive and robust, sees a book like The Goldfinch standing in the way. “What worries me is that people who read only one or two books a year will plunk down their money for The Goldfinch, and read it, and tell themselves they like it, but deep down will be profoundly bored, because they aren’t children, and will quietly give up on the whole enterprise when, in fact, fiction—realistic fiction, old or new—is as alive and gripping as it’s ever been.”

Is Donna Tartt the next Charles Dickens? In the end, the question will be answered not by The New York Times, The New Yorker, or The New York Review of Books —but by whether or not future generations read her. Just as a painter can be castigated by his contemporaries and still wind up the most prized painter at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a writer can sell millions of books, win prizes, and be remembered as no more than a footnote or punch line. It’s a fight that will be settled only on some new version of the Kindle, yet to be designed.

Evgenia Peretz

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Holden Caulfield Redux

By Ginia Bellafante

• Nov. 28, 2013

“The Goldfinch,” Donna Tartt’s third novel in 20 years, set in an opaquely rendered Manhattan of the 21st century, has followed its predecessors, selling robustly, while its eponym , a 1654 painting by Carel Fabritius, has been drawing crowds to the Frick . In an apparently serendipitous feat of cross-promotion, the painting currently appears at the museum as part of an exhibition of Dutch masterworks from the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis in The Hague, a show that has drawn more than 61,000 visitors since its debut in October.

Fabritius, a gifted student of Rembrandt’s, painted his goldfinch perched high in the frame and affixed to a delicate, unobtrusive chain. The artist died not long after, victim of an explosion that claimed much of his native city of Delft. In both its seemingly intended and accidental meanings, the painting captures what can feel like the strange nature of captivity — we often can’t see to what or whom others are held hostage, and we rarely know what will take us. The teenage Theo Decker, the novel’s protagonist, roams the city like a feral child while imprisoned by the consuming grief he feels for his mother, who is killed in a terrorist bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Mother and son had been viewing “The Goldfinch.”

Though the novel travels extensively — settling for a rich, discomfiting period in Las Vegas — it is a novel of Manhattan adolescence, a distinctly particular variant of it, as genealogically linked to J. D. Salinger as to any other forebear. There is Holden Caulfield’s urbanity; his mischief and failure (in both “Catcher in the Rye” and Theo’s story, trouble at private school propels the action). There is Holden Caulfield’s eye for the inauthentic, the perilous interactions with the adult world transpiring in a dreamscape New York — the specter of the dead.

What is striking about “The Goldfinch” of 2013 is that it is as much a narrative of post-9/11 New York as it isn’t. The bombing barely registers in the consciousness of the city — it is Theo’s tragedy alone. The menace is intimate: vagrants wander around in the morning, in good neighborhoods. There is little evidence of Citarella or Scandinavian strollers. The New York the author evokes is very much the New York of the middle of the last century. Right after the bombing, Theo is discharged to the family of a school friend, the Barbours of Park Avenue who live in an apartment with so little light that the plants die monthly, and so little sense of animation or connection that evening meals typically run along the lines of cocktail nuts and canapés.

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The Goldfinch

By donna tartt, an engrossing and entertaining dickensian tale, plot summary.

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, is a Bildungsroman (coming-of-age story) of a boy who survives a terrorist bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The bombing results in his mother’s death and, in the haze of the aftermath, him making off with her favorite painting, Fabritius’s Goldfinch, a small 17th century oil painting. The boy, Theo Decker, grows up, but under the shadow of the attack and his illicit ownership of this priceless painting.

Tartt’s David Copperfield-esque story is lengthy, but eventful. Theo goes from moving in with an upper-class Park Avenue family of a classmate to living in a largely-vacant housing development outside of Las Vegas with his dad to finding his way to being apprenticed at a antique furniture restoration shop. In each place, he’s haunted by his ghosts and weight of possessing a valuable and important piece of art.

Book Review

The story is plot-driven much of the time, which has resulted in backlash by critics who claim that it is not “literary” enough for its Pulitzer, but Tartt’s novel, despite its entertainment value, is no Dan Brown or James Patterson novel. It’s characters are complicated and sometimes deeply flawed, with a strong sense of voice. The writing is engaging and accessible, but intelligent and ably moves the story along.

