The Goldfinch (2013)
3.5 Stars out of 5
Donna Tartt
784 pages
Donna Tartt’s 2013 bildungsroman “The Goldfinch” has renewed
an old argument: can popular books also be great works of art? Tartt has
written three novels over the past thirty odd years. Her first “The Secret
History” (1992) met with considerable popular and critical success, while her
second “The Little Friend” (2002) with much less so from both quarters. “The
Goldfinch” was received with great commercial success with its thirty weeks on the
NY Times Best Seller List plus the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. And yet and
despite critical praise from the likes of Michiko Kakutani, chief critic for the NT
Times, there are several critics of note that consider the book to be little
more than a variation of the Harry Potter stories in terms of intrinsic merit; this one may be for adults
but it suffers from an improbable plot and simplistic language. I must confess,
I found the narrative at times engrossing and amusing, but all too often in
great need of an editor that should have been forced to trim about a third of
the book away. It is clichéd and much too long to say what it has to say. The language can
be colorful and many of the similes entertaining, but it is in the end, really
not that good a book with respect to dialog, structure or believability.
“The Goldfinch” begins as homage to a Dickensian theme: an
orphaned boy surrounded by colorful characters, some exotic, some wicked and
mean, and a very few genuinely interested in loving and caring for the boy.
Theodore (Theo) Decker as a thirteen year old visits the Metropolitan Museum of
Art with his mother. She as an aspiring Art Historian has spent a lifetime
admiring a particular painting: The Goldfinch by a Dutch master, Carel Fabritius.
A terrorist’s bomb at the museum robs Theo of his mom and thrusts him briefly
into the arms of an aged and dying antiquarian, Welton (Welty) Blackwell. As
Theo sits in the rubble of the blast with Welty, Welty pushes two items into
Theo’s hands. These two objects, Welty’s distinctive ring and Fabritius’
masterpiece are carried out of the museum by a stunned and confused Theo. Theo
returns home with both objects not yet knowing his mother’s fate. Even as his
situation and his mother’s death become clear, Theo’s straits worsen. Theo’s absent
father is an alcoholic that has abandoned his family several years before, and
Theo’s only other family is his paternal grandfather, an even more unpleasant character
than Theo’s father. For a brief period, Theo gains a brief respite as he spends
some interim time with a rich friend’s family, the Barbours. Theo is soon surprised
by the return of his missing father to reclaim him; a father that (of
course) has more than one motive for returning to his son.
Before Theo’s father Larry can drag him off to Larry’s new home
in Las Vegas, Theo makes a trip to Welty’s antique furniture store. Theo was
able to piece together some of Welty’s dying comments plus an inscription on
the ring to find the store. There he meets the one positive Pole Star in young
Theo’s life to be, Hobart or Hobie. Hobie is Welty’s partner and co-guardian of
Pippa, another survivor of the bomb blast. It is clear that Theo bonds quickly
to the pair; to Hobie for his kindness, to Pippa for their shared tragedy. But
in keeping with Dickens, Theo is pulled from this potential homely salvation to
the harsh lights and life of his father’s home in Las Vegas. It quickly becomes
clear why Tartt’s has chosen Las Vegas for the dissolute Larry’s home. Larry
drinks, does drugs, gambles, and ignores his son except to use him in an attempt to
steal; into this den of iniquity is where Theo meets his best and possibly worst
friend, Boris. Boris is like Theo a lost boy, the neglected only son of another
abusive and alcoholic father. Indeed, with the exception of Hobie, there is
scarcely a single male character in the entire book that couldn’t inhabit one
of Dickens’ books as villain.
The youthful Boris as the “artful dodger” is perhaps the
most amusing character in the book as he colorfully swears in his
Russian-tinged vocabulary and grammar. Besides providing most of the comic
relief in “The Goldfinch”, Boris also introduces the despondent Theo to the
world of drugs. Theo and Boris spend several years together “attending” school,
stealing food (as of course their fathers’ provide virtually no support), and
getting high, drunk, or both. Here was a missed opportunity for Tartt to deal
more intelligently with the grieving boy’s desperate state. It was a classic
case of telling instead of showing. We are told (endlessly) that Theo gets
high, but there is little emotional connection between the reader and Theo’s
inner turmoil and depression. This unhappy interlude in Theo’s life is followed
by a mildly dramatic flight across the country in a Greyhound bus back to New
York once Theo has become truly orphaned.
