A Book Review

Donna Tartt’s “The Goldfinch”.

There are SO many things that I could say about this book, and I apologize in advance if this blog post reads more like an essay in the end than a simple book review. But it’s a long book and extremely detailed (and it’s been ten years in the writing for the author) so it really deserves a proper appraisal.

First let me say that I am a MASSIVE Donna Tartt fan – have been ever since my teens when I read “The Secret History” – and I have been waiting for this book almost since I first discovered her. “The Little Friend” was a book that I liked, in the end, but do not love and I was starting to think that maybe she just didn’t have it any more and had nothing left to bring to a new story.

Boy was I wrong!

This book of hers, the 700-and-something-page tome, “The Goldfinch”, was published a month ago and is now being named one of the hottest books of this year. And, while for some, it seems that this author is considered to be overhyped – I’ve heard many people say, in reaction to this literary phenomenon, that “Hey, no book is THAT good” – I have to say I think it’s brilliant. (I won’t quibble with people who just don’t want to bother, or don’t like it. To those people I will just say: go and write your own blog post!) This book is truly great, in my view, just because it captures so much and sweeps so beautifully across the life of the main character and in such a way that – and I have to agree with some of the other reviews I’ve read here – with this book, Tartt could easily rival Dickens.

It’s a bold claim, but when you understand something about this book – and particularly when you’ve read it – you might understand.

So, ok, brief plot synopsis, if such a thing is possible here:

The story begins with the 13 year old Theo Decker being taken to an art gallery by his mother after he has just been suspended from school. Whilst there, he is introduced to new paintings, culture etc. and, at the same time, catches the eye of a pretty young girl who is there with an old man – her uncle. All of this meanders along for a few pages before the sudden interjection of an explosion, which caves in part of the building and kills several people, including the old man and, as is later discovered, Theo’s mother. During his time in the gallery, Theo does several things – beyond surviving the horrific event of being caught up in an explosion – the first of which is to talk to the old man and be given a ring which he is then charged with returning to a man called Hobie. This encounter with the old man will take Theo on a journey throughout the rest of his life and will still be with him as a potent memory many years later. But the other, seemingly more important, action that he commits whilst in the gallery is to steal a particularly famous painting: Carel Fabritius’ “The Goldfinch”.

It is a small painting and, from what I can make out, not overly impressive at first glance, but it makes a huge impression on Theo and the belief that he owns it, for so many years, is something that gives him hope even in the most awful periods of his life.

In later years, we see Theo moving from the relatively good care of a family in New York to an empty and neglected existence with his feckless, gambling, ex-alcoholic father in Las Vegas. Theo’s time with his father is pivotal because it takes him from being basically a good kid to being lumped in with his incredibly crooked father, while it is also allows him to form the relationships and overall outlook on life that will take him on to his later, and far more catastrophic adulthood.

In Vegas, Theo becomes a drug addict, meets the boy who will become his lifelong best friend and, in many ways, corrupter, but he also learns the valuable lesson that his family and, indeed, most of the adults in his life, are not dependable and that the foundations of his life are really not very solid. What struck me most about the teenage Theo was how vulnerable he is, and how he places his faith in all the strangest places; presumably because he has so little that is concrete to hang onto. There is no love or trust or loyalty in his life after he loses his mother; his father clearly doesn’t want him; the Barbour’s, whom he lives with for a while in New York after the explosion, clearly have problems of their own and are, despite their best efforts to hide it, glad to see the back of him. Until he meets Boris, then, he really doesn’t have anyone who loves him – and all he has instead is the picture.

The comparison that Tartt draws on most heavily here, or so it seems to me, is the one between Theo and Harry Potter. I’ll admit, this shocked me a little bit because it seemed to be so at odds with the kind of serious, emotive piece that she’s going for here (not that “Harry Potter”, as a series, was not serious or emotive in its own way, but, you know, it was fantasy, and this is adult fiction). Nevertheless, the fact that it is so clearly drawn out throughout the book, to describe the dynamic and overall relative characters of Theo and Boris, is interesting. Of course there are a lot of other comparisons to be drawn here, such as Oliver Twist and the Artful Dodger, David Copperfield and Steerforth maybe. But, for me, it is the Harry Potter allusion that stands out. Boris is the first to give Theo the nickname of “Potter” because of his appearance – he wears glasses, and has a similarly slight build, etc. And I suppose that this could, in itself, be a minor and isolated thing. But the name sticks and is still being used in Theo’s adulthood.

Plus, given the fact that Theo’s relationship with Boris is what ultimately changes him and, in the end, makes him look a bit like a Bret Easton Ellis character (Patrick Bateman without the obsession to murder prostitutes, or one of the guys in “Less Than Zero” perhaps), it just kind of made me think that you could see this book as, in part, a more realistic take on what would happen to kid like Harry Potter in the world we know. I mean it’s basically the case that Theo experiences the same sort of meeting that Harry experiences with Draco Malfoy when he first attends Hogwarts in “The Philosopher’s Stone”. Theo has a similarly fateful meeting with a kid who is really just like himself – a kid who gets kicked around by life – and, rather than saying that he wants to go and hang around with the good kids (as Harry does), he just bands together with the not so good one and forms an alliance that will stay in place for the rest of their lives. If you think of it that way then, Theo’s story is the story of what would happen if Harry Potter became friends with Draco Malfoy and they just looked out for each other first and above anyone else. In a weird way, it kind of works.

