Summary: After losing his mother, a boy comes of age with an increasingly troulblesome secret to hide.
Rating & Recommendation: 4/5; recommend for those who love a slow burn and a little chaos
Review: Upfront, I would like to clarify that Donna Tartt is an impeccable writer. This is one of the most beautiful pieces of literature I have ever read. Every word is so carefully chosen, every piece of punctuation so carefully placed. The reason this book doesn’t get 5/5 is because I found Tartt’s storytelling lacking. What begins as a carefully woven masterpiece abruptly goes off the rails toward the ending. It feels like she ran out of time and was forced to hastily wrap things up. They’re wrapped, indeed, but the pace changes, and the story loses direction.
With this loss of focus comes an unfortunate loss of plausibility. I found myself in disbelief as the plot-lines wound down, which was disappointing considering how easily I fell into Theo’s world. He's a charmingly unreliable narrator, so you're prepared for a bit of shock misdirection. But while some shock is necessary, the ending was downright outlandish in most regards.
Theo is thrust into tragedy, and then leads a terribly unstable life until he manages to get it together, all the while hiding this monumental secret under his bed. As the secret becomes exposed, so does his carefully crafted stability.
If the moral is that sometimes good comes from bad, and that good does not always lead to more good, I can see how Tartt's throwing a wrench into the protagonist's entire identity was intentional. What makes up his identity is objectively awful: being orphaned, substance abuse, fraud and deception. But somehow a character subject to a lot of bad, engaging in a lot of bad, comes out mostly on the side of good.
"She was the golden thread running through everything, a lens that magnified beauty so that the whole world stood transfigured in relation to her, and her alone."
The symbolism in this one is strong. Pippa becomes the breadcrumb back to Theo's childhood, back to the last moment before things began to go terribly wrong. He's in love with her, but he's in love with the nostalgia, too. She's the last remnant of his old life, and he can't quite give her up. She's the Before.
And the Goldfinch itself morphs into this piece of Theo, an extension of himself growing in real time as he does from the moment the museum explodes. It goes from a piece of art to a barely-kept secret to a dangerous problem threatening to ruin lives. As the security around it unravels, so too does Theo. The painting is the After.
What's so great about this book, as with The Secret History, is that you can tell Tartt spent years researching her subject. You can feel the dedication in every reference to art, to restoration, to history. I'll continue to be impressed by her ability to immerse herself in something for as long as she continues to write.
A final note: Boris is maybe one of the best supporting characters in any book I've ever read. He's a caricature, and a little unbelievable. But he offers a bit of humor and a much needed foil to Theo, despite the trouble he causes.
Commentaires