The Goldfinch
by Donna Tartt
Summary
Theo Decker is thirteen when a bomb goes off in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His mother is killed. In the confusion a dying old man presses a ring on him and seems to gesture at a small seventeenth century Dutch painting of a chained bird, and Theo walks out of the building with it under his coat.
The painting stays with him for the next fourteen years, hidden, unreturnable, and increasingly the only fixed point in a life that goes badly. He is taken in by a wealthy Park Avenue family, then removed to a half empty housing development outside Las Vegas by the father who abandoned him, where he meets Boris, a Ukrainian boy with an appetite for drugs and theft who is the best thing in the novel. Later there is an antiques restoration business in Greenwich Village, and eventually Amsterdam, and a great deal of trouble.
The warmth comes from Hobie, the furniture restorer who takes Theo in and teaches him to tell a real chair from one he has built himself out of period parts, which is the novel telling you what it is about. Pippa, the girl who was in the museum too, is the other survivor and the one thing Theo cannot have.
It runs to nearly eight hundred pages and is quite deliberately a nineteenth century novel: coincidences, orphans, a plot that turns on an object, and a long closing meditation delivered straight to the reader.
Critics divided sharply, several finding it overlong and that ending unearned. Readers largely did not agree with them. The Las Vegas section is the most propulsive writing Tartt has done. Best if you want a very long book to disappear into, and are willing to forgive it a slack middle.
Historical Context & Significance
The Goldfinch won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, in a citation calling it a beautifully written coming of age novel with exquisitely drawn characters, following a grieving boy's entanglement with a small famous painting that has eluded destruction.
The win produced a genuine critical row. Several prominent critics argued publicly that the novel was children's literature for adults and that its popularity had overwhelmed the judgement of the prize, while others defended it as exactly the kind of ambitious, capacious fiction the Pulitzer exists for. The argument ran for months in the literary press.
Donna Tartt publishes roughly one novel a decade, after The Secret History and The Little Friend, which is part of why each arrives as an event. John Crowley's 2019 film adaptation was a critical and commercial failure.
The painting is real: Carel Fabritius painted it in 1654, the year he was killed by an explosion.