At times, Boris and Theo’s relationship is quite sweet. They have a love for each other, which probably comes out of dependency and the lack of ability to find anybody else who cares. (There is a homosexual implication in there somewhere too, but I don’t think that’s the point. It’s more like they’re brothers.) And, even though Boris later becomes a drug dealer, steals from Theo, gets him involved in all kinds of trouble (including murder) he is still looking after his best friend right up to the end. All through this book, there is something very loyal and tight about these two guys, and you really get the sense of feeling sorry for Theo, despite the awful and sinister things he does towards the end of the novel when, quite frankly, he starts to look like he’s become a bit twisted; because, inside, he’s just a kid who goes through something truly terrible and needs to cling on to anything and anyone who will love him.

His love for Pippa, the girl in the gallery, with whom he has a very sporadic interaction right up until the end of the book, is something that verges on desperation and which almost everyone tries, gently, to deter him from. It’s almost like a PTSD thing, whereby you believe that you’ve gone through something awful with another person and so they are, quite naturally, the only person who will ever understand you. Theo experiences that for Pippa and goes a little bit crazy in the process because he can’t work out why she does not feel the same way about him.
It’s a tortuous thing to read, but it’s compelling and, when you feel his despair in the end, you can’t help but feel terrible at his absolute devastation.

Mostly I felt sorry for Hobie though – otherwise known as James Hobart. The guy is just a furniture restorer – the business partner of the old man who died in the gallery – and he’s somehow roped into being one of Theo’s guardians during his late teens. (He then goes on to make Theo his new business partner and things go downhill from there.) In many ways, Hobie reminds me of another character from Harry Potter, because he has this kind of big, good natured aura around him, and there is this overwhelming feeling of him being slightly blinkered where other people are concerned, particularly Theo. All of this makes me think that he is, in some way, modelled on Harry Potter’s great friend, Rubeus Hagrid and it just seems to me that you have to feel sorry for him because, like Hagrid, he puts so much faith in other people – some of whom he believes the sun shines out of – and should, in a perfect world, be rewarded for his pains.

As I read, I could almost imagine the good natured, optimistic beam of a smile falling from his face as he realized what a mess he was left with because of Theo – a boy that he’d plumbed so much hope and energy and love into, because he thought it was all going to be worth it – and it really broke my heart. (I suppose, again, you could draw all kinds of Dickensian allusions here too, Mr. Micawber for example, whose joviality should really be rewarded with kindness and prosperity, but who finds himself in a debtor’s prison and reliant – this time with a positive outcome – on David Copperfield, who is one of his only friends. It is heartbreaking that nice people like that have to suffer; you really feel it.)

I suppose what I loved about this book most of all though, was the way it seems to mix old and new styles. There is still the same feeling that this is a Donna Tartt novel. I read it with the remembrance of all the things I first loved about “The Secret History”. The rich, majestic descriptions of the art work and the culture, and the experience of learning about all of those things, are very similar to the evocative description of academia and classical learning that comes through in her earlier novel.

“The Secret History” was written in the 1980s and published in the early 1990s. It is, therefore, set in a time when academia still had a kind of grandiosity and hardworking quality (or at least it was still thought of in this way by some) with people slogging away at typewriters in old-style college bedrooms, staying up until the small hours to read Greek and sitting around in small tutorial groups during the day to talk about it with funny old classics professors. Even in her early phase, Tartt could make a college in Vermont sound like an American version of our Oxford and her first book really gave a sense of the golden time that those college years formed for the narrator, Richard Papen.

When I first read that book it inspired me, it made me want to go to university and have this experience. Although, in the end, I didn’t quite because, as I discovered, it’s not really like that in most higher learning institutions now. And I suppose that’s why, in “The Goldfinch”, all these things are slightly lost on Theo, who really only cares about art and learning, I think, because of the painting he has stolen. In the course of the book there is a move towards the more modern social and cultural concerns – terrorism being the key theme in the book with the destruction, desecration and theft of artworks hanging at the centre of the plot. But there are also more minor references to books and movies that make it feel more contemporary, as well as, more bleakly, to DVD players, iPhones and laptops; all of this makes the world in this book seem markedly different to the one she describes in “The Secret History” simply because, now, it really looks like our world.

I’m making this sound good, and in some ways it probably is, although, in a small sense, I was a little disappointed by these updated, contemporary references. I accept that it’s probably necessary, but, still, the introduction of an iPhone into a book about art, and even a long description of the anguish someone feels when the things dies out on them at a crucial moment, seems a little sad and sell-out to me. It’s the kind of thing Dan Brown would do.

Anyway, I digress . . .

This book is the best I’ve read this year, by far and away, and I would encourage anyone to read it. I know that a lot of people shy away from long books and, in many cases, I am the same. But, if you read one long book this year (what’s left of it), read this one. I promise you, you will not be sorry.