Anyway, if the worst thing you can say about a compelling and thoughtful story is that it’s “too entertaining,” then it’s probably worth a read. It was one of the more worthwhile books I’ve read in a while. The overall intellectual arcs — highlighted by Theo’s nihilistic tendencies, his discussion of morals with Boris — are good fodder for book club talks. The story itself is fascinating, though perhaps it veers into somewhat fanciful territory — terrorist attacks, mobster-like showdowns, drug usage, financial windfalls, etc. all find their way into this tale.

Read it or Skip it?

The Goldfinch has pretty broad appeal, though — fair warning — it is somewhat less accessible than general popular fiction, partially due to its sheer length and the granular information it delves into. For example, it dives deep into details about art and art restoration, etc. so that may or may not interest you. I loved all of it, but it’s not the type of thing that appears in your average novel. Beyond that, I don’t have any caveats. If the premise sounds compelling to you and have a little patience, I think you’ll find it to be a masterfully crafted and delightful tale.

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The boyfriend and I have had several conversations about who we think could play the characters in the film. Philip Seymour Hoffman, James Spader or Stephen Fry would all be great as Hobie. It’s a shame the former is no longer with us.

haha that’s a fun game — so true, he’d be perfect for the role!

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The Goldfinch: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction) Mass Market Paperback – June 28, 2016

• Print length 976 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Little, Brown and Company
• Publication date June 28, 2016
• Dimensions 4.3 x 1.5 x 7.5 inches
• ISBN-10 0316055425
• ISBN-13 978-0316055420
• See all details

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About the author, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Little, Brown and Company; Reprint edition (June 28, 2016)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Mass Market Paperback ‏ : ‎ 976 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0316055425
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0316055420
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.05 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.3 x 1.5 x 7.5 inches
• #2,770 in Coming of Age Fiction (Books)
• #3,977 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
• #13,421 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the author

Donna tartt.

Donna Tartt is an American author who has achieved critical and public acclaim for her novels, which have been published in forty languages. Her first novel, The Secret History, was published in 1992. In 2003 she received the WH Smith Literary Award for her novel, The Little Friend, which was also nominated for the Orange Prize for Fiction. She won the Pulitzer Prize and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction for her most recent novel, The Goldfinch.

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Customers say

Customers find the intellectual level deep and magnificent. They also describe the characters as incredible and the plot compelling, engrossing, and thought provoking. However, they find the book very long, with too much dead space. They find the emotional tone melancholy, pretentious, and dryly reported. They are frustrated with the pacing, finding it too clunky and overblown. Opinions are mixed on the writing style, with some finding it exquisite and moving, while others find it hard to read and filled with intellectual ramblings. Customers also have mixed feelings about the value, with others finding it totally worth it and others saying it's a waste of time.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

Customers find the plot compelling, engrossing, and thought provoking. They also say the story itself is simple, but it is completely fleshed out by the book. Readers also say it's an amazing, wonderful, and captivating storyteller. They say the book lingers in the heart and head and is truthful.

"...If it is not perfect, few things are. It is one of the best books I’ve read in some time, and I won't soon forget Theo's sad odyssey." Read more

"...; in which the hand of the author is constantly looming--but so compelling , engrossing, thought provoking.Read it...." Read more

"...Having said that, I thought the ending was decent , there's some resolution, but not too happy as to be out of character with the rest of the..." Read more

"...Nonetheless, this section was wonderful to read , as it lovingly fused the importance and meaning of beauty, art, life's split second choices, in all..." Read more

Customers find the characters compelling.

"...This one will stick with me for a long time. The characters are powerful , the writing is impressive, and Theo's fall through life is heart-..." Read more

"...For pure entertainment value, the characters as I mentioned are fantastic , the story is tragic and well written and very visual...." Read more

"...and it's the source of so much of the novel's depth, warmth, and personality ...." Read more

"...The Goldfinch is peopled with the most colorful and impeccably etched characters , some likeable (Hobie, Mrs. Barbour), others not so much..." Read more

Customers find the book thought-provoking, engrossing, and creative. They also appreciate the factual knowledge and ambition. Readers describe the book as meditative, morally and ethically complex.

"...Tartt has written a book grand in scope, vivid in imagery, thoughtful , and affecting. If it is not perfect, few things are...." Read more

"...the hand of the author is constantly looming--but so compelling, engrossing , thought provoking.Read it...." Read more

"...sharp lesson as I read, the plot is rich and lively, the bildungsroman themes are prevalent and effective, the prose is gorgeous and evocative...." Read more

"...Stunning prose aside, there is a ton of factual knowledge in this book that would have taken years to research, such as foreign languages, furniture..." Read more

Customers find the writing style exquisite, vivid, and moving. They also appreciate the graceful moments and satisfying commentary on life. However, some find the book incredibly hard to read, monosyllabic at important times, and tedious.

