771 pages: a large
book by any standard. Unfortunately,
because of teaching and other duties, I rarely have time to spend a couple of
weeks on a behemoth of a novel. But
several friends were so insistent I read Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, I decided during a break in grading to clear all
other priorities and tackle this novel.
I started on a Thursday and finished on Sunday.
This might sound
silly, but I actually enjoyed holding the book and feeling the silky smooth
paper. Then I got to the novel, and I
was completely blown away. This is my
first experience with Donna Tartt, but I can guarantee it will not be my last.
Donna Tartt was born
and raised in Mississippi, but she left the south for Bennington College in
Vermont in 1982. She was raised in a
family of voracious readers. She told
one interviewer her mother read novels while driving. While at Bennington, she began writing her
first novel, The Secret History, which became a bestseller. Her second novel, The Little Friend, won the prestigious W.H. Smith Award in 2002. Tartt is a slow writer – each of novels take
about 10 years from conception to publication. The
Goldfinch is her third novel. The
detail in this compelling novel attests to the level of work that took ten
years She writes by hand on paper and note cards.
Theo Dexter lives in
Manhattan with his, mother Audrey, a part-time model, actress, and artist. Theo’s father, an alcoholic with a gambling
addiction abandoned the family about a year before the story begins. One day, Theo and his mother decide to stop
into a museum to view some notable old masters on display. Theo spots an attractive young girl with red
hair accompanied by an elderly man. He
loses interest in the exhibit and begins to follow the young girl, when he is
knocked to the ground by an explosion.
Unhurt, Theo begins moving toward the exit now blocked. He encounters an elderly man, who has been
mortally injured. He gives Theo a ring
and asks him to take it to a certain address.
The dying man also tells Theo to take a small painting which has fallen
off the wall. This is The Goldfinch of the title. He does not see the young girl. He takes the ring to the address, and meets
the elderly man’s business partner, Hobie.
Together they ran an antique store.
He learns that Pippa, the red headed girl, is recovering from her
injuries at the home of Hobie and the elderly man, Mr. Blackwell. Meanwhile, Theo wraps the painting securely and
hides it in his room. All this action
occurs in about the first 50 pages.
However, I had
absolutely no desire to abandon Theo, Pippa, and Hobie. Every page of this novel contains interesting
characters, situations, descriptions, interior monologues of the highest
order. I could not stop reading. The list of characters far exceeds the few I
have mentioned here.
Janet Burroway, in
her creative writing textbook, Writing
Fiction, says, “every story must have a complication, crises , and
resolution.” Tartt has filled this novel
with a series of complications, which create one crisis after another for Theo,
which he manages to resolve, through pluck, intelligence, and hard work.
Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch moves to the top of my
list for the year, and perhaps the decade.
I have rarely encountered a novel of such grace, beauty, heartbreak,
sadness, joy, and with thrills, mysteries, and even some chilling moments
sprinkled on almost every page. This
novel has it all, and I could not urge my listeners more strongly to read this
book as soon as possible. You will get
to know Theo; you will become a part of his family; you will be forever
affected by Tartt’s power as a storyteller.
I have to raise my scale to 10 stars for this extraordinary novel, which
I have just learned, won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
--Chiron, 4/13/14
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