Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch

3,096 words

After Donna Tartt’s prize-winning novel The Little Friend, she published The Goldfinch in 2013, a novel that won her a much-deserved Pulitzer. The novel has been described as a latter-day Dickensian work, hailed as “a soaring masterpiece” by the Washington Post and as “a triumph” by Stephen King. Does it soar? Is it a triumph?

The Goldfinch does fly, although there are times when it hovers. It is nevertheless a remarkably beautiful, well-crafted Bildungsroman about Theo Decker, a pre-adolescent youth in New York City who is on the cusp of a new beginning. He’s being suspended from school, and Audrey, his mother — a well-rounded, lively, and vivacious woman — takes him to an art gallery before he faces the music.

She fills Theo with her own joy for art, especially in relation to The Goldfinch, her favorite painting. It is a 1654 oil on panel by the little-known Dutch master Carel Fabricius. Theo’s mother is fascinated by its style, especially a small chain that links the bird to its base. While admiring the work, Theo meets an intriguing couple: Welty, an older man, and Pippa, his niece. Theo can’t take his eyes off her:

This girl had bright red hair; her movements were swift, her face sharp and mischievous and strange, and her eyes were an odd color, a golden honeybee brown. And though she was too thin, almost all elbows, and in a way almost plain, yet there was something  about her too that made my stomach go watery.

Theo leaves his mother to back and speak to the alluring Pippa as she is being led away by Welty. Even though we’re only on page 25, these notable characters and Tartt’s fascinating New York setting would make this a glorious read — but then things go boom. Literally.

A bomb explodes in the gallery. Theo is gripped by a dying Welty, who begs him to save the painting. Theo does this, brushing his way past a frightened mob that is trying to escape the chaos, and then dodging through police lines, finally reaching the safety of his apartment, where he waits for his mother’s return.

In vain, it turns out, as she is among the dead, as is Welty.

This marks a new beginning far more adventurous, ominous, and soul-searching than mere school troubles, and Theo’s journey is a page-turning revelation of youth and discovery. Tartt engages us in Theo’s fear and despair over being alone. As he comes to grips with becoming a ward of the state. Tartt brilliantly captures a minor’s helplessness at the mercy of adults and institutions that, perhaps with arguable sincerity, claim to be taking charge of Theo’s life for his own good.

Theo visits a severely injured Pippa in Welty’s antique shop, which is run by Hobie, a benign carpenter in an overrun, ancient business that immediately draws comparisons to Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop. Theo dreads being sent to his ghastly, monstrous, senile grandfather, who sounds like a cross between Frankenstein and Joe Biden but, thankfully, never appears in the book. Theo ends up living with the Barbours, a semi-upper class family whose son Andy is Theo’s best friend.

Andy is long-suffering, enduring his father’s almost obsessive love of sailing while caught in a family life he despises, especially Kitsy, his younger sister. As Theo observes:

They were a pair of white mice, I thought only Kitsy was a spun-sugar fairy-princess mouse whereas Andy was more the kind of luckless, anemic, pet-shop mouse you might feed to your boa constrictor.

Although they have taken him in, Theo realizes the Barbours see him as an outsider.

As he mourns his mother’s loss and continues hiding the painting, Larry, Theo’s father — a failed actor and a bitter, quarrelsome man who abandoned him — arrives from Las Vegas with his girlfriend, the glitzy, unspeakable Xandra, and whisk Theo away to a new life.

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Pippa, still recovering, is bundled away by a sniffy, distant aunt to Texas. It is a painful rupture that Theo and Pippa, who could have bonded and helped each other heal, are broken apart — again, the adults argue, for their own good.

We also feel, as does Theo, the  loss of his mother. She was a great, compassionate woman whose brief appearance radiates and will, through the painting, have a profound impact on Theo throughout the book. The Goldfinch, secreted away by Theo, is a spiritual talisman representing his mother, and exerts a ghostly but also spiritual pull throughout Theo’s youth and early adulthood.

