Although this novel’s title comes from a tiny painting, its core deals with loss, grief, and trauma that lasts a lifetime. The story is fictitious, but the painting is real and it hangs in the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis in The Hague.

The book is epic in size. The 2013 copyright version of it that I have is in 962 pages in paperback. It must have taken some serious undertaking, a great deal of know-how, and huge creative power, which Donna Tart has in abundance.

I loved the story because I had read David Copperfield with my mother when I was about ten. I found several parallels between the two epics, such as the tone and the mood and the traumatic growing-up story of a teen boy. Then, both stories are larger than life.

The story begins with a mother and son, 13-year-old Theodore Decker, visiting the New York Art Museum since their appointment with Theo’s school’s principal is much later in the day. During their walk in the museum, Andy notices a young girl, Pippa, with an old man. Then, terrorists detonate a bomb and ruin the museum, and Theo’s mother among others is killed.

In the commotion, the dying old man who was with Pippa gives Theo a ring, tells him to go to Hobart and Blackwell and ring the green bell. He also hands Theo the painting of the Goldfinch, which Theo, horrified and in a state of shock, places in his bookbag.

Then, Theo goes to the apartment in Sutton Place that he shared with his mother, but when the social workers show up, not wanting to go to a foster home, Theo goes to his friend Andy Barbour’s, which Andy’s family accepts him and protects him. In that family, as nicely as they act toward Theo, are some problems, such as being the kept-secret mental-health-problem of the father and the jealousies of Andy’s siblings.

One day, Theo, following the instructions of the old man in the museum goes to an antique shop in Greenwich Village, where he meets James Hobson or Hobie who repairs antique furniture and later on, introduces and teaches Theo that art.

When Theo’s father and his girlfriend Xandra take Theo away from the Barbours to Las Vegas. There, Theo, left-unguided, makes friends with Boris and gets into drugs and drinking. Then, Theo’s father dies in a car crash and Theo, taking Xandra’s dog with him, runs away to New York, to Hobie’s. He is now sixteen years old, and this is only about halfway through the book.

What Theo doesn’t know is that Boris has taken the Goldfinch from him but has just left the packaging intact. Later on, Theo meets with Boris, after Boris has gone into crooked businesses. I think I already said too much about the plot. The rest of it one has to read to find out.

Donna Tart is an exquisite storyteller and this book is some serious literature, both in the tone of a fairy tale and realism.

On the other hand, I have to admit that, while reading the beginning part of the book, I was shocked and disturbed at the realistic showing of the bomb and its aftereffects and for so many pages, but the storytelling was so spectacular that I continued reading, and I am glad I did because I now understand why the author described and showed such hair-raising scenes in the beginning since almost anything in the story spirals from those earliest scenes together with complex human behavior and complicated ideas and situations.

In short, I don’t think this or any other review can do justice to this treasure of a story. No wonder it won the Pulitzer.

reading something that's truly literary.

characterizations, language, and the storytelling.

read other books by this author and I purchased another novel of hers.

"Donna Tartt is an American writer who received critical acclaim for her first two novels, The Secret History and The Little Friend, which have been translated into thirty languages. Tartt was the 2003 winner of the WH Smith Literary Award for The Little Friend. Her novel The Goldfinch won the Pulitzer Prize in 2014."

the story is intoxicating with themes of displacement, moral chaos vs kindness, reinvention, and adaptation, but read it only if you can stay with very long books.

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Created Feb 06, 2020 at 9:37pm • Submit your own review...