“Theo Decker, thirteen, survives a Metropolitan Museum bombing that kills his mother and ends up with a stolen painting that defines the next decade of his life.”
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The Goldfinch is Donna Tartt's 2013 novel, the Pulitzer Prize winner that earned her the literary reputation The Secret History had established. Theo Decker, thirteen, is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with his mother when an act of terrorism kills her and leaves him in a partially collapsed gallery. A dying old man hands him a ring and tells him to take a 1654 Carel Fabritius painting of a chained goldfinch, the source painting of the novel's title. Theo takes both. The next ten years of his life are the novel.
Tartt's project here is closer to a nineteenth-century European novel than to American literary fiction (the Dickens influence is overt, Hobie's Greenwich Village antique shop is straight Dickensian). The 771-page length is unusually patient even by Tartt's standards. The Las Vegas chapters in the middle third (Theo with his absentee father and the Russian-Ukrainian Boris) are some of the strongest adolescent friendship prose in contemporary American fiction. The Amsterdam chapters in the final quarter earn the slow-burn art-thriller mechanics the novel has been building. The painting itself is real and is treated with the seriousness any major novel about art owes its subject.
Recommended as required twenty-first century American literary fiction reading, as the natural next step for readers who finished The Secret History, and as one of the few contemporary novels whose 771-page length earns itself. Five stars. The 32-hour audiobook narrated by David Pittu is excellent. The 2019 John Crowley film is not (Theo is miscast); read the book.
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