Taking Dickensian allusions further, the settings of New York and Las Vegas are truly a tale of two cities. Where New York is lively, vibrant, and full of humane characters ranging from Hobie to doormen and the neighbors across the hall, Las Vegas is a solitary desert of isolation, marked by unsold and unbuilt mansions that dot the sand like hourglasses of the American Dream. It’s ironic that, under Larry’s so-called care, Theo is essentially abandoned in the empty faux housing estates of Las Vegas’ desert more than if he had been been living in New York with Hobie or the Barbours.

The desert can be a monastic world, but it can also be the gambler’s world of self-absorbed obsession, which describes Theo’s father. He lacks any of Audey’s artistic and aesthetic joys , absorbed in gaming and mostly staying away from home, barely communicating with Theo except when he makes a killing at baccarat and shares his child-like joy with him, recounting solitary and almost incomprehensible victories at the tables. He also obsessively watches ESPN with the sound off, studying teams to bet on.

Theo’s new classmates are a collection of rich, globalist kids from a dozen countries who are as rooted as tumbleweeds, trailing behind their parents’ jobs in finance or engineering. Tartt captures this class’ rootlessness, especially when they ruthlessly attack Thoreau’s Walden (“Supports doing nothing; just laying on your back”), appearing to render these kids as Ayn Rand groupies in embryo. Only one kid sneers at this corporate chirping, and that’s Boris, a kid from anywhere and everywhere who becomes another pillar in The Goldfinch as well as Theo’s life. Boris mockingly calls Theo Potter because of the glasses and somewhat preppy clothes he wears, and through their camaraderie he becomes a much greater influence than Theo’s father.

Tartt seems to be suggesting American archetypes through Theo’s parents. His mother is New York and has a pulsing life. His father is Las Vegas, a dreary epicenter of American greed. The Little Friend is Tartt’s take on flyover country.

Boris clues Theo in on life, much of it through drugs. They start tripping on anything and drinking at all hours, going on for page after page. I started skimming these parts. I never used drugs, and I suspect Tartt hasn’t, either, as her descriptions seem more the result of long years of research than personal experience.

Theo survives all this because he is literate, as is Boris, albeit in a crude sense. Plus, Theo always the painting to secretly unwrap and admire, allowing Audrey and her mores to influence him:

Quickly I slid it out, and almost immediately its glow enveloped me, something  almost musical, an internal sweetness that was inexplicable beyond a deep, blood-rocking harmony of rightness, the way your heart beat slow and sure when you were with a person you felt safe with and loved.

Boris has a drunken father who sometimes hits him; Tartt rarely has anything good to say about fathers throughout the book. For example, when Larry is visited by an ominously friendly loan shark, he demands Theo give up the $65,000 trust fund his mother had set up for him, coaching him in how to lie to the lawyer in charge to convince him that he needs the funds for private school. It’s a pathetic but powerful example of how roles can be reversed, with the father becoming the child and Theo prematurely forced into becoming an adult. It is perhaps a comment on the infantilization of America.

Larry finally has an untimely “accident” on the road, and Theo leaves before he is again left to the mercy of adults deciding his future, returning to New York by bus after refusing a last-minute offer from a frantic Boris to flee to Los Angeles with him. On the bus, we read of Theo’s passage from Sin City to Gotham, including descriptions of bus stations, landscapes, and passengers — all while guarding the painting. It’s all well-written, but could have easily been cut. There are many passages like this; losing 200 pages would have done The Goldfinch no harm.

Once Theo is back in New York, Hobie becomes his guardian. Theo works in his shop, learning the trade, and Tartt again uses her extensive research to good ends describing how furniture is crafted. Hobie compares it to working on living, breathing creatures of wood. All of this will figure enormously in the plot — and in Theo’s soul.