"...unlikeable, purposefully unrealistic characters, skillful writing spotted with casual cliches , and what one reviewer called a "coincidence..." Read more

"...The writing alone is 5-stars quality , but I despised Boris so much, he almost spoiled the book for me at certain parts...." Read more

"...It is self-indulgent and lacking clarity . It is also boring.Even so, I recommend The Goldfinch – and happily give it 5 stars...." Read more

"... Stunning prose aside , there is a ton of factual knowledge in this book that would have taken years to research, such as foreign languages, furniture..." Read more

Customers are mixed about the value of the book. Some mention it's totally worth it, while others say it'll waste your time.

"...Its characters were young, mostly affluent and privileged, and yet also damaged. The Goldfinch continues this tradition and enhances it...." Read more

"...It's not a perfect novel but it's well worthy of the Pulitzer , though I can see the reasons some people felt it was not...." Read more

"...The artifact disappears, there is no money , and Theo, stoned out of his mind, is holed up in a hotel with a dead cell phone, not speaking a word of..." Read more

"...All in all, the novel is a significant achievement. It was worth my time ...." Read more

Customers find the emotional tone of the book indolent, self-absorbed, and self pitying. They also say the book is not uplifting, disappointing, and not for the faint of heart. Readers also mention that the book's faults are mostly venial, the prose is dry, and the relationship with Hobie is ultimately unsatisfying.

"...Reading it, its easy to see why--uneven pacing, unlikeable , purposefully unrealistic characters, skillful writing spotted with casual cliches, and..." Read more

"...emotional connection is the sign of a great novel, it was also intensely depressing and made for some difficult reading...." Read more

"...'The Goldfinch' an exquisite read: magical in some parts, heart-breaking in others , wholly sublime in full. Highly recommended. 4.5 stars out of 5." Read more

"...So yes, Tartt's prose was often dry, certainly pretentious , and borderline preachy at times near the end...." Read more

Customers find the book very long, with too many words and fat pages. They also say the book meanders and has too much dead space.

"...Yes, this book is long , and sometimes even tedious, but in hindsight, necessarily so, I think...." Read more

"...First of all, let me say this is absolutely not a book for everyone. It is long and filled with intellectual ramblings that are bound to turn some..." Read more

"...The last 100 pages are kind of a mess and the very last page seemed to me to be some kind of excuse for how the book ended...." Read more

"...I like a lengthy book (and make no mistake – this is a very lengthy book , almost 800 pages)...." Read more

Customers find the pacing of the book frustrating, dragging toward the end, and lacking sufficient time spent on the relationships. They also say the book is too long, clunky, and overblown.

"...Reading it, its easy to see why-- uneven pacing , unlikeable, purposefully unrealistic characters, skillful writing spotted with casual cliches, and..." Read more

"...The story meanders and sometimes seems to stall , but these details serve to color in the analogy, which is obvious enough without the final chapter..." Read more

"...the first 500 pages of the novel, I was more than anything, frustrated with the pacing . The story itself was interesting...." Read more

"...There are sections where it moves very slowly with detail piling upon detail, plot lines gradually unfolding...." Read more

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4.5-Stars: Divine, Modern Dickensian Tale of Art & Fate

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Books of Brilliance

The latest book reviews and book news, the goldfinch: book review.

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt book review

Some books come along and when you read them, they stay with you for a long time. That is how the Goldfinch was for me and I still think about here here and there. See why it has connected with so many people and why it is was made into a movie.

The Goldfinch: Summary

13-year-old  Theodore Decker is visiting the Metropolitan Museum or Art, or MOMA, in New York City with his mother. During the visit, he gets separated from his mother and a bomb goes off killing his mother and numerous other people.

In the rubble, Theo meets a dying old man who points towards the painting The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius . That also happens to be Theo’s mom’s favorite painting. In a panicked state, Theo grabs the painting and walks out of the museum. 

Theo is taken in and lives with his friend and his wealthy family. He attends school and befriends Boris, a trouble making kid. Eight years later, Theo is working for Hobie at his antique shop. Boris shows up in his life again and reveals a shocking truth related to the painting Theo has hidden away for all those years.

Now, Theo has to right a lot of wrongs that he has done. But it won’t be easy as he gets involved in the underground world of art. He also has to make it up to Hobie for what he has done and come to terms with his mother’s death, something that has shaped his relationships over the years.

