Book Review: The Goldfinch

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

"'But - ' crossing back to the table to sit again '- if a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see, and think, and feel, you don't think, ' oh, I love this picture because it's universal.' 'I love this painting because it speaks to all mankind.' That's not the reason anyone loves a piece of art.  It's a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes you.'" - from The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

If you love art, art history, antiques, or New York, this book is for you.  This book is a piece of art that hisses at you from an alley, who tempts you to drag a finger over the artfully arranged sentences, and then, helplessly, drag a finger over it again.  It begs to have sentences re-read, to bask in a moment, to savor words as you silently roll them in your mouth, inhaling as if to draw out the experience. This is a book that makes you tighten the tourniquet, and shoot up for an all night bender.

Theo Decker is a 13-year old New Yorker, who suddenly loses his mother, the one thing that he loves, the only person that enlivens him, in a terrorist bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  And at the urging of an old man who will change his destiny forever, he steals a painting that is the last memory of his mother - The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius.  I think Tartt couldn't have picked a better painting as the centerpiece of this book.  It is a tiny painting, measuring only approximately 9"x13", barely bigger than the book in which it appears.  A goldfinch, drab in its winter plumage, stares stoically at the viewer, chained to his small perch. Looking closely at the painting, you can detect the quick and easy slashes of paint laid on a canvas by a master painter who died too young.  Step back, and the finch ruffles his feathers, and comes to life, pinning you with one beady black eye.  Lonely and enduring, the finch could be an apt representative of Theo - a pallid, waif-ish boy who wanders the streets of a city that doesn't seem to notice him.

Taken in at first by the antiseptic and arctic Barbour family, Theo gives us a glimpse at life as an affluent (but not too affluent) New York family. Then, when his father returns to claim him, after a long abandonment, he whisks Theo away, and we peer into life in wrecked and raucous Las Vegas. Meanwhile, the illicit painting wraps its delicate, but unbreakable chain tighter and tighter around Theo.

This is a story of desolation and redemption, of snobbery and low living, of art, love and heartbreak.  The places it occurs in seem as if they are a dream version of real places, but then a Dutch Masters painting of the Delft Disaster or a Chippendale highboy snaps it suddenly into chiaroscuro focus. Tartt takes you by the hand and leads you through a novel that doesn't always make sense, with characters that talk exactly like characters sometimes, and not real people, but you don't care because it's all so damn beautiful.  And I'm irritated a little, because this is the first book I read in 2014, and I'm not so sure that there will be another that can stand up to the silky rich prose of this novel.