Throughout The Goldfinch there is a tug-of-war between what is eternal and what is merely temporal. Pippa, visiting from a ghastly Swiss boarding school her aunt has inflicted upon her, still reverberates in emotional joy and satisfaction, her “hair like an autumn leaf, and her colors were mixed and confused with the bright colors of the kitchen: striped apples glowing in a yellow bowl, the sharp ding of silver glinting from the coffee can where Hobie kept his paintbrushes.” Pippa, Theo admits, casts a “shifting, colored nimbus of her own.” Yet Pippa remains damaged by the bombing, “all bundled up in half a dozen scarves, like some kind of cocooned insect wrapped in layers-protective padding for a girl who’d been broken and stitched and bolted back together again.”

Theo finds further grounding with Hobie, who reminds Theo that restoring furniture and creating fine wooded pieces was to make them breathe and live: “Always remember, the person we’re really working for is the person who’s restoring the piece a hundred years from now. He’s the one we want to impress.”  He adds that selling furniture “was all about matchmaking, finding the right home.”

Theo interacts with the Barbours again, although Andy has met an untimely end that, while tragic, was also hilarious when I read it. A strong thematic point is that, while Theo was merely tolerated by the Barbours when he was Andy’s guest, while they are still Park Avenue types they are now a bit sadder and wiser, practically relying on Theo to become a bridge over troubled waters for them. Mrs. Barbour becomes an invalid, but is also caring and interested in Theo. Certainly a major reason he becomes engaged to the exuberant Kitsy is as a favor to the family.

Yet, Theo worries if his father’s sins are being passed on to him. He looks like Larry, and in a plot point that becomes crucial, Theo begins to learn how to fake furniture masterpieces, selling them to unsuspecting buyers. This begins a moral and legal problem that will obsess Theo, much as he is obsessed with the problem of returning the painting. He wants to return it, but he reads in the newspapers about how the police are threaten to hunt down and prosecute any art thief . His dilemma of being true to the painting’s soul while wanting to make his way in the world is an important element of the story. Another is that Theo is always losing his grip with Pippa. She now lives in London, and has taken up with Everett, a rabbit-toothed Englishman Theo despises and whom he describes as “a lukewarm gloop of a guy,” and we see nothing that contradicts Theo’s opinion.

Theo explains his engagement to Kitsy by describing her transformation from a bratty kid into a bubbling fiancee in overdrive; it’s another example of Tartt’s comic style. Theo likewise reflects on his continuing drug use, something he needs not to escape Kitsy as much as to endure life.

Boris then enters his life again with a stunning revelation about the painting that will send Theo from New York to Amsterdam for a confrontation with the painting, his life, and his soul. Boris coaches Theo on what to do, and it ends with Theo killing a man. He is then forced to hide as another man disappears with the painting. What follows is what Theo describes as an epiphany as he waits in a hotel room until Boris reappears, ending the book with a sort of deus ex machina that falls into the realm of what someone in my writing class would call “making the implausible plausible.”

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Theo, in a long mix of monologue, stream of consciousness, and an almost academic summary of art that to me sounded like a drunk rambling at the bar understands that he has no business with Pippa, nor with anyone else. Pippa, he explains, was a substitute for Audrey: “She herself, the dreamy childhood her, was sublimity and disaster, the morphine lollipop (my emphasis) I’d chased for all those years.”

So Pippa was just another drug? That hurt.

Theo also explains that “[n]o one will ever persuade me that life is some awesome, rewarding treat. Because, here’s the truth: life is catastrophe. The basic fact of existence . . . is catastrophe.”

I understand Theo’s worldview and the downbeat ending, but I think a real opportunity is missed by not having Pippa reunited with Theo. As I observed when reading The Little Friend, Tartt prefers unhappy, inconclusive endings, which are in fashion among much of the literati. I can accept that The Goldfinch is not a romantic novel; if anything, it is, the story of Theo and Boris, a buddy-buddy novel, and it’s noteworthy that Tartt reders her female characters secondary here, while in The Little Friend it was the opposite.

Theo does try to be a good man, however. Near the end , he tracks down and pays his customers back for all the fake antique furniture he had sold them.