I was drawn to The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt by its beautiful book cover. It is a painting of a goldfinch peaking out through a ripped hole. It is genius and innovative. That drew me in and the crazy story of Theo kept me reading it whenever I could.

Donna Tarrt is known to release one novel per decade. But that wait seems to be worth it when she churns out novels that you think about for years. The Secret History is also a favorite of mine and I think even better than the Goldfinch. 

If you haven’t read a Tartt novel , then approach with caution. Her novels are long and tend to be very detailed. I believe it’s to fine-tune her characters and as we know, to really get to know someone, there’s a lot of details involved.

Speaking about the novel itself, I loved the focus on that one event in Theo’s life. It ends up shaping the rest of his life. He really misses his mom and nothing is ever going to ease that pain. The focus on the trauma sets up most of the novel and the poor choices Theo ends up making.  

It may be a long novel but the investment is worth it. You get to see Theo’s life unfold and it is one crazy ride. As a character, Theo is easily forgettable. He doesn’t have any outstanding qualities but you can’t help feel bad for him. Tartt knows how to build a solid backstory and write a great novel too!

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Lovely review! Sharing a link to one of my book post – https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/118548640/posts/3543911787 . You might enjoy reading this book.

I’ve already read it and loved it. Great review!

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I haven’t read The Goldfinch, but I did watch the movie and the story seemed so intriguing, except, yes, it felt like it needed to be fleshed out a lot more, which is where the book comes in I’m sure. I really want to read The Secret History but the length of the book is definitely intimidating me a little!

Thank you for sharing your review!

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The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

• Publication Date: April 7, 2015
• Genres: Fiction
• Paperback: 784 pages
• Publisher: Back Bay Books
• ISBN-10: 0316055441
• ISBN-13: 9780316055444
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Amina's Bookshelf

aminamakele

Review: The Goldfinch

**** (NO SPOILERS)

WHY I CHOSE IT: I read Donna Tartt’s ‘The Secret History’ when I was at school and my love of it inspired me to study Classics at University. It also inspired me to buy her Pulitzer prize winning novel, ‘The Goldfinch’, which has been sitting on my bookshelf for years. However, a couple of weeks ago, something about the cold autumn air led me to tackle the 864-page epic.

THE PLOT:  ‘The Goldfinch’ is about a young boy’s grief when his mother dies. Theo, the main character, steals and becomes obsessed with a very valuable painting that reminds him of his mother – a painting of a goldfinch. Theo’s life takes many dark turns and he is forced to live with a range of characters, but he clings onto the painting as he descends into a life of drug abuse and crime.

MY RATING:  This book receives four stars because it wasn’t an easy read. Although it was deserving of the Pulitzer, it’s very long-winded and descriptive so you have to persevere to get to the main story. I personally read fiction for enjoyment, and clearly Donna Tartt is a lot more highbrow than me, so I disliked struggling through long descriptions of antique furniture and famous artworks.

I really enjoyed the plot and character arcs, and felt they made the book a modern epic. There was something Odyssean about Theo’s journeys through life, and I liked that history and preservation were recurring themes. The plot is well thought-out and supporting characters weave through the main narrative in interesting ways. I particularly liked Theo’s friends, Andy and Boris, who livened up the plotlines and added a bit of tension and excitement. Although Boris is an exaggerated character, I felt his portrayal and pattern of speech was realistic (but perhaps this is because I’m friends with a lot of Russians/Russian speakers).

My main criticism is about the long passages of dialogue. Although well written, particularly in different patterns of speech for each character, the dialogue went on for pages in some instances. This felt extraneous in places and it could have been cut down, as it felt like many characters were bordering on giving speeches or soliloquies.

Finally, I also felt like the novel became quite prosaic and gratuitously philosophical. It was as if the author was trying to show off her knowledge about famous art and architecture, rather than telling a story. The plot became lost in sections as the novel fell into reflecting on the setting. This is best evidenced by the last twenty pages, which felt wholly unnecessary. Although the plot had concluded there was a lot of philosophical reflection on the themes of the novel. I would have preferred a chapter or two of this reflection, rather than twenty pages, and more space for the reader to interpret the themes themselves without being told by the author. This philosophical rambling was presented with the excuse that Theo was writing his own story, which felt like un-necessary detail because the whole novel was written in first-person past-tense.

FAVOURITE QUOTE:  “That life – whatever else it is – is short. That fate is cruel but may not be random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open.” Page 864.

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