Theo returns to NY and Hobie. He spends a few years learning
(as does the reader in considerable detail) Hobie’s trade as a restorer of
antique furniture. However, rather than following in Hobie’s restorative footsteps, Theo turns to the
sales’ side of the business, and in keeping with his now mature character,
turns to a new life of crime. In the meanwhile, he has stashed the Fabritius
painting in storage, never even opening its wrapping to look at it. To be sure
the painting is a metaphor for Theo. The painting of the chained and somewhat
forlorn but also somewhat hopeful bird is certainly a good stand-in for the
recently bereaved Theo at thirteen. However, the hidden and unexamined painting
is also a good stand in for the directionless and self-deceived twenty-something
Theo. Into this life, an angry victim of Theo’s adult larceny enters the story,
Lucius. Lucius has pinned together information to both prove Theo’s chicanery
with “antique” furniture sold as authentic and the theft of the missing
painting. “Fortunately” for Theo his old friend from Vegas, Boris also reenters
the scene. Boris has like Theo become an adult criminal, though Boris’ criminality
is of an undefined sort. In any event, he and Theo make a rapid trip to Europe
to get Theo out of the fix he and Hobie are now in due to Theo’s fraudulent antique
furniture sales. The book ends with one of the most disappointing book endings I
have ever read; a bizarre attempt to place Theo’s life and thus the book on
some kind of moral and philosophical plane that is far higher than the events described
in the book.
There are aspects of the book that I admire. Tartt
has clearly gone to considerable effort to learn the intricacies of how antique
furniture is restored, of the hidden messages by the Dutch Masters in their
paintings, and in developing a voice for a Russian émigré to an English
speaking world. However, each of these positive points are countered by
negative effects: for example, how many of the 784 pages were spent in service
of describing the importance of matching wood grains when doing a restoration, of
how scratches are made in long used furniture and how color of wood stain fades based on use?
It can be an interesting subject, but in what manner does it add to this book.
Is the reader to assume that like wood grains Theo and Boris are somewhat alike
and yet not? This seems pretty unlikely. Or to what end is the endless
description of how Theo and Boris got high or Theo’s multi-day hallucinations
in his Amsterdam hotel help us to understand the characters, their lives, let
alone the human condition? And while I did find Boris’ voice frequently amusing,
Tartt has him say a variety of what to me seem anachronistic (language-wise) comments. Additionally,
his conversations with Theo followed such a pattern you might just as well describe
and re-describe a groove in one of Hobie’s antiques. Boris would start an
explanation, a usually befuddled Theo would mumble “what”, Boris would veer off
topic, Theo would threaten to leave, Boris would say something not really
explanatory but sufficient to capture Theo’s attention, and then finally (mercifully)
Boris would explain whatever it was that Theo needed to hear. This problem of
two people leaving things unsaid and the consequences that come after drives me
nuts in a sitcom; words fail to describe how irritating or how often Tartt uses
this trope.
Tartt closes the novel in a most exasperating manner. Theo
has reached a kind of plateau in his life. He seems to have finally found a
path to follow that is truer to Hobie and his lost mother. That is all well and
good. But then as his character is at last nearing his final departure, Theo launches
off into a series of strange soliloquies of his and Boris’ lives, and of the
meaning of life. The reader is at once led to understand that Theo is not truly
nihilistic (despite a lengthy diatribe that clearly shows the contrary) but
that Theo’s purpose in life like anyone that finds beauty in art has found that
which is truly eternal. Meanwhile, Boris sums up his life with a variation on
Popeye’s “I am what, I am”, “I do heroin because I want to, not because I have
to”. The problem here isn’t the triteness of either philosophy (though one
could make such an argument), it is rather that Theo’s commentary is such a
jarring excursion from the narrative form of the novel. Instead, it seems like
little more than Tartt having realized she has failed to illustrate her point
via the life of Theo she must now have him explain himself to her presumed
adolescent readers. Because in the final analysis, this is a book written with
simplistic, graceless language, stock characters, a story seemingly about a
young man’s early life but in fact about his unbelievable adventures with his
druggie buddy. To whom is this book intended, someone interested in the human
condition, if so, turn away. If a long unbelievable story about a drug abuser’s
adventures is your métier, here is your book. It might have been a popular
book, but it does not appear to be a work of art to me.
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