Gore Vidal said novels are never ended, just abandoned, but I felt some regret that Theo’s soul is left uncompleted.

I will note that The Goldfinch is  a white novel. Tartt’s New York, aside from the folksy, warm doormen at Theo’s hotel, is a decidedly white, heterosexual Gotham. She doesn’t include the wise Negro or Jew many writers would have felt compelled to introduce.  There are many potential comparisons to Dickens. But is this good or bad?

Henry James considered Dickens “The greatest of superficial writers. He has created nothing but figures. He has added nothing to our understanding of human character.”

The Goldfinch has been compared to Great Expectations, but I think David Copperfield is a better one. Certainly, David being caught between Agnes and the frail Dora is somewhat similar to Theo’s dealings with Pippa and Kitsy, although Kitsy is far too humorous and lively to be a mirror image of the superficial, frail, but charming Dora.

Certainly Mr. Murdstone, the man who marries David’s mother and partly destroys her through his insensitive domineering, nevertheless mourns and suffers when she dies. Theo’s father, by contrast, has no compassion for his mother and cleans out her apartment with a cold ruthlessness, destroying all memory of her. He abandoned her, he explains to Theo, in order to cut his losses — a true gambler’s statement.

I likewise enjoy Tartt’s political evenhandedness. She makes a very satirical point on page 558, when Theo recalls the silly civics textbook he and Boris had been forced to read, describing the obligatory multiculturalism of one entitled Democracy, Diversity, and You!, which includes the following: “What are some duties of an American citizen? To vote for Congress, celebrate diversity, and fight the enemies of the state.” It’s very bland and laughable; it’s Tartt in Orwellian territory, mocking American dogma in the post-American age.

Although one aspect of the novel I continue to think about is that the bombing itself is never explained. It is rarely mentioned except on page 66, when we read that the media is claiming that it was planned by “Right-wing extremists” or “homegrown terrorists,” and that some of the perpetrators died in the attack. But that’s as much as we learn, which I thought was odd. Is Tartt showing her political biases, or is she remaining the disinterested novelist? Perhaps she felt that devoting more attention to the bombing itself would overburden what is already a very long and complex book.

I’ll mention that I took a particular interest in the description of the bombing itself because I have actually seen one myself. I served as a soldier in Germany, and in June of 1976 I was at the I. G. Farben Building in Frankfurt, which was then the headquarters of the US Army’s V Corps. As I was walking toward its large pond that had a sweeping willow tree at its rear, which was a couple of hundred feet from the entrance, I suddenly heard an enormous crash. When I  looked up, I saw smoke pouring from the building, and then came the wail of a million sirens.

I hadn’t been inside, but I was close enough. No one was killed, and the damage to the marble interiors was minimal. The bombing was attributed to the Red Army Faction, carried out in revenge for one of the group’s leaders, Ulrike Meinhof, in prison the previous month. Unlike the seemingly pointless bombing of the art gallery in the novel, the headquarters was an obvious target of “US colonial imperialism.” As it was both Europe’s Pentagon and CIA headquarters at the time, the building had more than its share of bombings throughout the Cold War.

The bombing in the novel is an important metaphor as well, since most of Fabritius’ work was destroyed when a warehouse packed with gundpowder exploded in Delft, leaving only a dozen or so extant paintings. Fabritius’ name also means “carpenter,” tying in neatly with the work to which Theo ends up devoting himself.

The heart of The Goldfinch is Theo’s coming to grips with loss, memory, and survival. Despite the criticisms I’ve already outlined, this is a masterful work that is a joy to read, not only due to the story, characters, and setting, but Tartt’s exquisite prose. You can re-read her and it never grows dull, as some say about reading Dickens or Proust.

Tartt says that she spends eight years on a novel, and estimates that at this rate, she has have six more to go. I hope she can find some time to finally write a romantic, happy story, but whatever her next novel ends up being about, I’m waiting to read it.

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