Book Review #1 - The Goldfinch

Reading a book with as much hype as The Goldfinch is an interesting experience.  Every sentence carries the burden of great expectation and each page is weighted with anticipated excellence.  I certainly bought into the hype and, mostly, I was not disappointed. Until the end. I really disliked the ending.

Donna Tartt has us readers invest in her flawed and well-crafted protagonist, Theo Decker, who from the very first page is clearly in some sort of trouble, as he reflects back on how he came in possession of a famous painting, The Goldfinch during a terrorist attack at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. After briefly being introduced to adult Theo, who explains that a dream about his mother is the impetus for the story to come, we are taken back to witness an injured and traumatized 13 year-old Leo, disoriented and separated from his beloved mother amidst the mayhem of a bombing, innocently take a priceless and famous painting from the wreckage. Not knowing how to explain how or why he took it, orphaned and despondent upon learning about the death of his mother in the attack, he secretly keeps it, more out of fear than greed, turning a tragic moment of confusion into a soul-crushing crime that influences every future decision he makes. Just like the Fabritius’s goldfinch, his life becomes chained to that painting.

One part of the story that confused me a bit was the time span. 13 year-old Theo possessed an iPod and the setting seemed to be present day. But his future, older story-telling self also seemed to be set in present day. I couldn’t figure out if the explosion that set Theo’s tragic trajectory in motion was set in the past, like the 1990s, or if his older, more ruined self existed in the future and it was sort of science-fiction-y without the science fiction. I pointed out my confusion to my mother, who had finished my copy from the library right before me, but she didn’t notice it (or care) so perhaps it doesn’t matter, but I often found myself troubled about the progression of time without any obvious progress in time. Not too troubled though, because the writing is so engrossing that I was mostly absorbed in whatever scene Tartt threw Theo into, whether it was in a ghost town, foreclosed neighborhood in Las Vegas drinking Vodka with his Russian and equally neglected by his father friend, Boris, selling antique furniture with his rescuing guardian, Hobie, in lower Manhattan, or hiding from the Dutch police and Russian mafia in Amsterdam.  Every shift in Theo’s world was fully developed and his guilt and obsession with The Goldfinch prominently staged as the major contributor to his mental decline. In that regard, I kept comparing this complex book to Poe’s The Tell Tale Heart or Dostoyevesky’s Crime and Punishment.  For most of the 700 plus pages, I actually thought I was reading a modern retelling of either of those great accounts of obsession and guilt.

Until I got to the last 60 or so pages. Everything was going along swimmingly…depressing, for sure, but good, well-developed depressing, when Tartt decided to go with the bad ending.  I had forgotten, but the book did begin with Theo stating he was telling his story. Still, even with the first person narration, I never felt that Theo was actually writing the story. Novels often use flashbacks or first person recollections, and Theo’s recollection, once started, proceeded in an orderly, chronological retelling that I felt jolted when the past caught up to present day and Theo began to refer to me as his reader. The change in tone from recollective to persuasive irritated me for some reason.  Suddenly, there was an intimacy in the story, a confessional conversation between Theo and me and I felt like the purpose and direction of the story changed. Instead of me neutrally observing Theo and the chaos his drug dependency and PTSD gave to his life, I was now required to sympathetically agree with Theo and his philosophies about right and wrong, good and evil, God and fate and agency and death. To be honest, I got annoyed. I wanted to go there by myself, if that was where the story directed me. It bordered on the moral of the story being spoon fed to me, as if the author didn’t trust me enough to figure it out, if there was anything to figure out, on my own. In my opinion, I would have loved for the story to end where it started, in Amsterdam, with Theo’s personal Road to Damascus experience. I would have loved to have wondered what he did after that.

Can an ending I dislike ruin an otherwise incredible book? A little bit. I think this book is stock full of wonder and literary gold. But, like the cliche goes, that last bite left a bad taste in my mouth.