The Goldfinch
by Donna Tartt
Theo Decker, a 13-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange...
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“For anyone who's ever clung to a beautiful thing during an ugly time.”
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Tartt is doing something deeply unfashionable here — writing a 700-page novel about beauty, grief, and the moral weight of objects. In an era of spare, minimalist literary fiction, The Goldfinch is unapologetically maximalist. The Amsterdam section is where people lose patience, and I get it. But the messiness is the point. Theo's life is a mess. His relationships are a mess. The only clean thing in his world is a tiny painting by a Dutch master. Is it too...
The first half is brilliant — the museum bombing sequence is some of the best prose I've read. The second half meanders. Still, there are sentences in this book I've memorized.
