The Goldfinch

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 long? Probably. Would I cut a single page? Absolutely not.